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I step backward, crushing our pipe cleaner cabin underfoot. Tears prick in my eyes, and my voice chokes. “Did you ever think maybe you aren’t the only one who wants to make things work with their one and only soulmate, even if it’s hard and we have things we need to heal from? Did you ever think that maybe you are worth wanting without any strings attached?”
“No.” He looks up at me, so sincerely it breaks my heart. “Never once, beautiful.”
I grip my hands in my skirt. My lips tremble. “Well…” A tear falls into the corner of my mouth. “You are.” I close my eyes and scrub at my cheeks. “But I can’t make you believe that any more than you can make me stop believing it.” It hurts to swallow. “So I guess we’re stuck.”
Genuine agony fills his voice. “How…how can I claim to love you if I entertain stealing you from everyone you love just so you can be with me? That isn’t love.”
Taking a deep breath, I march past him into the kitchen and flinch because when we left for my parents’ house, it was atrocious—just another one of those things that slipped through the cracks, like my oil change. Now, it’s spotless apart from the covered pot of pesto pasta on the stove.
The sight almost compels me to curse.
Refraining, I throw open the freezer door, and snatch an unopened tub of rocky road ice cream.
“You cleaned our kitchen!” I yell as I wrestle with the plastic on the container lid. Rudely, it doesn’t have a perforated line. Why doesn’t it have a perforated line? How dare it. I jerk a massive knife out of the silverware drawer, and a flicker of a butcher knife sticking out of a cutting board blinks behind my eyes.
I can’t catch the memory.
Which makes me angry. Er. It makes me angrier.
Ollie appears beneath the archway right as I hack into the side of the ice cream lid with my knife. Lurching back, he swears. “Brittny, be careful.”
I jab the blade in his direction as I rip the plastic wrap off. “Do not tell me what to do.”
He lifts his hands in defeat.
Trading my knife out for the smallest spoon I own—because it is better than all the rest—I plunge it into the ice cream, and I— I discover that my freezer is working.
I might cry.
I may already be crying.
“Why would things in the universe be set up like this?” My hand shakes above the slimmest indent in the solid block of ice cream. Next thing I know, I’m slipping to the floor with my back against the cabinets.
Hesitant, Ollie follows me down, pries the ice cream and spoon from my fingers, then digs a bite out for me.
My lashes flutter, damp, as I look between him and the offered morsel.
When I open my mouth, his face erupts crimson, and his body goes more frozen than the rocky road.
I huff. “Are you sure you’ve had romantic experience?”
“I…” He wets his lips and swallows. “No, I’m sure I’ve had sexual experience… Romantic is very new.”
“You are precious,” I grumble. “I like you. Why would the universe set things up like this where we can’t be happy together? Is some manner of drama required in a paranormal romance? How did Willow get over it?”
“Willoughby didn’t have to become fully fae. She’s Zy’s thrall. Her life is linked to him, so she did not have to forfeit her humanity in a ‘grand’ turning ceremony. Her time is paused where her humanity won’t ever erode. She will always be as she is.”
“Thrall…” I murmur. “Is that an ‘only one person’ thing? Or would your friend be wi—”
Ollie’s expression darkens fast enough I snap my mouth closed. A drop of ice cream melts off the spoon, and he whispers a curse as it hits the laminated flooring. “Sorry. That’s…” He exhales and sticks the spoon back in the container. “Becoming a vampire’s thrall involves some intimate actions that neither I nor he would be entirely comfortable with. And while it would stop your time, allowing you to keep your family and your humanity, it would not spare any children from mixed blood. We would watch our every child grow old and leave us. It would also open your mind to his perusal, and I’m uncertain how comfortable with that you would be.”
“Very un…” Hugging my knees, I say, “Is there nothing else that could work where I get to toe the line of both worlds and not lose our kids?”
“Were I an alpha, you would become my luna, and we would share the powers of that responsibility, allowing you even in your youth to control your glamour in the same way Zy does with some practice, but…”
“But you’re not an alpha. And I’m assuming it’s not a believe in yourself sort of situation.”
“I’m sorry.”
