38. Chapter Thirty-Eight Bahira
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Bahira
I place my hand in his outstretched one, letting Daje lead me out into a vacant space on the grass near where the musicians are playing. We face each other, our joined hands out to the side while my other hand lays on his shoulder, just the tips of my fingers touching him there. His large palm rests on my lower back, and I search for an inkling of heat—of desire or lust—within me at our close proximity, but I feel nothing of the sort.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says, diving right into the conversation I know we need to have.
I shrug my shoulders as we move, our feet mirroring each step of the waltz that I learned as a child. My gaze is hooked over his shoulder on the other dancing couples behind us as I counter, “The same could be said of you.”
He blows out a breath, the movement tickling the ends of hair by my ear. “I didn’t know if I should reach out,” he says slowly. “I—I know that you would have preferred that I had not intervened… But, Bahira, I couldn’t simply watch him do that to you.”
Adrenaline trickles into my veins, a fight or flight response building despite the fact that I’m not in danger. “I know,” I respond thickly as I swallow down the sarcastic retort on the tip of my tongue. Tension clouds around us, my breathing quickening the longer the silence goes on. My mouth opens to say something to ease it, but Daje interrupts before I can.
“Haylee told me about what happened in your workshop yesterday.” His voice is quiet, conscious of the few people who are dancing around us.
My body tenses as my steps falter. Damn it, Haylee. “I don’t want to talk about that,” I grit out as my frustration and embarrassment cause a heat to work its way up my neck and cheeks. My gaze meets his, those blue eyes vigilant as they watch me. Shouldn’t it make me feel something to have him look at me like that?
“Come on,” he whispers, turning to guide us to the edges of the trees surrounding the base of the amphitheater. We walk just past the treeline into the near darkness. Daje calls over a spelled flame, the yellow glow of his magic surrounding it as he holds it above us.
My mind feels like the normally well-oiled gears are colliding, chunks breaking off and clogging the ones below, continuing until everything reaches a standstill. His thumb rubs the back of my hand as he holds it, dragging his other hand over the top of his closely cut dark brown hair. He looks nervous, and I have to swallow down my own anxiety about what he is going to say.
“Bahira, you must know how I feel about you. I have held back, fighting with myself on either being content with just being your friend or begging you to take me as more.” It’s hard to breathe as we stare at each other, words I can’t voice sitting at the base of my throat. “I have been in love with you since we were kids,” he proclaims, and fuck, I should feel my heart flip at that. “But I hate the thought of you being alone purely based on principle.”
My eyebrows draw together as I look at him. “I’m not alone on principle, Daje,” I correct firmly. My hand pulls from his, and I cross my arms over my chest. “I am alone because I’ve been focusing on other things, and I don’t want to just se—”
“And now?” he interjects, taking another step towards me.
“And now, what?”
“Do you have the time now? Are you still focusing on those things now? ”
The implication in his tone settles heavily on me, harsh and suffocating. Am I ready to settle down now that I have another set of failed experiments under my belt? Now that I’ve hit a rock bottom that I previously hadn’t?
I shake my head and huff out a breath, as I keep my gaze locked on his and answer, “That is unfair of you to ask, and you know it.”
Bugs in the forest behind us buzz loudly, the revelry from the party mixing in to create a jarring noise that represents how chaotic I’m feeling on the inside. I honestly thought I knew the answer to this question already. Yes, I have the time now. Yes, I’m ready to stop and settle down. But I can’t force myself to say it. For some reason, my instinct is to say no, I’m not done. No, I still have work to do. No, I don’t want to settle down with you. But I can’t say that either because I don’t know if it’s the fucking truth.
Daje sighs when my silence drags on, taking a small step back. “I need to be honest with you, Bahira.” His chest rises with a deep inhale before he slowly blows it out. “I want to marry you. I want to be able to protect you without fear it’s going to cause you to bite my head off. I want to see you happy and thriving and not so focused on fixing something that isn’t your job to fix.” Each word is meant to be a declaration of love by a caring man asking me to be his, but they hit me like he’s throwing invisible, jagged knives at my heart instead. “Marry me, Bahira. Marry me, and let me make you happy. Let me show you what a life of being cared for by me is like. Because I can’t do this anymore.” His hands gesture between us, like the sum of all of our time together is coming down to this moment.
“You can’t do what anymore?” All I can do is speak in three or four word sentences now as my mind tries to play catch up with everything Daje is saying. It’s funny how his version of me happy has never once included asking me what I’d like to do. He wants permission from me to let him be the center of my world.
