Chapter 40
She let out a noise like air escaping from a compressed can and rolled her eyes.
"Shut the fuck up with that shit," she wrote, the small image on the translator jiggling about in a lewd fashion to emphasize the aggressive words.
"What?" I was absolutely shocked.
No one spoke to me that way as the Emperor.
The only person who came close was Makrus, but he didn't use words so foul.
"Don't think you can treat me like that just because you bought me with a spaceship if you're going to be a rude prick and imprison me or kill me.
Just do it; don't play these mind games with me and pretend you can't get enough, and then tell me you're disgusted by me," she continued, the words pouring out of the translator as she furiously typed into it.
"Treat me with the basic respect of talking out whatever is going on inside that crazy bin you call ahead. Talk it out."
I was too shocked to hold the words in.
"You wanted to say goodbye to another man," I said, almost choking on the absurdity of what I was saying.
Who was she that she demanded I answer to her?
She was nothing to me.
Even as I thought that, I felt the stab of my own falsehood. I knew in my heart that I was lying to myself.
She was everything.
She just had turned out to be everything I didn't want.
"So what?" she demanded. "You've known me for all of like two seconds.
You walk into my bedroom in the middle of the night, come on to me super hard and out of nowhere, and offer me safety and security and wealth and a family and expect me to leave with you immediately?
You can't have thought that no one else treated me well, that I wouldn't have somebody I would want to…
" her fingers hesitated for a moment. "I really wanted to say goodbye to him and tell him that I was sorry. "
I could see the glisten of tears in her eyes.
I reached out to touch her cheek, and she took a step back.
"He meant something to you?" I asked.
She hesitated.
She wasn't going to tell me the truth.
"I need the truth," I demanded. "If you lie to me, now, I will find out, and there is no relationship between us without truth."
She looked me in the eye and nodded.
"He left me when I needed him. He betrayed me, and then you were there," she said.
"No matter what I feel… no matter what I felt for him.
I'm not in that kind of position where I can succumb to fantasy.
I need reality, and the reality is that you can take care of me.
That you can provide for me. The reality is that I can give you something that you need. "
"He betrayed you?" I asked.
"He left me," she typed. "I don't know why."
I shook my head.
"You deserve better than that," I sang softly, acknowledging the conflict in my heart.
I should just tell her.
She typed something quickly and then closed the distance between us to rest her hand lightly on my lower abdomen.
"Please help me forget him," the translator sang out.
Her hand slid down into my trousers.
This wasn't what I wanted.
I had wanted her to know me, to fall in love with me without my title and my wealth.
But maybe that wasn't what I deserved to receive in life. Maybe this was all I could have - a woman who wanted to be with me because she wanted to be taken care of.
Maybe I just needed her to fall in love with me as the Emperor.
Or maybe I didn't need her heart.
Maybe I just needed to own her.
I wrapped my hand around her wrist and pushed her hand lower.
But she hesitated, pulling back ever so slightly.
I stopped, holding her in place as I studied her face.
She had closed her eyes and was turning her face away from me.
This was not what she was like before.
Before she would reach for me, touch me. She was the one who had initiated our matings. She had gazed at me as if I had made the ice melt at the first touch of the warming. Now she shrank away, moving away from me, pulling away from my touch just enough to resist.
She wasn't strong enough to stop me.
Was she doing this because she felt she had to?
"Do you not want this?" I asked.