Serenity
As it cleansed, exfoliated, hydrated, massaged and moisturized my face, I had an extendo-straw inserted through the mouth opening, its other end inside a martini glass filled with a martini (obvs) that was sitting in a cool-pad beside the pool.
A classical piece by Doriana was playing, all sorrowful strings and plaintive winds, assisting me greatly in literally wallowing in my self-pity.
I heard the chimes of my Palm telling me I had an incoming comm, something that had happened a good deal since I left my parents’ house.
So far, I hadn’t answered. They had all been comms from my mom, which turned to text comms, and those I answered, assuring her I was all right (when I was not).
No comms from my father, but then again, I was an experienced hand with this.
Dad pulled some shit; Mom smoothed it over.
I’d always felt kind of bad for her, because that was an important (but it had to be frustrating) part of her role in our lives. Though, it wasn’t like she didn’t know what she was in for when she married a demon.
However, if this was her, it meant she was still worried about me, so I needed to lie some more to make her feel better.
I released my straw and called, “Accept comm, audio only.”
“Catla?” Gayle called when the comm engaged.
Damn, it wasn’t Mom.
I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, even my Gayle.
Too late now.
“Hey,” I greeted.
“Are you all right? How did the meeting go?”
“Not great. Tanyn was there.”
“Oh my gods. Seriously?”
“Seriously. And I was late, of course, so Dad dressed me down, brutally, right in front of him,” I shared.
Gayle, who was half fae, half human, not only knew demons because she’d been one of my two besties since we were in single digits, but because she’d lived among them her whole life. We lived in Night’s Fall, which was a shifter realm, but all the realms were fully integrated, unlike ancient times.
Thus, she knew what that meant, and her stunned silence said she understood just how far my father had leapt over the line.
“And our compatibility trial is happening the weekend after this one,” I continued.
“By all the levels of the hells,” she breathed.
Mm-hmm…she knew what all of this meant.
“So I have a text comm into Bash asking if I can meet him at his place tomorrow after work so I can break things off with him while I do that,” I went on.
“Oh, Cat,” she whispered.
“Yup. It’s going to be fun and games for me for a while,” I drawled.
“I…don’t know what to say,” she said.
“There’s nothing to say,” I replied.
After a long pause, she asked, “And you can’t speak to Mr. Truelock about this?”
“He circumvented that by having Tanyn there. I don’t know, because I didn’t ask, if that was his idea or Tanyn’s, but I’d hoped this meeting would be me making one last ditch effort to change Dad’s mind.
Now, I have the trial date set, and Tanyn has his PR director working on this whole scenario to ease the citizens of Sky’s Edge into understanding their king is seriously courting a female.
As such, with every passing moment, I feel the cage getting tighter. ”
“So, the weekend after this one, you’re going up to Abyssinia to—”
“Not Abyssinia. Sigil Isle. He wants to take me to where he grew up.”
A shorter pause before she queried, “That’s kind of sweet, isn’t it?”
Tanyn Firefierce sweet?
Um…no.
“Sigil Isle is two hundred miles north of the northernmost part of Sky’s Edge,” I replied.
“The only colder place on the planet is the tip of Mount’s Crest in the Seven Realms. There’s never a thaw on Sigil Isle.
This means, after I get out of my serenity pool and take off this spa-visor, I’m getting on the panes and buying every piece of fur clothing I can find in order to prepare. ”
“Oh, so you’re in a spa-visor. That’s why you sound weird,” she mumbled.
I felt the visor massaging something into my face when I confirmed, “That’s why.”
“You can’t buy fur, Cat. It’s outlawed everywhere but Mount’s Crest.”
“Fake fur, whatever,” I muttered.
Now she was going for casual, and failing, when she asked, “How was Tanyn while you were there?”
“Expressionless, yet arrogant.”
“But still gorgeous,” she added.
Yes, lamentably, still gorgeous.
I heard her take in a deep breath before she said, “During the trial, you’re going to have to…”
She let that trail off.
Even so.
“Oh yes,” I confirmed. “They try to pretty it up with a lot of language around compatibility and chemistry and time spent with no distractions so you can concentrate on nothing but each other to see if you fit. But this system was designed by males. In other words, it’s rigged.
So that’s not the point. The point is to give the male the opportunity to have sex with the female and see if he wants her in his bed for the rest of his life.
Therefore…yes, while freezing my ass off on Sigil Isle, I’m going to have to sleep with him. ”
I was also going to have to pull off the impossible.
Being terrible in bed.
“That kiss he gave you was good, though, right?”
