33: AINSLEY
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“I told you. I’m not interested in having this conversation with you,” Luke seiches.
I pause at the open door to my room wrapped in a towel. I spent a good portion of dinner gagging from the smell of gross armpits. Mine. They were definitely mine. A bird bath wasn’t going to do salty balls all to abate it either, so I headed straight for the showers.
Now I’m stuck creeping outside my room, afraid to interrupt whatever the heck is happening in there. Though, if I’m being entirely honest, I’m more than a little curious what’s got White Horse riled up.
“Well, I’m interested in having it with you,” they backfill.
“And just like everything else Esha wants, she automatically expects to get it,” he splashes.
Ah, Esha. Fun times.
“Not automatically.”
“Fine,” he deadwaters. “You want to have this conversation? Then you’re going to do a lot of listening because I’m all done hearing anything you have to say on the subject.”
“That doesn’t sound like a conversation,” she dribbles. “Sounds more like a speech.”
“Do you want the speech, or do you want silence? Because I’ve been peeling the silence, and I’m happy to go back to that.”
I want the speech. Choose the speech, Esha!
She plunges a sigh. “Give me the speech then.”
And here I am with no popcorn.
“I forgive you,” he foams, and the way he says it makes my heart hurt for him. “I gave up my fire spark for you. I gave up the dark for you. I asked you for one thing. One. Simple. Swashing. Thing. The only thing that mattered to me. I gave you everything else. All my wants. All my hopes. All my dreams. I wrapped them around you. All you had to do was say the word, Esha. One single word. No…”
He pauses, taking a breath to steady his ship. “All you had to say was no because you knew that given the choice I’d choose you over even that one thing. I’d already proven that to you time and again. But you didn’t say no. Instead, you made a promise to be my sheath, and I trusted you.
“Then you went ahead and chose to be a wielder anyway after I’d already done it, knowing there was no trawling way I could fix what you’d broken between us, no way to go back. All so you could have what you wanted right then. You could’ve just waited, and you would’ve had it anyway.”
“I forgive you,” he scuppers. “I let myself get so mixed up in the idea we were meant for Synergy I was blind to anything else. That’s on me. Not you. Something’s changed in me. I understand the difference now. The way I feel about…” He stops, choosing his words more carefully. “I’m pretty sure love forms Synergy, not the other way around. It’s not something we’re meant for. It’s something we make.”
Blitz me. Those are my words. He really listened to me. My stomach does a weird flip, and my heart misfires.
“The reality is, even if I could change my Polarity now, even if I wanted to, I still wouldn’t want you. What we had wasn’t love. I know that now. What we had was me constantly giving you everything I had to give, yet it was never enough. And that’s okay. It’s okay I wasn’t enough for you. My choices were on me. I chose to give you that power over me. I chose to trust you. And now, I’m choosing to forgive you and moving on with my life.”
“Who. Is. She?” Esha flushes, and I don’t understand how that’s her takeaway from his glorious speech. Though, now that she’s said it I’m starting to wonder myself.
Luke’s voice hits a low register I’ve never heard before. Not a yell. Much darker than that. An even tone laced with so much brine it freezes me still in place. “If you’re actually dumb enough to try your lame crap with her, I’ll stand back and watch like a smug scut as she ignites every cell in your body with the force of her fire spark. And once that blaze has scorched through your bones, leaving nothing but a trash pile of ash, I’ll scoop it into the dumpster for her so she doesn’t have to soil her beautiful darn hands by touching you. Because that’s all you are to me now, Esha. A heaping pile of ash trash. You’re nothing.”
“Oh my light,” she drips, clueing in. “I thought that trash kiss was just to get me to come here. You can’t be serious. She won’t ever care about you. Not like I did.”
“She’s not wrong,” Keira bubbles from across the room, and I’m suddenly jealous to be standing in the hall when I could’ve had front row seats to this epic crap shoot. They probably have popcorn. Pyroclastic punks.
“You’re nothing but a hot pile of garbage that uses men until you’ve burned out all the good in them,” Esha squirts.
“There’s no need to be jealous, Esha,” Keira pops. “There’s room enough over here for you too. Maybe I can even thaw out that frigid flapper of yours.”
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“I’m going to fill you with so much water it’ll wash the fire out of you for good,” Esha clogs.
“Stay the heck away from her,” Luke sprays. “That’s the one warning you’ll get.”
If Esha wants to play some war games, I’m down for that. It’s best she learns that straight away. I’m protective of Keira, so it only makes sense to ensure my alliance is evident. I stroll into the room with nothing but my towel and a bright smile, damp hair cascading over my bare shoulders like a waterfall dripping with promise.
“Oh hey,” I clip, casual as anything. “We have company?”
I walk nonchalantly over to the communal bed at the left of the room and promptly drop my towel to the floor, leaving my bare butt pointing right at Luke and Esha. The volcano suppresses their laughter like champs.
I turn suddenly, giving Luke and Esha a full view of my bullets and powder keg while directing my next question to Luke. “Are you bringing a guest to drink from my watering hole?”
Aspen buries his face in the pillow to keep from laughing.
“The more the merrier,” Maverick rumbles.
