Within the Alcazar Oceania I feel the weight of the porthole shift as I open it, rising up into our chamber. The jade crystal walls shimmer dully with memories in the wake of our pre-proposal domesticity.
“You came back.” I hear the voice, cracked, like a mirror reflecting back the consequences of what I had done straight at me, full force.
“You didn’t exactly give me much choice,” I mutter and Orion comes into view. He glides toward me. His face is impassive but his eyes are scared. There is fear in them. Fear I’ve never seen before.
“If you hadn’t run off in the first place then it wouldn’t be an issue,” he doesn’t snap. He just sounds tired. I take off the tiara that’s still digging into my skull and move over to my vanity, placing it in front of the conch comb. The diamonds glitter coldly.
“I needed some time,” I admit, turning and meeting his eyes. They’re dead.
“Why?” He asks me, I can tell every muscle in his body is tense as even his tail moves in calculated and measured momentum.
“To think,” I reply honestly, earnestly. Not whispering but speaking clearly. I do not want there to be any mistake of my intent.
“That’s funny. I thought you had your mind all made up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean,” I rise slightly so my eyes meet his. I suck down thick salty mouthfuls of water, letting it quench my thirsty lungs and give me the confidence that I need to get myself heard.
“I asked you to marry me.” He puts his hand through his hair in that way he does when he’s stressed, fingers bristling against the metal of his crown. I know what would calm him, stroking his hands through my hair, over my body, but I cannot let him seek comfort in me any longer.
“And I said no.” His head snaps up only moments after his eyes have fallen to the floor as my words reach him.
“You didn’t. You just fled. You always flee. So you’re saying no?” He narrows his eyes. I inhale. My heart begins to hammer but I have to confirm his claim, I have to put myself first.
“I’m saying no,” I nod and he turns for a moment, as though I’ve physically slapped him. “Are you mad I’m saying no?” I ask him, wondering what to do as I hang, limp in the water.
“Not angry. Humiliated maybe…” He mutters, waving a hand, back still to me, dismissing my existence almost.
“You chose to ask me in front of everyone. It isn’t my fault. I was kind of humiliated too,” I remind him and he still doesn’t turn around, robbing me of his gaze, like a small child refusing to kiss his mother after he’s thrown his toys out of the pram.
“Yeah, I can see how.”
“Orion, please don’t be like this…” He turns on me, finally deciding to square up to the problems that have come to a head after months of denial.
“I waited for you,” he snarls. I straighten my back and cross my arms.
“I didn’t ask you to,” I remind him, glaring.
“You’re my soulmate. Would you rather I be in love with someone else?” He asks me the question and I contemplate my response carefully.
“Maybe you should have been, I mean, I don’t like you being like this, Orion. There’s too much pressure,” I admit to him and in the confession I feel lighter. I feel my heart begin to swell with truth. Orion looks confused.
“We were made for each other, Callie. That’s the opposite of pressure.” He snorts, then looks at me like I’m crazy. Like what I’m saying is in some kind of foreign language.
“Not to me,” I say the simplest answer I can think of. I don’t rise, I don’t bite. I just go for what I know will infuriate him most, acting like I don’t care what he thinks. Acting like my thoughts are completely cleaved from his own.
“I don’t understand you!” He exclaims, throwing his arms up in a flurry of disturbed bubbles.
“Please don’t yell at me,” I say calmly. My lack of retort makes his expression turn nasty. An Orion who is not a white knight. Not a prince charming. Not a crowned ruler. An Orion who is distinctly human.
“NO! I am a calm person Callie, but I’ve had enough! I waited, I did my part. I suffered! I paid my dues! Then you DIED CALLIE! YOU KNEW YOU WERE INVOLVED IN THAT GODDAMN PROPHECY AND YOU LIED TO ME! I GOT YOU BACK FROM THE DEAD! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT’S LIKE? DO YOU?” He stops for breath, his muscled pectorals rising and falling like twin peaks of masculine assertion. I stand, facing his rage, his anger and grief like the storm I’ve just ridden into the dusk. “So I’m sorry if I proposed to soon! Maybe I jumped the gun! But is it so much to ask that I just get to have you for a little while? Just for me? Is it so wrong that I want to lock you away from the world after everything you’ve been through?” His eyes have gone from burning with rage to imploring me to see his point of view in a few seconds. I find his intensity tiring, he’s so invested. I’m just exhausted.
