“It’s so dark. Everything in here—except for you.”
“Ah. I’m out of place.”
She shook her head slowly. “You’re better than this place.”
His face crumpled, and he looked down at his feet.
“What’s wrong?” She stepped closer.
“It’s nothing,” he said, but his voice was thick with emotion.
He flinched when her hand fell on his arm, yet when he looked up, his eyes were burning with lust. She swayed toward him, drawn like a moth to a flame by his intensity, but he took a step back and pivoted away from her. His glowing tail twitched with agitation behind him.
The rejection stung, but only for a moment. He was clearly grappling with something, and she had a feeling that it didn’t have anything to do with her. Or at least that she wasn’t at fault for it.
“Can we talk?” she asked.
“We are talking,” he replied, a nervous edge in his voice.
She huffed. “Yeah, I guess we are, but…”
Lights flickered on around them, illuminating the garden like a Christmas light show. Floating lanterns drifted along the path above their heads as tiny flickering lights lit up the trunks and branches of trees. The path itself glowed softly beneath their feet like UV-reactive paint under a black light.
She sat on a nearby bench carved from glowing white stone. A little brook ran past it, babbling over smooth, rounded rocks. She beckoned him to join her. After a moment’s hesitation, he did, sitting as far down on the opposite end as he could without falling over the edge.
“You’re acting weird, you know?” she said.
He cleared his throat but offered no defense.
“If it’s something I did…”
“It isn’t,” he said quickly. “I do not want you to think that. You are beyond reproach, Cordelia.”
She couldn’t help laughing at that, even if the reverence with which he said it made her feel breathless. “I can think of a fair number of people who would disagree with that assessment of me.”
“Then they are fools.”
She cast him a wry look. “How can you say things like that and treat me like I’m radioactive at the same time?”
His brows climbed, and he stammered. “I am not treating you like—I do not mean to—I only—” He buried his face in his hands, shoulders curling miserably. The green glow of his eyes spilled from between the seams of his fingers.
Something was holding him back. Shame, maybe? Regret? God knew she understood the feeling. After all, she’d been keeping her own skeletons deep in the back of her closet. She’d rebuffed all his attempts to get closer to her, to understand how she thought, so it only made sense that he had his guard up, too.
She couldn’t help him if he wouldn’t tell her what was eating at him, and she didn’t have the right to demand he open up if she wasn’t willing to do the same.
“The last guy I had feelings for died because of me,” she blurted.
His hands dropped, and he looked at her incredulously.
Her leg bobbed as she took a deep breath and prepared to gut herself for his benefit, hoping that some sense of quid pro quo might get him to open up. God, what was she doing? She hadn’t talked to anyone but her therapist about this, and then she’d only done it in desperation to get her damn job back. That had gone over like a car on fire; after she’d told the story and how she felt about it, that therapist had marked her down as too unstable. A liability. Was that what Rentir was going to walk away with, too?
The words stuck in her throat, and she swallowed thickly to clear it.
“I was the commander on a ship called theLeto,” she began to say, twisting her fingers in the extra fabric of her shirt. “I had worked my whole life for that command. I was almost thirty years old, fresh off my military service. God, I felt so wise and experienced. I had no idea.” She laughed bitterly, shoving an errant strand of hair from her face.
“I had dreamed of seeing space all my life, and when I landed command on theLeto, it was right there. So close I could reach out and touch it.” Even now, even tainted by the bitterness of what followed, she counted that year of training for the mission among the best of her life. “It was a small crew, and we were like family, you know? You stay in close quarters with people like that, people who really understand the heart of you, it’s impossible not to get attached. And Felix… Felix was the best of us.”
Rentir straightened, turning toward her with a singular focus. “Felix was the male you had feelings for?”