Ah, my Gayle. Trying so hard to make things better.
“That kiss he took was good, yes.”
Though, it had not been good.
It had been stellar.
So stellar, if I wasn’t in the midst of failing at trying not to think about how my life was suddenly no longer in my control, all I could think about was that kiss.
“But even if it was, so what?” I finished. “I’ve had a lot of good kisses, and I didn’t want to marry the male.”
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
The tone of her voice took all the serenity of my serenity room clean away.
“What?” I asked hesitantly.
“You know, Sirk knows about all of this,” she said.
Sirk was the male she was seeing. And although we all liked Sirk, because he was a cool being (not to mention gorgeous), Gayle had recently found her fated mate. It was just that her fated mate told her he didn’t want her, then buggered off back to Land’s End.
So, before she met that ass, she’d been putting Sirk off because she wanted what Laura and Aleksei had, what shifters and fae could have (though, not demons): true, fated mates.
However, since Prince bloody Cormac of Land’s End, her fated mate, was an elitist piece of shit and didn’t want anything to do with a half-fae from Night’s Fall, she was with Sirk.
It was hardly sloppy seconds. Sirk wasn’t only cool, he was one of the best chefs in all of the realms, he wasn’t hard on the eyes and Gayle reported he was fantastic in bed.
But a fated mate was a fated mate.
I’d never have one, but I’d been around them, most recently Laura and Aleksei, and anyone would want what they had.
“I know,” I prompted her when she didn’t go on.
“And he told me that Tanyn didn’t fight the trolls.”
I blinked behind the spa-visor.
“What?” I asked, shocked, because I’d been there. I’d seen him, along with Aleksei, his father, his brother, Sirk, Cormac and Prince Bainon of Dawn’s Break jump right into the fray.
“Sirk says Tanyn knew the defense bots had been assigned to the Sceptred Isle. So he didn’t try to fight creatures he couldn’t defeat, knowing, once the bots were deployed, they’d deal with them.”
After saying this, she was silent for so long, I thought I’d lost her.
Finally, she spoke again.
“Sirk says the casualties would have been ten times worse if it wasn’t for Tanyn.”
“What?” I repeated, much more breathlessly this time.
“He didn’t go into fight mode. He went into save and rescue mode. He engaged with a ton of trolls, but only to rescue someone they were targeting and speed them to safety in the palace. Sirk said he easily saved seventy, eighty beings from injury or even certain death.”
I floated as I thought on this, and as I did so, the perfectly acclimatized salt water I drifted on suddenly felt warmer.
“I don’t know,” Gayle carried on. “I don’t get what you’re going through, but I still do.
I think about how I’d feel if my life was totally upended without my say, and I can’t imagine it.
I hate you’re going through it. I don’t know how to support you.
And Prince…I mean, King Tanyn is mysterious.
No one really knows much about him. But perhaps, I don’t know, maybe you could try to get to know him? Maybe, if you do, you might like him.”
“Even if I did like him, Gayle, say, I met him like a normal being would, we started dating, and we developed feelings for each other, it would take some seriously deep feelings for me to give up everything, my job, my home, my family, my friends, and move to an entirely different realm for him. And that doesn’t even get into the whole me-being-queen thing. I have no interest in being queen.”
“You’re the queeniest queen I know,” she half joked.
I almost smiled, because…
She wasn’t wrong.
“Honestly, two months ago, I’d be all for being a queen,” I admitted. “After watching all that responsibility land on Laura like a two-ton dragon, I want nothing to do with it.”
“I hear that,” she murmured.
“And you’re doing what you can to support me. You’re listening to me bitch about it,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she replied, sounding morose.
I would feel the same way if she was in my shoes.
Hells, I did feel the same way, considering Prince bloody Cormac was such a dick.
“It’ll be what it’ll be,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she replied.
“At least I like to ski,” I noted.
She laughed. There wasn’t a ton of humor in it, but at least she laughed.
I saw blue filter through my closed eyes, the spa-visor telling me it was halting its business because my face was moving and it had come to a mode where I needed to be still, so I said, “I’m in the final throes of the visor program.
I need to stop talking. But I’m okay. Or, I’m hanging in there. And I love that you checked in.”
“Always.”
“I also love you.”
“And I you. Always on that too.”
I smiled under the visor and the blue light started blinking.
“Letting you go,” I said.
“Okay, honey. Call me after you talk to Bash.”
The next pleasant task to look forward to.
“Will do.”
“Bye.”
“Later, babe.”
We ended the comm.