Chapter 41
"Do you not want this?" he asked.
The words snapped me back into myself.
I gazed up at him.
"No, I don't," I shook my head as the words came out of my mouth. He wouldn't be able to understand them, but it seemed he understood the motion of my body. I needed to be truthful to myself, even if I couldn't give him the full honesty that I should.
I couldn't tell him that I didn't want him.
I just wanted safety.
I couldn't say that I thought he was someone else when I slept with him, and though I didn't blame him for that, it still didn't sit right with me.
The thought of it brought up a swirling tension in my gut, a discomfort that I didn't want to face. It was an old scab, roughened and irritated by the presence of a new wound.
I knew I should want this.
I chose this - to go with this man for the sake of my own security.
Yet, at the same time, there was an ache in my heart I couldn't ease.
An ache caused by my own choices.
I didn't wait for him.
I just left with the first man who offered me a spaceship.
"I want Zale," I said, as I looked into his eyes, feeling the sinking sound of my own truth as it echoed in my ears. "I shouldn't have left him."
It was a really good thing he couldn't understand me.
I pulled my wrist free from his grip and typed into the translator.
"I want to be alone," I typed into the translator.
"Maybe it just isn't me you want to be with," he snapped, his ears pinning back.
Then he turned and left.
I stood stunned, feeling like an utter tool.
Why couldn't I just touch him and make him feel like he was everything to me, even if it was a lie?
Why did I have to sabotage myself like this?
First, I just left Zale behind without even a goodbye, and then once I actually got on the ship with the Emperor, who had promised me a great deal to come with him, I turned him down and argued with him.
It hadn't been hard for me in the past to pretend to want a guy.
I had worked at a strip club for two years!
That was two years of my life, pretending night after night that those men in there were the cream of the crop, the best men I would ever meet in my life, even though there was a part of me that utterly despised them for walking in there in the first place.
I absolutely could fake it.
Yet here I was, unable to do so for an alien who read my body language better than men who had spent their entire lives immersed in the same culture as mine.
What was I doing?
I took a deep breath.
I knew what I was doing.
I didn't want to be here.
I wanted to be back on that moon, talking to Zale.