“I can’t continue to watch you sneak off and bed other men, thinking I don’t know. I can’t continue to watch you lose more of yourself on this quest to fix magic.” My breath catches in my throat at his words. They aren’t exactly mean but they hit their mark in me all the same. “If you can’t marry me—if a life with me isn’t what you want—then we can’t…” He trails off, looking back towards the celebration before releasing a sigh and meeting my eyes again. “Then it would be best if we go our separate ways.”
My head rears back, my jaw falling open as I gape at him in surprise. “You are giving me an ultimatum? Marry you, or lose you as a friend?” I blurt out, confused and indignant.
“I’m asking you to marry me and gain something more than a friend,” he corrects.
My heart beats hard and fast in my chest. Daje is one of my oldest friends, and though things have started to change as we got older and his feelings for me began to morph into something more, I never imagined it would come to this. “Daje, please don’t ask this of me,” I breathe, my fingers curling into fists. “Why can’t our friendship be enough?”
According to him, us marrying would be the solution to all of the problems in my life. A week ago—hell, two days ago—I would have scoffed in his face. I might have told him to fuck off and marched back into the celebration with my head held high and a deep belief that what I was doing held purpose. That it held value. Now however, I am so lost and confused, and I just don’t know if I can handle losing something I thought would be a constant in my life.
“Do you think I haven’t tried? To push these feelings I have for you so far down that I hope they disappear? Only to have them come rushing back to the surface every time I see you smile?” His blue eyes shine with silver as he stares at me. “I have tried to let it be enough, Bahira. I have begged and pleaded with any gods that might listen to let me just be happy with what you will give me. But I can’t—” He hesitates, his head dropping for a few breaths before he looks back up to me. “I can’t keep sacrificing my heart in the hope that one day you might catch up and see me the same way I see you. If you care about me at all, if there’s even a tiny chance that your heart calls for me like mine does for you, then it’s worth it to try.”
My lips purse as I contemplate his words. I don’t love Daje in that way now, but could I learn to? If I allowed him to change the parameters of our relationship into ones he sets the rules for, maybe I could find happiness. Maybe I could settle down and feel fulfilled by it. I have never been in a long-term relationship, by my own choice, but maybe there has been a solution right in front of me all this time.
“When do you need an answer?” I question, to both his shock and my own. His eyes move between mine as if he’s trying to figure out if I am being serious.
“In two days,” he answers. “I will be at the palace for the council meeting after the shifter king leaves. You can tell me then.” It’s a strategic move, and a smart one, on his part: either I have to reject him in my own home, possibly even while his father is there, or accept his proposal in front of the council, in front of my father. He swallows, a nervous but hopeful look flashing briefly in his eyes.
“Okay. I will give you an answer then.” A feeling of unease settles inside me as I agree to his terms.
Daje nods, moving to take a step before pausing. “I would do anything for you, Bahira. I just want to make you happy.”
My throat feels like it’s being squeezed in a tight vice. I watch him walk back to the party, taking the spelled flame with him and leaving me alone in the darkness.
I take the steps back up from the center of the amphitheater slowly, the ringing in my ears blocking everything else out. The entire carriage ride home, Daje’s words replay in my mind, and that sinking feeling grows. My brain begins running through the possibilities of what my life would be like if I were married to Daje. And each time I picture that future scenario, there are no butterflies in my stomach, no fluttering of my heart. There are no happy wedding day smiles nor tangled bodies in the sheets later that night. There’s nothing but that sinking feeling, the pit of my stomach aching with something that feels an awful lot like dread.
“Fuck,” I whisper, feeling like I can’t breathe. The carriage finally comes to a stop in front of the palace, the guards opening the door and helping me out. I stop at the bottom of the stone steps, my gaze tilting up to stare at my home. In two days, it will be the place where I mete out an undetermined judgment on my own future. My hands grip the fabric of my dress, my breaths coming faster and faster.
“Your Highness, is everything alright?” one of the guards to my side asks, but my brain feels like it’s spiraling out of control.
It feels like the very essence of who I am is being ripped out of me in one harsh yank, and I don’t know where that will leave me after. I have never felt so unsure, so defeated. I need to go anywhere else, anywhere but here . I turn and start running down the stone path, the guards calling out behind me, but I don’t stop. I run, my dress rustling with each step, and the only other sound is that of the wildlife around me. It takes a few minutes, but I end up at my destination with sweat dripping down my brow. When I step into my workshop, I exhale heavily. I would have gone to the library, but everyone else is down at the celebration, meaning it is locked.
