Chapter 19
I love you too, you green softy
Melanie
“What is going on?” Zhari asked, sliding her head through the large opening that served as a door.
I blinked, a tear falling from my lashes onto my forearm as I turned my head. I must have looked pathetic, sitting on the floor facing the door, waiting, legs folded against my chest, head resting on my crossed arms.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “We had a fight. He left.”
Zhari frowned and walked inside, stopping at my level to sit on the floor with me. “It is not my brother’s way to flee from conflict. He must have something on his mind.”
I scoffed, wiping at my wet cheek. “He said he needed time. That he’d be back in the morning.”
It was the middle of the night now. People kept celebrating outside, chanting, dancing, laughing…I wished Ghauro and I were celebrating too, instead of going into that damn discussion so early.
He knew. From the first morning, he knew I didn’t plan on staying and the way he reacted to it was to just try—and fucking succeeding—on making me fall in love with him. With this place. Now, I still had to leave, but I’d have to go heartbroken.
“Maybe he went to deal with Jerakeh,” she mused.
“Probably not,” I said, burying my head back in my arms.
She scooted closer and wrapped her arm around me. “He said he will be back, then he will. No matter what your fight was about, Ghauro does not take his oath to you lightly.”
She slid her hand in my hair, catching and removing the flowers, one by one, silently. It took time. I didn’t realize he had placed so many…That must have been why his whole family looked at us strangely. I had given him only a handful, while my whole head had been covered.
“Whatever plagues your mind, Melanie…you will find a way.”
There was none. I couldn’t have both of the people I wanted most in my life. I had to make a choice, and even though it broke my heart to leave Ghauro, Granny was more vulnerable. “I don’t think I can.”
“I meant you, as a mated pair. Your issues are now his issues, and it goes both ways.” She paused, probably finished with the flowers in my hair. “Does it have to do with the fact that he…has not claimed you?”
I grunted. “In a way.”
“Okay…Is there…something wrong on an anatomical level?” she asked, cautious.
“What? No!”
She leaned back as I pulled my head away from my arms and lifted her hands in surrender. “I am just asking! You seem so defeated that I feared like…maybe you were not compatible in that way.”
“It’s nothing like this. He decided to wait. I—wanted to hurry, but for the wrong reasons. Now I’m lost, and confused by the mixed signals.”
“What mixed signals? I think Ghauro is doing a pretty good job telling the whole world how he feels.”
It felt too personal, talking about what Ghauro and I had shared the past week.
About how he had initially said he wouldn’t fuck me except during my heat.
Learning that, unlike the Tauri Female, human women could have sex outside of their fertility window didn’t make him change his mind.
The whole week we spent all over each other was just that—superficial.
Insanely good, but with only mutual pleasure in mind.
“I know this was all some sort of arrangement,” I explained, my voice breaking. “But he gave me hope. Hope that I shouldn’t be having, because this whole marriage is doomed. Because I fucked it up, thinking he only wanted to breed me—although I’m still unsure what he wants from me other than that…”
He’d been hurt that I wanted to leave, that part had been obvious before he took off. Zhari hummed, shaking her head softly as she looked outside through the large door.
“I mean, it is obvious for those who see…You just have to open your eyes.”
I turned my head, just enough to see her face. She was smiling. Was this whole thing just a joke?
“Open your eyes, yes, but also look.” She gestured to the ground surrounding me. To the dozens of pale pink flowers that looked like lilies scattered on the floor.
“Baraghu…” I whispered, remembering the name the woman at the stall had given me. The way my hand had hovered above the nearly empty basket only to pull away, plagued by my own thoughts and insecurities. The name of this shed, too…
“The flower of love,” Zhari said with a dreamy sigh.
“Why do you think our mother nearly had a heart attack? She was not ready to see her precious last born son so infatuated with the human bride he did not want two weeks ago. Thanato told me all about Ghauro’s change of heart the second you stepped foot in that room. ”
The flower of love. There were at least twenty and no other except for the single Bakarut that he had placed over my ear. No wonder everyone had looked at me with wide eyes and Jerakeh had looked so fucking hurt by the mere sight of me.
“No matter what your fight really was about,” Zhari continued, “you guys will get through it.”
