“About last night?”
Crystal swallowed but her lack of reply answered his question all the same.
He didn’t comment on it. He didn’t push at all. In fact, he fell back into step beside her, his hand brushing her arm.
Crystal looked down at her feet as they walked, at the pair of sandals he’d surprised her with that morning in the cave. They were surprising comfortable and kept her feet dry.
She’d be lying if she said that a part of her wasn’t incredibly touched by his thoughtfulness, by his concern for her wellbeing. She wasn’t used to it, someone else watching out for her.
“Thank you again for the shoes, Cruxan,” she said, breaking the silence between them. She’d thanked him already, but she did really appreciate them and the effort he’d put into them. He must’ve worked all night on them, going without sleep. Again.
“You do not need to thank me,luxiva,” he murmured, which was what he’d replied with earlier that morning. If she didn’t know any better, she would think it made him shy. But a shy Cruxan? She couldn’t imagine that.
They fell back into silence and every time his arm brushed her side, it made her heart do strange things. She wondered if he could hear the way it flipped in her chest.
He broke the silence with something that she’d never expected him to ask.
“Will you tell me about Krane and Jir—Jron?” he tried, sounding out the strange name. It was even strange in English.
Crystal’s lips parted. “You remember that?”
“Tev, of course,” he said.
The way he said it, his voice all dark and deep, made her spine tingle. “Oh, um, they’re just these characters my sister and I made up when we were little. Like…imaginary friends, I guess.”
“Imaginary friends,” he repeated, rolling those words around on his tongue, his brow furrowed almost quizzically.
“Every kid I knew had some kind of imaginary friend,” she rushed out, a little embarrassed. “Didn’t you?”
“I…do not think I understand the concept,luxiva,” he murmured, though it washimwho now seemed a little embarrassed, as if his lack of knowledge shamed him.
“Did you ever, I don’t know, play around as a child? With your friends? With your sisters?”
“You mean like training?” he asked, frowning. “I would never fight my sisters.”
He’d grown up in a warrior culture. For all she knew, fighting had been his brand of fun.
“You would never pretend that you were a warrior, even when you were young?” she asked softly. Something about that made her sad.
“My destiny was always to be a warrior,” he replied, glancing over at her. “I did not need to pretend.”
“Right,” she said, her lips quirking. So…Cruxan and perhaps many other Luxirian children didn’t grow up imagining they were knights or police officer or fighting against zombies or making mud pies from anything they could find.
“Human offspring do this?” he asked next, slowly.
“Yes,” she said. “We were always making up something, imagining we were different, or in a different place, with different friends.”
“Like Krane and Jron,” he finished hesitantly for her.
Crystal smiled a little. “Yes, they were our goblin friends.”
She didn’t even want to try to explain goblins to him when he couldn’t understand using his imagination.
“It’s silly,” she murmured. “My sister and I made them up, slowly over time. We lived in a place called Washington and we lived surrounded by trees and nature. It was easy to imagine goblins or faeries or elves living in a place like that. It’s good to have an imagination, at least I think so.”
She glanced over at him, to find him watching her carefully. She couldn’t read his expression, but she got the impression that he simply liked hearing her talk. That she could be reading from a dictionary and he would never want her to stop.
That knowledge flustered her, made her belly flutter, and she quickly continued with, “My mom and my dad didn’t have the best relationship, you see. They would argue and fight a lot, so after school, my sister and I would never want to be in the house. We would go into the woods just beyond our backyard and imagine anything we wanted. It…it made me happy.”
