Page 64 of Leviathan's Song
I forced a small smile but it felt a little crooked. “Not necessarily. I think you just touched a few raw nerves.”
She sighed and dropped her head into her hands.
“I’m going to go try to talk with him, and I’ll contact you when I’ve figured something out. If you have any other ideas, maybe send them to me privately first, through a spectral?” I stood and eyed the stack of papers she’d pulled from her file. “May I take these?”
* * *
The more Imulled on it, the more the idea appealed to me. What if itwasn’tfake? What if we could just elope and skip all the nonsense of a drawn-out dating relationship and large public wedding and all the family drama? He was already bound to me, so I couldn’t see what the big deal was other than the length of time social norms dictated was appropriate for a relationship before marriage. The length of acceptable courting time was different among every race and society, anyway. Was that naive of me?
Probably.
Okay, yes.
But it would also fix the contract situation, and I couldn’t really find it in myself to be against the idea of a quick marriage to Levi... other than the fact that he clearly didn’t want it. I just needed to figure out why. Was it me? I didn’t think so, considering he said he didn’t regret being bound to me. Was it marriage in general? That would be… unfortunate. Maybe it really was the timing issue.
I thought back to our conversation on the picnic table—what felt like so long ago—and remembered he’d said he wanted someone who was just as trapped with him as he was with her. He’d acted like he was furious with the idea, but some niggling little feeling in my gut brought to mind a quote from some long dead human playwright, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Could it be the idea of afakemarriage that made him so mad?
Obviously, no one would assume marriage between people who had known each other only as long as we had would be prudent. It was too sudden. Too permanent.Foolish.But a small voice in the back of my mind kept reminding me we were already, in our own way, permanent. He was bound to me physically through his bond, and he’dsaidhe didn’t regret it. Was he having second thoughts?
I watched his face as he stared out the window on the train to Oar’s Rest, silently fuming. He hadn’t spoken as I’d joined him on the sidewalk or as we’d walked to the train station. Instead, he’d simply fallen into step beside me, like my own personal storm cloud. I gave him space, content to wait until we had some true privacy to tackle his anger and the sprite’s dilemma.
He ignored the waiters as they shuffled up and down the long aisles, pushing carts with food and drinks, his sullen expression twisting into a grimace as we pulled into the station. “Do you mind coming back to my house with me?” I asked, remembering what he’d said about his roommates’ preternatural hearing abilities.
His answer was a brief shake of his head as he shouldered the duffle I’d picked up from the porter station. I belatedly realized he was probably trying to spare the general public the effects of his anger-laced magic. Lord have mercy, I was slow sometimes.
I arrived at my door to find no more than the usual amount of harpy feathers on my front stoop and let us into my unit with a sigh. If there was anywhere in the world better than a person’s own space, I hadn’t found it, and after days of sleeping on the ground, it felt like a relief to be in my own home. Levi drifted in behind me as I kicked my boots into the hall closet and dumped my bag on the floor.
He cast his gaze around with a reluctance that seemed to ease as he took in the multitude of pillows and throw blankets and the odd plants tucked here and there. The townhouse was clean and modern, but comfortable, and I could tell it was more to his liking than he had expected in his current mood.
“This is nice,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “It fits you.” The Crown District was new and affluent, but at least it didn’t scream “old money” like my parent’s estate. My housewasnice, and I’d spent a lot of time making it cozy.
Levi carried my duffle up the stairs to my room for me, where I promptly breezed past him into my closet. I was wearing jeans today, which needed to be rectified immediately. Plus, I needed a minute away from his ire to clear my head. My closet was a generous sized walk-in perfect for housing my clothing addiction. I had planned to change into some simple loungewear, but as I stood there, an impish impulse had my hand hovering over a specific drawer in my highboy dresser.
I’d had a thing for negligees for the last few years. Not necessarily all lingerie per se—that was more of Sidney’s wheelhouse. But in the same way I tended to hoard decorative pillows and drape throw blankets across every cushioned surface, I leaned toward nightwear that was luxurious with a nice drape, although perhaps a little scandalous. It didn’t matter to me that I’d never dated or that it was just for me; I liked it, so I bought it and I wore it.
Sidney knew this about me, and one of her ways of teasing me was to buy me more and more frivolous ‘nightwear’ on every birthday. Not that I didn’t reciprocate with more and more ridiculous lingerie—the last set had included a g-string that was basically nothing more than a giant bow for her rear with a few pieces of floss to hold it on—but I had a feeling her purchases for me probably got more actual use.
I plucked her latest gift from the back of the drawer and glanced over my shoulder toward where Levi was still grumbling in my bedroom about the audacity of the mer, his magic whipping out like driving rain. I tried to hide a small smirk threatening to take over my face. He had his weapon… I had mine.
Changing clothes felt a little bit like suiting up for battle. We were going to hash this out tonight. However… going in ‘guns blazing’ might derail the entire conversation. I eyed a short, silk robe hanging nearby and pulled it on over my ‘sleepwear’. It fell to my upper thigh and covered my garment completely.
I took a steeling breath to gather myself and then padded silently from my closet. Levi was standing at my bedroom window, arms braced against the windowsill, his head hanging low as he scowled at something outside. His hair was a rumpled mess, like he’d had his hands in it just moments before, and backlit by the window as it was, it appeared like a glowing halo around his head.
“I’m going to assume you don’t make a habit of chewing out frazzled selkies,” I opened quietly.
He swung his angry glower toward me, but it disappeared in a moment of confusion as his eyes flickered over my robe before he shook off the distraction and focused on what I’d said. The anger didn’t return, but his eyes stayed hard. He swallowed thickly and stared through me for a moment, until I wasn’t entirely sure he was going to respond.
“She thinks she can use me.”
I contemplated this for a moment. “Explain.”
Levi ground his teeth and his eyes flashed as he worked to rein in his growing anger again. I felt a little bit like a mouse before a lion in the face of his burgeoning wrath, but I knew it wasn’t directed at me.
“The audacity of these people… thiscouncil...and their self-centered disregard for people’s lives… I can’t even put into words my absoluteoutrage.” He didn’t need to. It was written clearly in the stiff way he held his body and the slashing, angry movements of his hands. “They want a mer name on their project, even at the possible detriment of the project itself, at the cost of people’slivesif need be, so that they get the glory and the respect in the end. That they would useyou, use me, useus—ourrelationship…”
He stopped for a moment to rein himself in again, his breath sawing out of him as his jaw clenched. “I can’t stomach the thought that you would be trapped with me because of their meddling. It’s bad enough that you’re already forced into this… thisbond, with me following you around like some starving mongrel.”
“I don’t feel forced—”