“I’m eighteen, Orion. Yes, I died, but I chose to come back to be with you, over being a Goddess! What you’re doing is just like you say, it’s locking me away, so I can’t escape even if I want to. That sure as hell isn’t a good enough reason to get married… I mean you need trust for a start!” I feel my emotion getting a little loose, I check myself internally. Distance is the key to getting through this. To getting what I want. If I let myself feel, I’ll crumble into his arms and be back at square one all over again.
“Can you blame me for not trusting you, Callie?” Orion’s expression is deadpan and the water around us is tremor-less.
“Okay, so I lied to you, I get it. You have a point. But I’m not marrying you because we’re ‘destined’ either,” I bite out and he looks affronted once more, in spite of my generous acknowledgement that I might have given him some reasons to distrust.
“You met Atargatis! You can’t tell me you don’t believe…” I cut him off mid-sentence. Feeling myself becoming angry. I don’t like to talk about my experience with the Goddess and I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up in a shouting match.
“It’s not about that! I’m not happy like this! Can’t you see that?” Now it is me who is imploring him. His sense of reason, which seemingly departed along with Atlas’ soul. His look quickly turns sullen as his eyes glass over, the frost within them creeping across his field of vision like a window pane.
“I thought you loved me.” His chiselled jaw bulges as he presses his lips, those same lips that could be so incredibly soft against the nape of my neck, into a cold hard line. A line incapable of caress.
“It’s not a question of that,” I realise that this is true. My mind spilling its thoughts out, untarnished, like the first draft of a poem onto a blank page.
“Then what?” We are both suspended. Hanging like the questions we ask in the water between us, still, facing off. Cutting each other, edging around the subject of our imminent destruction. We could both see it coming, but neither wanted to move.
“It’s about trust, letting me go and knowing I’ll come back. Not chaining me down with passionate possession and praying I won’t break free.”
“You could be a poet,” he quips, raising his chin, looking down over me in my youth and stupidity. How dare he. I think to myself. He took me away from everything I’ve ever known. He was the selfish one. He let me die and did nothing to save my human life. He let me be taken away from my mom, my sister. How dare he look at me like that! The venom of the sentiment crossing my mind shocks me. It is no longer the voice in the back of my mind implying such things. This is my voice. My anger. My hate. I recoil. Trying to calm myself.
“I’m trying to be honest,” I admit to him. Trying to retract my anemone like spikes. Trying to work through it, trying to reach a conclusion.
“Fine. What do you want then if not marriage?” He looks at me and I realise, I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who I am. I used to be Callie Pierce, San Diegan teenager. But now… now I was The vessel? Failed Goddess? Orion’s soulmate? The revelation strikes me and I feel ashamed of myself. I feel humiliation and weakness envelope me.
>
I can tell you what I am to the people of this city, what I am to the people who wanted to sacrifice me and leave me for dead. I can tell you what I am to my Goddess, and to Orion, but what am I to myself. Who am I?
“Maybe we need some time apart,” I hear myself say the words and know instantly that I’m craving to remove my constraints. To swim the oceans, to spread my wings. I want to fly. I want to become whoever the hell it is I’m supposed to be. Without Orion.
“You’re leaving me,” Orion turns away from me and I shake my head. Desperate for him still.
“No. I said time, a lot has happened. I’m not sure what I want. Who I am,” I move toward him, taking a stroke forward, closing the distance between us. For this to work, I need his patience. Unfortunately, I think that’s already worn far too thin.
