Chapter Fifteen #2
I say, “I’m sorry if my visits and disposition have troubled you overmuch.
Your aversion to dealing with human beings becomes clearer each day, and, after earlier, I’m beginning to understand that your hospitality the first day I encroached upon your peace was a compulsion independent of your wishes.
” I retrieve a box of strawberry Milano cookies, as penitence.
“When I fixate on a goal, I charge forward, razing everything in my path.”
“Determination is a commendable trait. It’s particularly overactive in villains, and there’s nothing wrong with emulating a villain.”
She’s so…
I sigh.
Nuts. Absolutely, utterly, and completely nuts .
The more I get to know her, the more I’m desperate to see more.
Does something other than the foreboding promise of social interaction rattle her?
What would make her laugh uncontrollably?
How do I get under her skin and stay there, near her heart, forever?
“Have you gotten the bread yet?” she asks.
I have gotten the bread, eggs, several kinds of cookies, juice, chocolate milk, root beer, ice cream, chips, vegan butter, and a few avocados…
Needless to say, she only told me to get the first two things.
She seems to have forgotten she needs more juice since the finality in her tone right now makes me think it’s not going to be mentioned.
I provide a perfectly innocent, “Yes.”
“Great. Hurry up and check out so you can take me home.”
As I thought. She forgot about the juice.
Smiling, I readjust the hefty basket, ignore the strain in my permanently sore arms, and head to checkout.
Even if she’s yet to notice the few additional centimeters of muscle I’ve added to my shoulders, at least my pushup routine has prepared me to carry this shopping basket with five kinds of juice in it around.
Hopefully she’ll notice that I look more shouldery soon. Hopefully it won’t be a situation where we see each other so often she doesn’t even comprehend the improvements. Hopefully she sees me one day and something changes in her brain chemistry, just like when I first saw her…
Hopefully, some day soon, she’ll forget about my brother entirely and only see me.
After unnerving a cashier, because I insist on going through the human-manned registers and smiling a little too wide, I make my way out to my car, pop my bags in the trunk, and find Ceres curled up in the passenger seat.
“Doin’ all right?” I ask as I slip into the air conditioned cabin.
She glances at me, past her shoulder and the waves of her hair. Big hazel eyes damp, she nods.
Mindlessly, I reach for her and swipe my thumb at the corner of her eye. “Talk to me.”
“I wish I weren’t like this,” she whispers, so frail.
“I wish I could breathe . Just…breathe. It shouldn’t be so much to ask for.
I should be able to go to a shop with a pre-meditated script and say the right things without coming home with an entire stupid bike.
I should be able to go to the store without feeling like the walls are closing in.
I’m so tired of being like this.” She tucks her face away from me, against her knees.
“I’m so tired of living, constantly, in fear. ”
“What are you afraid of?”
Her hair rustles as her head shakes and broken words leave her. “I don’t even know.”
“You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
Laughter. Short, sarcastic, but there. “No. You’re familiar. Safe.”
My heart skips beats. I’m safe . I’ve never once—in my life—been safe .
“You seem just as out of touch as I feel. There’s comfort in solidarity.”
Oh. Well. Um.
That’s not exactly a compliment, but I think…I’ll take it.
I stare at her, at the curve of her back and the bundle of her skirt clenched in her fists as she crumples her body into a little ball.
Yeah…I’ll take it.
Her head jerks off her knees, and her eyes widen in the hazy window reflection. “I forgot. Juice .”
Combing her hair away from her ear, I say, “Don’t worry. I didn’t. And if you run out again, I’ll come back.” I let my fingers graze the shape of her wingbone as they pull through the sunset strands. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, not so long as I’m here.”
Her nose is scrunched when she glares back at me. “Ew.”
Ah. Okay.
“That’s so white knight of you. I’m not a damsel in distress. I’ve lived on my own for a perfectly reasonable length of time. I don’t need to be saved. I need to be tormented and taken against my will into the belly of my fears, so I can get over them and become even more self-sufficient.”
Girlie pop, what you need is therapy.
As though I’m one to talk, though, when taken against my will is repeating on surround sound in my skull. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of any of the dark romance force tropes, truly. They’re a bit, what’s the word? Revolting? Yeah, that. Even kidnapping.
I know. I know.
How can a guy like me with a brand like mine and Jovey’s not be mega pro kidnapping??
I don’t know. I guess I’d just really like to be the one chosen. Without being the only choice. Or something.
