She sobbed until she felt as if she had cried all her tears out. Then she straightened up, wiped her face with a wet cloth, and looked in the mirror. A bleak-eyed woman with a puffy red face gazed back at her miserably.
“No more,” Cela said quietly to her reflection.
She just couldn’t do this. Living on scraps when she’d had a buffet. It only made her unhappy and caused dissatisfaction with all the other truly good things in her life. It was unfairto her, and it was unfair to Tyr. One of them had to change things.
No,she told herself in the mirror,call it what it is. This isn’t altruistic. It’s selfish.
I just can’t bear to continue scraping tiny bits of happiness from a well of despair. I spent most of my life like that; I only know it now that I have something to compare it to. If I let myself settle for a little, then I will never know what it’s like to have a lot.
She paused to listen for her griffin, but there was nothing but unhappy confusion. Her griffin didn’t like the choice she was making, but it didn’t like the other option either. The deepest, most instinctive part of herself had no insight to give her.
So she would simply have to do what she thought was best.
Cela took a deep, shaky breath, and went to pack.
TYR
Tyr joltedawake with the sun in his eyes. For a moment he was confused. He was naked in a tangle of blankets that smelled like Cela and sex. But the tattoo hadn’t activated to wake him up. It was something else. Cela ...
Where was Cela?
He raised himself on his elbows. He was lying in early morning sunshine on the back lawn. The remnants of his and Cela’s full-moon date night were all around him, but of Cela there was no sign.
This wasn’t entirely strange by itself. She could have gone inside to tend to the twins. Or maybe she was working today, although he’d thought she had taken the day off.
But he still had a nagging, unhappy sense that something was wrong. Tyr sat up. From this slightly better angle, he could faintly hear voices from the front of the house.
The idea of letting Cela go off to work after their night of frantic lovemaking felt wretched. It was bad enough that he’d slept through moonset and hadn’t even managed to get in a final kiss before daybreak. Tyr scrambled to his feet. There was no time to put on anything, even pants. He wrapped theblanket around himself and hurried barefoot around the corner of the house.
The sight that greeted him shouldn’t have felt so wrong. It was something he’d seen a few dozen times by now, Gaby’s car in the driveway and Gaby picking Cela up for work.
Except Cela wasn’t supposed to be working today, and she had one of the babies’ carriers in her hands, while Gaby was helping strap the other into the backseat.
“What’s going on?” Tyr asked.
Gaby jumped. Cela looked around with a miserable expression. “I hoped you’d stay asleep for just a little while longer,” she said in a small voice.
She was still tousled from sleep and sex, in clothes it looked like she’d hastily thrown on. Tyr stared at her. He couldn’t believe this was happening.
“Where are you going? Did I—is it?—?”
“What? No! It’s nothing you’ve done. It’s—” Her hand went automatically to the tattoo, covered by a sleeve of her shapeless sweater. She glanced at Gaby and took a few steps closer to Tyr. “Can we talk?”
They went up to the porch, while Gaby finished getting the twins settled in the back.
“I’m not leaving you,” Cela said quietly. “I just—need a little time away from being in the same house. Gaby’s got a guest house; it’s a little place on their farm where her mom used to stay before her mom married a guy and moved away. She said I could stay there for a while.”
“But I thought ...” Tyr was trying to keep the hurt bewilderment out of his voice, but he couldn’t help it. “You said you liked it here.”
“I do! I do. More than I can say.” She started to reach out for his face, then let her hand drop to her side. “It’s just so ... sohard. I think maybe we should see how it works if we’re not actually living in the same house. Maybe one night amonth will feel better if it’s the only time we see each other.”
Tyr unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “I—don’t think it’s going to feel better,” he said as calmly as he could, with the pivot-point of his world in front of him calmly talking about walking away.
“But we don’t know, do we?” Cela asked, almost desperately. “Maybe it’ll be easier for both of us. It might make the full moon nights more special.”
Easier? He was already feeling the separation like a hot iron in his chest. “The twins,” he said. Losing Cela’s kids felt like Paula and her kids all over again. “Are you going to forbid me to see them?”
“What? No! Of course not. Please come over any time you want.” Cela looked terribly sad, which was the only thing stopping him from—throwing himself at her feet, locking her in the house,something. She didn’t want this, and he could only imagine that her griffin was protesting just like his own. “I’m not leaving you, Tyr. I just need distance for a while.”