“I think we both know that isn’t me,” he says it in a childish, self-pitying whimper. Oh for Goddess’ sake! After all this time. He still doesn’t know. I wonder, for a moment, if I can show him. Take him into my arms on my terms and kiss him in a way that will resonate with both my flittering body and my needy soul. I flick my tail, taking him by surprise, moving my hands up to his head and feeling my rage at his stubbornness rise. Something happens I don’t expect. Orion cries out, a harrowing, scorching scream that could shatter glass. He collapses.
“What the hell, Callie? Are you trying to kill me?! Do you hate me that much? Do I make you that unhappy?” He bursts out, his tongue an unholstered weapon, shooting vocal bullets of devastation with each word.
“What? No… I…” I reach out to touch him but he flinches away. I feel my insistence grow and I move closer to his slumped figure, touching him gingerly with one hand. As my skin touches his, I feel something pass to me as he grabs my hand hard. He tries to pull me toward him, tries to subdue me again, suddenly with an assault of his own, trying to possess my mouth with his tongue as he rises over me like a mountain, immovable, solid. I struggle as he grasps my upper arms in his palms, gripping me like he wants to shake sense into me. I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I repeat internally, almost screaming. I don’t want him to turn this into another overly enamoured cover up of the problems he’s been ignoring all these months. I try to say no but his lips are clutching mine. I’m stiff in the water, unmoving. I struggle but he holds me still. I’ve had enough.
“ENOUGH!” I scream out in a muffled exclamation against his lips. As the sound escapes, something else does too. I create a tidal wave of air, displacing Orion and knocking him back against the wall of our chamber with a dull crunch. He hits the crystal, smacking his head and collapsing against the floor below the crack he recently made with his fist.
“You…. You took my power,” he looks at me with a wicked grin on his face. Like he knows something I don’t.
“I…” I begin and turn, exiting and fleeing into the castle below. I hear him call after me with a laugh.
“What a surprise… You leave… like you always do! Well this time, don’t even think about coming back!” His words pain me, fear cresting within me, crashing down over me and drenching me. Leaving me sodden, naked, and cold.
ORION
“Well you handled that nicely,” The surly tones of Starlet reach me as her magenta length rises through the porthole, entering our… I mean my chamber.
“Go away Star,” I bite out. Why is she always around when I’m angry? My heart is pounding against the inside of my rib cage, longing to escape and follow Callie, but the throbbing of my spine is preventing me from moving. The impact of having my own power used against me still reverberating within my skull.
“I personally liked that ‘don’t even think about coming back’ add-on at the end there. Nice touch,” she moves over to the vanity made of jade glass and picks up Callie’s tiara, fingering the diamonds.
“I said go away.” I slump against the wall. Starlet perches on the vanity across from the wall and looks at me with a cocked brow.
“Unlike Callie, I don’t listen to every word you say with baited breath, Orion. I think you need to get over yourself.”
“She’ll come back. She always does,” I relinquish my own personal assurance, the one that lives in the back of my consciousness, making me feel safe.
“I think you’re over estimating the power of her ability to deal with your crap.” Starlet puts the tiara back on the vanity and shifts, crossing her arms.
“You don’t understand. She’s so difficult.” I crick my neck from left to right, rubbing the back of it half-heartedly.
“She’s a person, Orion. It’s not her job to do whatever you ask without question. That’s called slavery,” Starlet looks at me with her head tilted, running her fingers through her long white blonde hair and letting them snag.
“I know that.”
“Do you, though? Really? People feel so sorry for me…”
“No they don’t, where you getting that from?” I look at her surprised at the confession.
“You think I don’t see the pity in people’s eyes at every goddamn formal event? You think I’m imagining people avoiding me?” She looks at me seriously and I wonder. I guess I hadn’t noticed before, but maybe she was right, I had never seen her with the other mermaids.
“You don’t think that’s because you’re, you know…”
“A bitch?” She finishes with a smile and I laugh back with an almost cruel edge.
“Well… you can be,” I admit.
“Maybe I am a bitch… but the point is… I walk around with everyone pitying me for being alone. But it’s not so bad. I don’t have anyone to answer to but me.” I still don’t get what she’s insinuating.
“And this has what to do with me and Callie?”
