Chapter 12 #2
I know she’s joking, but it’s still news to me. “Grateful? Really? I would never have guessed.”
“Bad at reading the room,” Marlowe whispers.
Her curls form a halo around her head as she stares up into nothing, into everything.
With her limbs flung out like a starfish, she takes up a lot of real estate.
I get the impression that’s how she intends it; Marlowe bleeds out into her surroundings, reaching, probing.
Not just on this blanket, but everywhere.
From the moment we met, she’s been seeping into my defences.
One of her dimpled hands lies an inch away from my knee, pressed flat into the pile of the blanket, like she could become one with it if she just tried hard enough.
I’m struck by the ease with which she seems to embrace the world.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who can simultaneously keep their secrets so well guarded yet share so much of themselves with others.
It’s admirable. Enviable. Sometimes I worry I’m so closed up, there’s no reversing it—and why would anyone try?
“Tea?”
Marlowe’s voice pulls me out of my thoughts, and I find a mug held out to me. She presses it into my palm and pours herself one, tucking her feet beneath her. The warmth sinks into my skin and I inhale deeply, trying to ground myself. I’m nervous.
I realise I’m staring when the side of her mouth curls over the rim of her mug. It opens her whole face.
“Something to say, Captain?”
“I can’t picture you falling in love with Dominik Gryphon.”
It just tumbles out, shocking us both. Marlowe blinks a few times before biting back a laugh.
Meanwhile, I wish I could climb into my tea and dissolve into oblivion.
But, despite my embarrassment, I wasn’t lying.
The man is a narcissist. As far as I can tell, Marlowe’s bisexual, and she could have anyone, probably doubly more before she was a mother.
Marlowe raises an eyebrow. “You definitely look like you have something to say now.”
“I’m sorry.” I shake my head. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s none of my business—”
“Have you ever been in love?”
I hesitate. “I don’t think so.”
Her other eyebrow joins the first. “You don’t think so?”
“I didn’t have much opportunity for relationships at the time when my hormonal teenage peers were running around.” I shrug. “And then I joined the IAF, and there was no point in even trying.”
Marlowe stares at me like I’ve given her the answer to a long-pondered equation. “Huh.”
Something tells me I don’t want to know what she’s thinking. Except, of course, I do.
“I fell in love with Dominik when I was young. He wasn’t always the way he is now. Determined, yes. Obstinate, yes. But there was a time I thought I’d never get him out of my system. I didn’t even want to.”
I watch as Marlowe sets her tea down and dredges up her past. “He had this way of talking. People called him silver-tongued in this jokey manner, but he really was. He knew how to work a room. Now, of course, I see him for what he is, but at the time, I thought he was incredible.”
Her words build the perfect picture of a young, idealistic woman still married to the belief that people are inherently good, determined to find romance in everything. In a twisted way, I envy her that experience. To be...soft.
“I grew up fast, of course, when I found out I was pregnant. Dominik wanted me to have an abortion, but I knew from the beginning I wanted to be a mother, even if it was way earlier than I ever imagined.”
Her hand rests protectively on her stomach, even now.
“Was that when your view of him changed?” I ask.
“Fuck, no.” Marlowe snorts. “I knew his flaws, and I’d accepted them in the face of his better traits.
Compromise, right? Except, the more I thought about being responsible for a child, the more I realised I could never again be so frivolous.
It was entirely his right not to want to be a father.
It was everything else that shook me up. ”
She turns her head and spears me with those eyes, amused in the half-light, even as she grimaces. “Simply put, Dominik was morphing into the kind of man I wouldn’t want parenting my child. And that was that.”
“You know, every time someone tells me a story about being in love, it almost always does nothing to endear itself.”
Marlowe bursts into laughter and rolls onto her stomach, shooting me a narrowed look. “You’re too aloof to fall in love? Much too smart to be in these trenches.”
She’s joking, but it feels like scrutiny anyway.
“I don’t disparage the notion. Really,” I add when she cocks an eyebrow. “I just don’t think I ever wanted to see myself in a situation like that.”
“Like what? Like mine?”
“No, no. In general.”