“How do you know that?”
She gave me a cheeky smile. “Because I know my brother. And I am pretty sure the only reason you were not entirely covered in Baraghu was because there were not enough flowers.”
Zhari had left me shortly after the big revelation.
I wasn’t sure how long it’d been but the festivities had started to quiet down and the sky wasn’t as dark anymore, the sun starting to rise behind the dense forest.
I hadn’t slept, unable to calm my heart and anxious mind enough to even close my eyes. Eyes that were unable to look away from the twenty-three baraghu flowers scattered on the floor.
Twenty-fucking-three. I had counted. About a hundred times, just to be sure and because my insomnia was leaving me with too much time on my hands but nothing better to do.
Safe to say my brain nearly short-circuited from sheer relief when the imposing form of my husband suddenly appeared under the large frame of the open door.
His chest was heaving, like he’d been running since he left. Hands flexing at his sides like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Hold me, I thought. Hold me while we try to figure us out.
“You are not sleeping.” Not a question, but I shook my head anyway.
“You were gone,” I said. “I was worried.”
He took a careful step forward, his head tilting to the side in wonder before freezing, his foot just a couple of inches away from the first flower.
“What were you worried about?”
“What do you think?” I asked, my voice wavering. “That you’d be hurt? That you were so upset with me you didn’t want me anymore? That, maybe, you found your way to another woman’s bed? I don’t know, you name it, it has probably crossed my mind.”
Ghauro kneeled on the ground in front of me and delicately moved the flowers to the sides as he got closer.
“Do you not trust me?” I tried burying my face back in my arms but he didn’t let me, his hand cupping my jaw as he leaned forward to press his forehead against mine.
“I am sorry I left,” he said. “My brain worked faster than my mouth and I was not sure what to tell you until my plan was clear enough.”
I shivered as his nose brushed against mine, inhaling deeply his now comforting scent, so similar to mine but still tinged with something that was wholly him.
“What plan?”
He pulled his head back a fraction, one corner of his lips curling in a joyful smile. “I needed to find a way for you to stay here. For your kin to not be…in danger of starving anymore.”
My eyes widened, jaw dropping in surprise. “What?”
Ghauro pulled me toward him and out of my bunched up position, placing my knees on each side of his thighs. One arm slid around my waist while his free hand cupped the back of my head, tilting my face to his.
“I went to meet with Maxwell,” he said and I gasped. “I asked him to bring your Granny here.”
He had to be joking. “What?” I repeated. “No…you didn’t—”
“You said she was sick because of your planet’s air. That she was alone. She would be thriving here…She could rest until her health improves, and then, if she wants to, join one of the elder’s farms.”
My grandmother? Here?
She had always dreamed of traveling to space. To find some place better to live in and to raise my father, then me when he died. But leaving Earth was more expensive than living on it…
“Ghauro…” I started. “I—you don’t realize how expensive it is to do something like this. I can’t afford—”
“Oh, no, no, no. You will not have to pay anything. Maxwell will.”
The joke was becoming ridiculous. “I doubt anyone could manage to convince him to pay for anything.”
His smile widened. “I may have threatened to tell all the others about the way the program had abducted you from your home world. To ensure his whole experiment would fail. Some of our species are reluctant to participate in this whole thing, so finding out their brides are not completely willing? They would back down.”
That was it. My husband was an evil genius in disguise.
“Are you…upset with me?” he asked.
“I—no. No, I don’t think so. I wish you’d told me before you left…but I’m not upset.” I circled his neck with both arms, searching his beautiful yellow-ish eyes. “Why did you do this for me?”
He blinked, eyes darting to my lips, between my eyes, the sparse freckles over my nose and cheeks. “Is it not obvious?” he asked, grabbing a discarded baraghu to slide it in my braid. “I love you. I do not want you to leave. You belong here, with me, in a world that will heal instead of kill you.”
“Ghauro…” I breathed out, my lips brushing against his.
“I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay here.
With you.” I reached blindly for the floor until I grasped the closest baraghu, and slowly lifted my hand to his hair.
His gaze followed the motion until I pinned it in place, and as they set back on me, his eyes flared. “I love you too, you green softy.”