All this said, I am still chest-deep in the dark romance community and I am still utterly unable to keep myself from picturing Ceres…pressed to a wall…in front of me. Flushed and asking for me on command.
Ceres swears, lurching around.
Because my head has just fallen.
Against my horn.
“What are you doing?” she blurts above the roar.
Picking my head up, I bang it a few more times, freeing a succession of shorter honks as well as the illicit pictures roaming about in my skull. “Nothing. Why?”
Her eyes flick from my head, to my steering wheel, to the surrounding parking lot. “You are disrupting the peace.”
“Not my fault,” I declare, straighten, and throw the car in reverse.
Peeling out, I tell myself that focusing on the road—so as not to kill the woman I love—will keep me from looking at her and thinking very bad, no good thoughts.
Because it is my opinion that even intimate thoughts should only be entertained with consent.
Some dark romance author I am, clearly.
Too romantic, me. Not enough ink in my rose-red blood.
It’s incredibly likely that I will not survive Ceres’s comments on my “story” once I get deeper into the plot and the characters have a chance to meet. Just thinking about how I’ll handle her unwittingly rooting for dastardly events between us to occur sends a shudder racing down my spine.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” Ceres asks, because she’s a kind, genuine, perfect being who cares about others to the point of breaking. Even when the other is a random guy like me.
I fill my lungs with air. “Absolutely.”
“So, I spill my truth, and you lie to me?”
“Yep.”
She scowls, then forces her attention squarely out the window.
Swallowing something bitter, I say, “Some truths don’t need to be shared, little goddess.”
“In my experience, some truths are hard to hear, but they’re better for the other person if they’re shared. Keeping the truth hidden only serves to protect yourself.”
“And where do you go about thinking that self-preservation isn’t important to other people? I understand you struggle with it, but self-preservation and I? We go way back. Great friends.”
I catch her eyeroll out of the corner of my eye. She says, “You’re kind. As if self has anything to do with you.”
“How do you live being both deathly afraid of people, yet also unable to help yourself from seeing the absolute best in them?”
“Don’t be stupid. It’s not about seeing the best in people.
It’s about seeing the truth. I’m an editor.
I work on books for a living. I dive into condensed versions of reality, and I pull the truth forward.
People aren’t good. That’s just a fact. But even in all the bad , so many will do a kind thing.
Even the worst people will sometimes surprise you. ”
A light turns red, so I take my chances looking at the most beautiful woman I have ever known. “If that’s the case, what’s there to be afraid of?”
She wraps herself in a tighter hug and frees a breath as her eyes close. “Because. It goes both ways. I prefer predictable. People aren’t.”
Yet, somehow, I’m the safe one? When I have—on multiple occasions—set something on fire on a whim, I’m safe?
Her head cocks back against the seat. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. ‘I’m not predictable. I set things on fire without warning sometimes. There’s no way I’m safe.’”
Creepily accurate. I love this woman.
Before I can come up for air, she continues, “You’re safe because you’re so blatant about who you are. There’s a stark honesty to you that I appreciate.”
The way that manipulation is my middle name…
“You’re safe because you’re unpredictable. I don’t have to try and play oracle. I get to be me, because who even knows what the right answer is with you?”
Finding it harder to both breathe and swallow, I say, “So it’s not because you like my brother?”
“Jupiter has the same edge to him. You’re both kind people, but the rules make more sense with you, probably because we’ve actually spent time together.”
The…rules…? Jove dropped a tree on a building a week ago. I walked right into Ceres’s house when we first officially met. “You mean it’s easier with us because there aren’t rules?”
“Yep.” A subtle peace swells around her.
“I don’t have to keep track with people like you.
You’re logical enough to fully understand that you’re unhinged, which means I don’t have to worry about myself.
Nothing I am is going to be worse than what you consider perfectly acceptable.
It’s freeing. Like being alone. But with someone else.
Which…” she begins, peering at me, “…is why it hurt a little when you abandoned me these past two weeks.”
My mouth opens, but I can’t find the right words. “I’m sorry. I thought…” She put away her spare key because I was bothering her. I thought she wanted space. I thought…
“You thought wrong.” She tucks her face against her legs. “Do better.”
My heart tightens in my chest, and I don’t know if there’s anything I can say right now that would matter, not when I can barely form thoughts in my own skull.
All that matters is that we’re going home, together.
And she wants me around.
All of me. Just the way I am. Because just the way I am allows her to be just the way she is.
Looking ahead, I take a deep breath and watch as the light turns green.