Marlowe reaches out and traces a finger over my ankle, exposed by my rucked-up trouser hem. Carefully, she avoids my eye as she continues. “No one ever modelled healthy love to you.”
A statement, not a question. She’s good at that, I’ve noticed, though I haven’t decided how I feel about her observations of me. They make me feel cold, but in a brisk way, rather than painfully. It’s the sensation of being thoroughly seen when I thought I was invisible, safe behind my mask.
“No, no one ever did,” I say.
Even my Nayya, as much as I love and respect her, couldn’t protect me from the harms of our home—being depended on at that age was hard for me, and shaped my entire future.
I expect Marlowe to prod at the admission, as so many people would.
I don’t even know if I’ll answer her, if I can, but I steel myself anyway.
Maybe I could pare it down to bare bones so it’s more palatable: gambler father, abused mother, poor upbringing, parentified teenager.
Instead, Marlowe drags a fingertip across my skin, sending sparks all up my leg with the friction of her nail. I almost miss her next sentence. Is the distraction for me or her? How deep is she in my head?
“I owe you an apology,” she says softly.
I manage a grunt of some sort, but I’m equal parts frazzled and astonished. Words won’t come to me.
“I was angry at you for something that wasn’t your fault at all.
” Her mouth twists into a scowl. “And I’m not telling you this because I want to know the answer to my earlier question.
I’m telling you because you deserve to know.
You saved me from a world of pain and didn’t even scold me for recklessness. ”
This is important, and I have so much respect for her for owning up to it.
But the heat of her hand against my skin is short-circuiting my synapses, and I can’t focus if she doesn’t stop.
I pull my legs away from her hand and into the lotus position, then lean into her personal space again.
I just don’t want her to think I’m uncomfortable with her touching me.
People don’t do it very often, but I crave it, just like anyone else.
Platonic, romantic—it’s all good for the soul.
Marlowe bites her lip and lets out a breath. “I think it’s obvious I’m attracted to you.”
I’m frozen in place, not sure where this is going, but trying very hard to lock down my expression.
And though all I want to do is reach out and touch her, finally kiss her after all this time, I don’t.
That wasn’t consent, and despite the last time we were this close, I need to hear her say it.
I don’t know if I’ll survive it, but I need to hear it.
“I’m an adult, I can admit it. But I don’t share my diagnosis with anyone because I just don’t care to.
Having you find me on the floor like that.
.. was humiliating. No, let me finish.” Marlowe holds up her hands at the protest that slips from my throat.
“The logical part of my brain tells me it wasn’t, of course not.
I have a condition, and it came to bite me in the arse.
All you did was help me. Gaia knows how long I would have lain there before I could summon the strength to get up. Right? I know that.
“But the part of my brain that hates spiders and screams at jump scares doesn’t care. It tells me I was vulnerable. It tells me I was helpless. It tells me no one in this galaxy could see me on the floor like that and still possibly... want me.”
She exhales deeply and tucks her hands into her armpits. “So, I was angry. I wanted you, and I was pretty sure you wanted me. And then you saw me on the floor, and I wanted someone to shoot me into space immediately. I took it out on you, and that’s just... not okay.”
“Marlowe—”
She looks at me, finally, and smiles sheepishly. “Thank you. Seriously. And I’m sorry for the drama.”
“Marlowe—”
She flaps her hands as if she can wave it all away. “Eurgh, no, don’t. Just tell me this...”
I watch, with bated breath, as she rises to her knees and throws her shoulders back. Something like determination sets her features. I can’t name the gleam in those chestnut eyes, but I know the heat they send through me.
“Was I right? Are you attracted to me? Were you, before—”
“I’ve never been more attracted to anyone in my life.”
How can she possibly think otherwise?
I get a glimpse of a beautiful smile before she throws herself at me, and my arms are full of soft, fragrant skin.
I pull Marlowe into my lap, slide a hand into those curls and kiss her the way I’ve been dying to.
The noise she makes is something like a drug.
When she sucks my bottom lip into her mouth, she punctuates it with the sinking of her nails into the nape of my neck.
I can’t stop myself from gasping against her, all my inhibitions untethered.
Of course she would be wild.
Of course she would immediately get under my skin.