Chapter Two Taissa #2
“Be glad I didn’t get my scarves, Locke,” spits Taissa.
Kion looks briefly puzzled before evidently deciding he doesn’t care enough to ask more questions. Taissa steels herself, drawing her shoulders back as she eyes the warlock’s lithe body up and down, hoping that her disdain burns in her eyes as much as it burns in her pounding heart.
“By the way,” Taissa adds, breathless with fury and the overwhelming need to throttle him, “I hate you.” Truthfully, she has never been so soul-baringly honest in her entire life.
“You,” he snaps back, his knuckles white around his qyl, the pointer finger of his other hand jabbing at her, “are fucking unbelievable—”
“And you’re a burnt-out Robber who tanked his team to the bottom of the Minor League and can’t even manage to crawl his way back up above the Cockatrices,” Taissa fires back.
To her great pleasure, she sees him flinch.
It’s subtle—a stiffening of his shoulders, a bobbing of his throat—but she knows her arrow has struck true.
She knows him, in the way only rivals on opposing teams can.
That relationship (more of a hatredship, really) is just as, if not more, intimate than a marriage.
After all, they’ve seen each other drenched in sweat and panting, trembling with exertion, grunting and groaning and crying out in ecstasy.
Seen each other at their most vulnerable: sobbing tears of joy, shouting in fury or triumph or panic until their voices gave way, spouting the dirtiest words known to man. Kion’s favorite cuss word?
Fuck.
Oh, Taissa knows everything about Kion Locke: his favored defensive move (a barrel roll, followed by a tuck-and-drop), the way his eyes grow glassy with a victory, the way his upper lip curls and his brows lower when he’s anxious.
His favorite restaurant (Taste of Delhi in Pinion-upon-Keat), his favorite club (Rules), his taste in women (leggy, blonde, and certainly not Taissa Cho…
not that she remotely cares anymore), and the exact type of cologne he favors (Atlantis, something tropical and not entirely unappealing).
Know thy enemy.
She most certainly does. Although some of her knowledge had been acquired from her heyday as one of his infatuated fans (see: taste in women, cologne preference), once their rivalry was established, it was impossible not to learn more.
Their names were paired together for years, in magazines, in tabloids, in commentaries, on social media.
At one point, their known rivalry was so intense that when one thought of Taissa Cho, mention of Kion Locke soon followed.
It began at that gala, but burst into flames when Taissa broke the first of Kion’s NCL records. And then another. And then another.
He’d been great, once. And so had she.
But now they’re standing off in her garden, one disgraced and hated, the other the absolute laughingstock of the NCL.
Both very inclined to murder.
Kion looks like he’s slowly and painstakingly gathering the scraps of his already-tattered patience. A muscle is ticking ferociously in his jaw; his hand seems to be trembling around his qyl as he re-holsters it.
“You know, I came all the way up from England to Scotland on a perfectly fine Thursday afternoon when I could be doing literally anything else, to ask you one question. One bloody question, Cho, and your first instinct is to knock me flat on my arse and spit in my face,” he says, in an almost conversational tone belied only by the way his accent has become thicker, nearly to the point of non-intelligibility (the way it does when he’s close to flying into one of his famed temper tantrums).
“I’ve not spat in your face,” says Taissa, offended.
Kion looks like he’s about to choke on his own fury, swatting away the whispering sprites. “This is the part when you ask what the fucking question is.”
Taissa glares right back at him. Her head aches something fierce. With her initial reaction to scratch the tempestuous Combat glyph onto her skin, she’s been doling out punches first and thinking later. Or, really, not at all.
Kion Locke. Here. In her garden. What’s this “one bloody question” he came all this way to ask?
“I’m flattered,” says Taissa slowly, “but, see, marriage isn’t really in the cards for me right now.”
“I’m not asking you to marry me!”
“Oh,” mutters Taissa, being deliberately obtuse because she knows how it’ll incense him.
And then, because she also knows it will make him absolutely lose his mind, she shrugs, turns around, and begins walking toward her cottage. She feels the Fair Folk’s stares on her back from the forest, but nothing burns more than Kion’s enraged glower as it sears a hole through her spine.
Let him glare. Whatever Kion Locke has to ask her isn’t worth a minute more of her time. Yes, she’s curious (of course she’s curious), but that curiosity weighs nothing in comparison to the deep, deep well of resentment sloshing around inside of her.
Seeing him here, in the flesh, brings it all back in a gigantic wave, even more than cruel Cauldron posts or snide remarks ever can. Because of him, it’s been years since she played carriwitchet, since she felt like she could live, really live. Because of him, she lost Sansa…
And she’ll never forgive him for it.
“Cho!” hisses Kion from behind her.
She looks over her shoulder at him. Just a bit.
For a moment, standing there near her tomatoes and kale, he looks almost lost. Forlorn.
Something passes between them, just briefly.
She knows he feels it, too—how the memories dangle between them like winter cobwebs, sparkling and delicate, yet cold.
This isn’t the first time they’ve stared each other down from across a field.
Calculating the other’s next move. Scouring for weaknesses.
She’s found his. For whatever reason, he needs her.
And she has no plans on helping him.
Taissa smiles sweetly at Kion Locke.
“Get the fuck off my lawn,” she says. The sprites giggle as she stomps back toward her cottage.