Chapter Twelve
Sigisvult
Celeste Walsh, back for round two.
I was already drunk when she strode into our shared room in the shuttle. We were just days off from Udora and our final battle. She hadn’t come to me this whole time, and I was starting to get concerned.
Every time I tried to talk to her she would pull away and brush me off, find a reason to go be with Caridan or Ikar, hellbent on mending their relationship.
This was the first time we’d really spoken, in earnest, since the sinking ship on Chavatov.
She shivered in the hallway, bundled up in a tight plaid jacket with faux fur running from the inside cuffs out into a woolen hood. Her hair was a mess of unkempt red strands that were clearly not styled the way she intended them to be. She gave me an impatient, cold expression before she stepped into the bedroom.
“You look surprised,” she said evenly.
“As I recall the last time we spoke you weren’t too happy with me.”
“I’m fine.” She scoffed and pushed passed me into the quarters, regarding my empty bed harshly before turning back to me. “I just don’t like your girlfriend.”
I swung the door closed and bit my lip, unsure whether or not I should indulge her. This was the exact reason getting involved with women was a giant pain in my ass.
“Who? Fhalanae?” I said with some surprise. “Not my girlfriend.”
“Oh yeah?” she raised her brows wryly. “Didn’t look that way to me. But I guess you probably couldn’t tell, what with her boobs in your way.”
I laughed and approached the redhead.
“She’s awful.” She frowned. “And could probably kill us all, you know? Especially if you make her mad, which, let’s face it, you would because… you’re… you!”
“You are seriously getting upset about this? She wasn’t flirting with me.”
“Oh yeah? Then she should win an award for her stellar portrayal.” She rolled her eyes and thumbed a knick-knack on a shelf. “I just don’t know what you see in her.”
I laughed defensively and watched her lean up against the pale white wall behind her, her skirt crawling up her leg as she bent her knee and set her foot against the stone.
I raised a victorious finger in her direction, cocking a brow. “I don’t see anything in her.”
“That’s not what it looked like to me.” She stared at me for a long time and looked sharply hurt before carelessly tossing her hands into the air in defeat. “Okay, I give!” she shook her head and closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose as she did so. “I’m not even just talking about her, either. I’m officially removing the ‘you with all other girls’ topic of conversation from our pre-approved list.”
“Funny, I never got a copy of that list. Let me see it when we get back. It might help sort out our communication issues.”
“You know,” she snapped, “you hated that I spent all that time with Ikar.”
“Yes, but I never said anything about it.”
“Right, not until we were in the middle of having sex,” she scoffed.
I blinked in surprise at the sudden serious tone she possessed. My eyes traced her body, and I watched with curiosity as she swayed her leg back and forth, her foot still firmly planted on the wall behind her.
“You could tell me to stop. To be your little wife, your good little girl.”
The offer hung there, and we both knew exactly how fictitious the sentiment was. Her eyes gunned me down with some sort of challenge, and she shook her head in frustration.
“Why the hell would I do that?” I asked.
“Because…” her expression said she desperately wanted to continue talking but her lips wouldn’t cooperate. She pressed her lips thin, and I felt a sudden aching in my stomach.
“Celeste,” I reasoned. “Have I mentioned that I’m with you and not Fhalanae?”
She watched me carefully, and her legs both found their way to the cold floor as she waited for further confirmation. Finally, she gave a long sigh and said, “Every night I am left wondering if we are alright, how you feel about me, what you’re thinking, and every time that I try to bring it up you make me feel like an idiot for caring about you.”
“What do you want me to say, Celeste? That we’re friends? Lovers? Parents?” I blanched at the thought.
She blinked, suddenly infuriated. “We are not friends!”
“Okay then…” I said with a stunned exhale. “We’re not friends.”
Even despite my thoughts, the sentence still hurt, as did all meaning behind it. If we weren’t at least friends then… I exhaled sharply and stared at the floor, my arms extending as I said, “So why don’t you just ask me what you clearly stormed over here to ask and then we can get this unpleasantness over with?”
She swallowed hard and stared right into my soul.
I felt my heart sink and watched her study me with no readability. Her eyes were just hard, like stone, a blank wall of emotion that I couldn’t get through. Was she hurt, sad, relieved?
“What is this?” I asked, my eyes narrowing to a confused frown as Celeste made her way back towards the door. She was so insistent on being hard, hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard to deal with.
Aggression fueled my last thought, and I moved closer to her unrelenting eyes. “Celeste.”
Her eyes didn’t soften, only proving to further infuriate me.
I felt a well of emotion rise up in me out of nowhere, and I stared at the fiery redhead in front of me with absolute surety.
“Either talk to me or leave,” I demanded.
She stared at me for a moment, furious, and the rolled her eyes. “With pleasure!” she shouted. If there were a real door to slam behind her, I was sure it would have been loud. Instead, the door slid shut automatically.
I scoffed and sat down on the edge of the bed. If she was so unwilling to communicate, then there was no way we were getting anywhere. I’d been through conversations like this with her before, and they went absolutely nowhere.
And yet, my stomach quickly shot up in sickness as I heard her footsteps draw further away from the doorway. She just wanted a reason to be mad. Maybe it made it easier for her; I had no idea. I set my jaw and stared forward and then, out of nowhere, I exhaled and raced out the door to find her just at the bottom of my stoop.
She exhaled loudly, relief washing over her features. “And in under a minute he caves. Your willpower disappoints me.”
I didn’t smile. “Please come back.”
We stared at one another for some time before she slowly made her way back up the stairs, ignoring my extended helping hand as she re-entered the makeshift home. She shrugged helplessly in the hallway, standing close to me and trying to soften the situation with her pouting.
“I’m sorry.” Another shrug.
I closed the door and took an easy breath before approaching the girl, running my hands down her shoulders. She pulled away from the motion, pressing her eyes shut and moving her hand over her stomach. “It just makes me sick.” She clarified, “You and her.”
I moved closer to her face, just staring. “Why?”
“You kissed my heart,” she said with a quiver in her chin.
I exhaled, taken aback, her statement somehow erasing all of my anger with a single recollection. She took a steadying breath, her tone on the cusp on whining. “That was our thing. I don’t want… I can’t think that you’ll do that with her.”
“Then I won’t,” I said quietly, nearing her body in the entranceway, my hand resting on her lower back. She raised her brows skeptically and I extended his right hand and pledged, “I promise.”
She stared a while longer. “You probably couldn’t find it anyway,” she said of Fhalanae’s heart.
“You know… you were the one who recruited her, right?”
“Don’t remind me.”
I laughed and pressed up against her body, rested my head against hers until our noses touched. “Stay with me tonight?”
Her eyes cornered the wall behind me, thinking, stubborn.
“Please?”
I ran my thumb across her cheek and kissed her lips, waiting for her reciprocation. She exhaled loudly and relented to my movements, tongue skimming across mine in small flicks.
“Okay.”
“Celeste,” I said firmly.
“What?”
“It’s just you and me now.” I stood corrected, staring down at her small protruding belly and grazed my hand along the bump. “The three of us, I should say.”
The sentiment changed her countenance entirely. She seemed more relaxed then, and even the way she looked at me seemed different. She grabbed my fingers in her small hand and blinked tiredly as she led me to the small bed. I lay down, and she crawled in next to me, cuddling into my chest and caressing my collarbone with her hand.
“Promise you weren’t going to sleep with her?”
I held her in my arms and stared down at her in sudden wonder. I brushed her hair with my hand and kissed her flat on the forehead. “I promise,” I whispered. It was true.
“Good.”