“Oh come on, I wasn’t one of the two people involved in the argument and even I can guess what her issue is,” Starlet rolls her eyes at me and I wonder when Star and Callie became a team. I wonder if Callie is even aware of what Starlet is saying right now.
“This isn’t any of your business,” I remind her, rising up from the floor of the chamber. Straightening my spine is painful, but the pain quickly recedes as my accelerated healing begins.
“Yeah, well it will be my business when Callie takes your advice and doesn’t come back and you’re miserable for the rest of eternity. It’ll be all ‘poor me I’m so alone and brooding’ again. Not a good look on you by the way.” The words have an unexpected effect on me. I think back to those years of moving alone through the ocean. The emptiness. The touch of other women who were not and never would be her.
“She’ll come back,” I repeat.
“I wouldn’t be so sure. You’re caging her in, Orion. Freedom is probably looking pretty good right now.”
“I didn’t do anything of the sort,” I laugh, a kind of sneer at the implication that my love is anything but endearing.
“Seriously? Really? After everything that girl is telling you, you’re still not gonna listen?” Starlet looks at me, incredulous, as I turn to face the window that looks out over the city.
“I haven’t done anything wrong, Star,” I say the words, the truth in them assuring me I’m doing the right thing. Callie needs to know I won’t stand for her putting her own safety at risk. She means too much to me.
“You proposed to her with no warning in front of a room of people,” Starlet frowns at what I assume is her remembering the giant fiasco after Callie left me standing there.
“She wants to marry me, Star. She just doesn’t know it yet. She always does this. She always needs a little push. Then later she thanks me for it,” I nod and she frowns deeper still.
“She became a Queen for you yesterday. Took on a Kingdom at eighteen. What more do you want? I can’t see her getting any more committed than that.”
“She’s always known what the deal was. This bond… it’s forever. A ring doesn’t change anything,” I rationalise the situation, letting my sister’s words roll off me.
“Okay. You keep believing that,” she rises and mo
ves, tailfin swaying from side to side, reeking with feminine allure. The kind too obvious for even me, as her brother, to ignore.
She descends through the floor of the chamber and I move, wondering if I do, in fact, need some perspective. I look over to the clamshell bed and it beckons my weariness, like a pill for all my waking pain. I move the porthole lid closed and lock it, spinning the wheel so it’s as tight as it will go. I flick my tail, displacing the water around me and move, diving and collapsing onto the shell bed. I knock the prop holding the hood of the clam away with the end of my tailfin and let it close around me. Shutting me away in darkness, where my lids slowly droop, and I call back to me the argument in a detail crystal clear like tropical waters.
AZURE
Crustaceans crawl through the sand, laboured, slow, and pitiful in their existence. Something catches the corner of my eye, an aquamarine glimmer that shouldn’t be there, writhing, scurrying through the water to get away. I move around the edge of the surface scraper with its round walls that line the alley I am skulking in. I like this alley, it is comforting to me, after all the Occulta Mirum isn’t like Cryptopolis, there aren’t many dark spots where one can escape amongst the banal glimmer and the mundane sparkle of the surface world. I scratch against the sandstone of the building, leaving claw marks in my wake as I use the tower to leverage myself forwards, still encased in shadow like it’s a child’s blanket, comforting and safe as my tail lashes out behind me haphazardly.
I see Callie, swimming like her life depends on it, moving away from the Alcazar Oceania. What, is she taking off again? I’d heard about the scene in the throne room. My brother proposing. Well, good for her, saying no to that whole bullshit dog and pony show. I sneer internally. The idea of a forever bond with a man makes my inside furl and snarl like thorny vines, thirsty for blood, for death.
I move closer, deciding to follow her, stalk her like prey, good practice seeing as I haven’t had a good stalk in a while. My tail waves sensuously, undulating, shimmering black and electric blue. I see Callie bump into Saturnus, who is hurriedly leaving the building in which his study resides. He flinches back, red hair floating innocuous in the water around him, like she’s red hot and dangerous.
The Kiss That Saved Me (The Tidal Kiss Trilogy Book 2) Page 11