Esha swirlies her eyes to Luke, who’s looking at me with his mouth hanging open and something in his eyes that makes me consider blushing for the first time in my freaking life. If I’m not careful, and if I’m really, really lucky, I might be getting more than an ice dagger to the powder keg, courtesy of Esha. She gasps, then groans indignantly, before scudding out of the room. I’ve seen that move before. Her and White Horse are scud buds.
After a quiet minute, we all burst into ferocious laughter. Except Luke. Luke’s still having a hard time closing his mouth, and I, maybe or maybe not, haven’t rushed to retrieve my towel for that very reason.
“We’ve got an empty water slot. Are you coming over or what?” Keira asks Luke, trying to wipe the smile from her face but misfiring gloriously.
Luke throws his Sparklet at the wall, cracking the screen down the middle. He scuds out too. Big blitzing shocker.
“Guess not,” Keira crackles.
“Ainsley,” Aspen outgasses.
“Yeah?” I fire back.
“My brain knows you don’t care you’re naked, and technically my brain gets the message loud and clear, but you’re probably going to want to cover up in the next few minutes because my tephra doesn’t speak the same language as my brain.”
I brrrt a laugh and reach down for my towel.
“Let’s play hide and seek with it,” Keira smoulders.
I drop the privacy curtain for them. Aspen and Maverick extend shields to lock them in their little love cave. I tug on a pair of pyjama pants and a tank top, pausing by my bed while I consider what to do.
I can tell I’m running heavy as engorged balls on water again. I always run high around Luke, like my spark knows what a thirsty tick he is and wants nothing more than to be drank by him. Something tells me after that Esha encounter he needs my water spark just as much as it needs him.
I’m tired of our little bedtime game, him resisting, me insisting, so despite knowing what a foul mood he’s in, I drop into his bed, permission to board be damned.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
When he comes back, he stands in front of my bed for a long time, long enough I start to doubt my resolve about this being a good idea. I didn’t wait for his ‘giddy-the-heck-up’. I’m just here in his bed of my own accord. It’s a bold move. Assumptive. Maybe he’s going to crawl into my empty bed himself to avoid coming to bed with me.
But before I can completely lose my nerve, he strips down to his boxer briefs and slides into his bed beside me. I keep my eyes closed and pretend to be asleep. We lay like that for a few minutes, side by side, before he slides his arm under me to curl me around so I’m facing him on my side. He reaches his free hand forward and takes hold of my left arm, pulling it to rest on his chest with my palm against the right side of his neck. My water spark pours into him in a soothing stream. No dang rapids. Not even ripples. Just a calm flow meant to ease the tension from his body.
We lay in silence for a while, but I’m having a hard time really falling asleep. There are too many whirring thoughts in my head. I might actually have to talk to him about this messed up situation between us. We’ve somehow avoided a direct discussion about it for a month. I knew the silence couldn’t last. Every day I’ve been waiting for it to break, wondering how it would break. Would it be with a whisper or a freaking war cry?
I know sleep sharing is normal, and it’s largely encouraged. My implosion is a major safety concern. Staying close to a wielder is an added layer of protection for me and subsequently everyone at the academy. It’s why they assign rooms the way they do, why they allow wielders to hunt and take the spark from charges. It’s just a necessary evil. It can’t mean anything more than that horsecrap, can it?
As though he senses my agitation, Luke pulls me even closer, tugging me toward him so my thigh curls around his, more intertwined than we normally are while we’re awake. My water spark rushes out to meet where my foot connects with his shin. After another few minutes, he ebbs a satisfied sigh. His relief hits me like a tidal wave, washing away all my worried thoughts and replacing them with something else.
Now that we’ve ended the old game, and our future sleeping arrangements are firmed, I want to play a new game, a far more dangerous one I hadn’t even considered as a possibility until he looked at me like a piece of meat he wanted to strip from the bone with his teeth. He’d probably lick that bone and suck out the marrow too.
Game.
Freaking.
On.
I slide my thigh higher, eliminating every bit of space between us. My hot cylinder presses on his thigh through my pyjama pants.
He tenses under me. “Stop,” he whirlpools.
“Stop what?” I quickfire, looking up from his chest into eyes bearing down on me so hard a shudder quakes through my powder keg. I rapidfire my eyelashes at him like a squib, feigning innocence.
“You know what,” he backwashes, but I reckon I have him when his eye ripples.
“This?” I ask sweetly, shifting my thigh again and grinding against him with purpose while I stare him directly in the eye.
His blue rings and white flecks darken, and his hand closes into a knot at my back. I’m not really sure what he’s going to do to me, but the deepest part of my pleasure palace wants to find out how he might punish me for pushing him this way. I cock a brow and wait. Your freaking move, White Horse.
He grunts his annoyance before manhandling me back into our standard position. I do try to fight it, but he’s strong as heck and wins before I can even break a limb free in protest. Once I’m curled up at his side, and my palm is resting against his neck with my thigh over his in what he deems is an acceptable distance from his no wake zone, he uses his right hand to restrain my thigh and keep that slug from misbehaving again. His other arm slides around my back as it always does, keeping me close, though admittedly not as close as I want to be.
I might’ve lost this round, but we’ve only just started the game, so maybe it won’t hurt anything to play it for a while before I beat him. I’ll win anyway. I always freaking win.