I need to work this out logically, but when it comes to love and relationships, it isn’t that simple. There is no way to write out Daje and I as an equation to find a true singular solution. He’s in love with the idea of what I could be for him, and I care about him only as a friend. Those two things cannot mix, and yet I don’t want to lose him from my life. He stood up for me when I was picked on and isolated from the other kids for being magicless. He listened quietly as I told him about my theories on magic and my latest experiments. He had sparred with me and attended boring council meetings and been someone for me to vent my worries to about Nox being gone. And now, he wants to be even more or he wants to be nothing at all.
Spelled flames hang from glass bowls on either side of the space, giving the room a calming ambience. It feels ridiculous to be wearing such a fancy dress in this space where literal sweat—and now, I suppose, blood—has been spilled. I walk over to the desk at the front of the room and sigh as I take a seat and hold my head in my hands. Haylee’s poems and stories are stacked on one side, while the other has two mage journals that I accidentally left a few days prior. I had stopped in to make sure everything was clean and ready for my experiments the following day. I snort at how pointless that ended up being. My eyes dart over to the journals, those two voices once again on my shoulders: one begging to read them and one pointing out that it doesn’t matter anymore. But I need something to ground me or, at the very least, distract me enough to calm my spiraling mind. My fingers brush against the soft leather cover of the top journal before I grab it and slide it towards me. Flipping it over, I bark out a crazed laugh at whose journal it is: Kallin Keria, Daje’s father. Of course. There must definitely be a god out there just laughing at my plight.
“Might as well,” I mutter before opening the journal to the first page. The date on this one is from two years ago. The beginning is mostly notes about various council meetings and decisions they’ve made that bear no interest to me, what with my data collection being focused on tracking magical discrepancies. About halfway through the book, Councilman Kallin mentions an incident with magic in another small town. Concordia has about three hundred residents, and is situated right on this side of the border with the Mortal Kingdom. According to Kallin’s notes, older mages in their eighth decade of life are completely magicless now, or at least unable to wield any magic they may retain. That correlates with what Councilman Arav wrote about the mages living in his small town that bordered the Fae Kingdom. Searching through Haylee’s papers, I find a blank one to tear a corner off of and bookmark the page so that I can add the information to my data chart in my own journal. I spend another hour or so reading and bookmarking before the words start to blur on the page. Exhaling, I lean back in the chair and stretch my arms overhead while closing my eyes. Rolling my head side to side, I work out the tension in the muscles there as I think.
While I still have no idea what I’m going to do regarding Daje, at least I am now calm enough to go home and try to sleep. I roll my head once more to the left, holding the stretch there as my hands come to rest on the table. My eyes open as I stretch to the right and look over at the table where my experiments are performed. All of the glass bottles are pushed to one corner from my hasty clean up after Haylee left. I gaze over them, my nails digging into the desk as I remember the moments when I could see the magic fading from the leaves. When they started to turn brown again and return to their decayed—
My eyes catch on one of the containers. I blink twice, my brows drawing up, before I push up from the desk and hasten over to the table, nearly tripping on my skirt as I do so. Slowly, with trembling hands, I slide it closer to me. My breath catches as I stare at the contents, my heart beating riotously in my chest. I pull the other two bottles used in the experiment forward and line them up next to each other. One is still full of dead, brown leaves, and it could be either Haylee’s or Erick’s. One bottle contains the leaves affected by my father’s magic, and the leaves are vibrant green and sprouting a few roots, but not any further along than where I had left them yesterday. But in the third bottle, not only are the previously dead leaves teeming with life, but roots and new buds have blossomed from more leaves than any other jar.
I stare for what feels like an eternity at each jar, trying to figure out how this could have possibly happened. There was obviously some sort of delayed reaction with either Haylee’s or Erick’s magic, and I’ll have to look at the plants more closely under a magnifier tomorrow, but it worked. Something quantifiable and tangible and new happened. My smile lifts my cheeks as I feel a warm tear fall. It worked. A sob breaks loose, an overwhelming feeling of exhilaration causing me to fall to my knees in front of the table. More tears descend as my eyes burn and my chest heaves in relief and excitement.
I know there are still so many questions and this may be yet another dead end, but I can’t help but feel like maybe the timing of it is no coincidence. Like maybe this is a sign that I am not meant to settle.