His head hurt. His stomach churned again as he watched her go, white-hot shame flooding him as his memory of that nightreturned, echoing the sickening chant in his mind reminding him that she’d seen it.
At least… well, at least he didn’t have to worry about her agreeing to marry him for the wrong reasons now.
But any chance he had of winning her was still rendered to dust. How could she possibly fall in love with him after seeing him reduced to such pathetic depths? She’d seen just how weak he was with her own eyes. Any respect he might have had from her, in his character and physical traits, had been ripped out the second he’d let his father break the glass against his head.
And yet… he still loved her.
He’d still vowed to only marry a woman he loved who loved him. And if he didn’t marry soon, the scene the night before was only a shadow of what would come.
He didn’t have any solution. Was it truly hopeless?
The next night Nikias was on watch, Aimilia appeared again.
He eyed her as she took a seat next to him once more. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at her face directly for fear of meeting her eyes. What would he see in them?
“You remember when I was suspended from classes for a week my second year at the Academy?”
Nikias kept his gaze focused on the dark mass of trees stretching out ahead of them. Before she’d walked up, he’d been staring at it and thinking of nothing but what it would be like to walk in and never come back out. “You woke up in the middle of the night just to come out here and make small talk with me?”
He could still see her out of the corner of his eyes.
“Do you remember or were you too busy staring into Faustina’s eyes to remember anything about when we were all at the Academy together?”
Nikias pushed the vision of blonde hair and a soft, sweet face back down into the dirt where it belonged.
“You were attached at the hip to my brother; of course I remember.”
“Now was that so hard?”
He grunted in response.
“Did you ever hear why I was suspended?”
Nikias looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “No.”
“Too busy making eyes at Faustina to ask around?”
Why was Aimilia throwing Faustina and the fool he’d made of himself in his face?
He snapped, “I was too busy to concern myself with petty gossip.”
“Too busy with Faustina.”
He whipped around, mouth opening ready to snap when she faced him with a sharp smirk. He snapped his mouth shut and faced forward, pulling his knee up even closer. “Maybe.”
Because it would get a rise out of him.
Nikias was starting to think there was no one who knew him the way Aimilia did.
Aimilia laughed softly. “I’m teasing you, not insulting you. In the past, I was absolutely insulting you. But now…”
The way she trailed off made Nikias more desperate for her words than a fish for water.
“Now what?” Nikias whispered, but Aimilia had dropped her gaze to the dirt. She scuffed the edge of her sandal in it.
When she looked up, she said, “Anyway, I was suspended for fighting. I got into it with two of the girls on the command track with me.”
“Now I’m insulted,” Nikias muttered. “I thought I was the only one you picked fights with.”
