Chapter Seventeen
My head is full of questions and anxiety when I finally get down to breakfast the morning after the star safari. Of course
it is Forrest who is sitting at the otherwise empty table when I enter the dining room.
“Ava, good morning!” he says with a smile. “When did you get in last night?” I don’t answer him as I pour myself my first
cup of coffee. I’ll need at least seven more of these before I can manage polite small talk to even an average-looking person,
let alone Forrest. “Ah, I see,” he says when I don’t immediately reply. “I thought our truce extended until we got back to
the castle, but you didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I left, that’s all.” It is just at that moment that Hal, the man formerly thought of as human, enters the room. I am so not
ready to talk to him yet, or look at him, or think about him or anything. There might not be enough coffee on Earth for this
situation. Still, I knock back one coffee and then another.
“So, that’s it, then?” Forrest asks. “The truce really is over?”
“Yes,” I reply, cross and out of sorts. Forrest doesn’t know that it’s mostly because of Hal, because he has blown my mind and maybe I’m never going to be the same again.
He thinks I’m just holding a grudge against him.
He doesn’t know that right now I am holding a grudge against all men, human and almost human.
Both kinds are equally annoying. Hurriedly I knock back one more coffee. Forrest is not reading the room.
“It just doesn’t seem very mature,” Forrest says, “for a grown woman to make such a big deal out of this.”
It takes a lot for me to lose my temper, and for reasons that have both nothing and somehow everything to do with Forrest,
this is that moment. But when I do, it is quick, hot, and loud.
“You dare to call me immature?” I say, slamming my cup down on the polished surface. “You, who throws insults around like
they don’t mean anything? Like it’s all ‘a bit of a laugh’? You do realise that despite me apologising to you more than once
for what happened to your shirt, you have never apologised to me?”
“Apologised to you?” Forrest looks baffled. “What for?”
The nerve of him.
“I feel sorry for the kids you are teaching, that’s all I can say,” I tell him. “How can you call yourself an artist when
you have the emotional intelligence of a rock, which is unfair to rocks, by the way?”
I storm out, feeling both Forrest and Hal watch me as I go.
Forrest will stay out of my way now, and even if he doesn’t, it doesn’t matter because I will be diligently staying out of
his and everyone’s way and trying to work out why he makes me feel so many feelings!
It is a strange paradox, that this man who is obviously besotted by his daughter, and connected really well with those kids, hasn’t once tried to apologise for what he said to me.
It seems like two different people, somehow.
But that’s humans for you. They are complicated and messy, and confusing.
I don’t think Hal knows what he has let himself in for.
I guess I’ll find out. We have to get back to work today, one way or another, and that is going to be weird as fuck.