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Saying it like that made it sound like there might be room for more than one in my heart.
I didn’t think there would be.
“Yeah,” I breathed—and only barely remembered not to tell her his name.
She reached back and flipped open her pantry cabinet door, so I could see her poster, before holding her hand out beneath it like she was a game show presenter. “You know what this says?”
I couldn’t see any words on it, so I shook my head.
“It says live the life of your McDreams.”
I pretended to be serious for a minute. “Is that like a new thing on the McDonald’s dessert menu?”
“Oh, fuck you,” she said with a laugh, and I dodged her throwing a towel at me, before heading back down the hall. “I recommend nozzle setting number four!” she called after me, and I turned bright red, hoping like hell that Marcus hadn’t heard her.
I could tell Cepharius was waiting for me by the time I got into my room.
I could feel the sensation of his presence in my mind slowly growing as I neared, like I was easing into the world’s most perfect bath.
“Hi,” I told him, waving at him from the door as I came in. I moved to stand in front of the window, and wondered if I could ask Marcus about getting his help setting up a curtain situation if this conversation went badly.
“Are you full?” he asked solicitously.
“Yeah,” I said, and then we were both there, waiting for the other to take the lead.
What was it Donna had said, about diving into the awkward?
“I know I’m a human—and you’re a kraken,” I started off, at the same time he did.
“How did you get your scars?”
Him asking that totally derailed me. It meant that he’d seen me the prior night—or he’d seen me looking at them in a mirror in my mind, which was the same kind of peeping-Tom thing.
“You saw me! You lied!”
Ceph was undeterred. “There was no point in telling you the truth then, but now there is. Are you of your species’ breeding age?”
I took a step back as though he’d stabbed me, and my hands flew across my chest to rest on their opposite shoulders, trying to protect me, too little too late.
“Are you asking me because I don’t have breasts?” I managed to keep the quaver out of my thoughts, but my eyes were filling up with tears.
I wasn’t prepared to have this conversation—I’d assumed I’d be with Grant up until about seventy-two hours ago. I didn’t know how to talk about my surgery with strangers.
“No,” he answered. “I’m asking you because my knowledge of human breeding cycles is limited, and I would like to court you—but only if it is appropriate.”
I thought I felt my heart stop.
“Are you all right, Elle?” he asked, and I nodded, so he continued. “You have hurt, and I have hurt. Let us not hurt, anymore, together.”
I put a hand to my mouth, half a second away from sobbing. The thought of having a relationship with a kraken was insane—but then so were all of the events that’d led me here, and I was 99.99 percent sure there was a spaceship at the bottom of the ocean less than a mile away.
So why the hell not?
Especially when it felt so right?
“Okay,” I whispered, both out loud and with my mind.
“Yes?” he repeated, as though he hadn’t heard me, though I could feel his elation building. “I can court you?”
