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I bit my lip for a moment. When I finally released it, I said, “You weren’t bringing those memories back. They suck, but they do that without your help. I never thought you were going to hurt me. I fought with you, because I was terrified of the alternative. I still am, honestly.”
There was a long, long moment of silence between us.
I was worried he would be angry with me.
“Well, that makes me feel much better about everything,” Quake—Odin—finally said.
My lips curved upward, just slightly. “Does it?”
“Yep.”
He left it at that.
And I did too.
At least, for a minute. “I still don’t want to be mates. I’m not ready to be anyone’s wife,” I finally warned him, still laying on the ground and staring up at the stone ceiling above me.
“Well, you’re my mate whether you want it or not. Fate makes that decision, not us. I’m uncertain what you mean entirely by wife, but the only people who get to decide what it means for us to be mates, is us.”
His words surprised me.
They surprised me a lot.
“You haven’t heard the other girls talking about husbands and wives?” I asked him.
“I’ve been lost to my magic for a long time. And besides, I’ve been required to ignore them. Remember?”
I snorted at the reminder.
That part of their culture was so damn obnoxious.
Men could only talk directly to women that were either fully mated or unattached. It was considered a challenge for a man to talk to a woman who was involved with another guy.
“I remember. You must’ve heard some things, though.”
He made a noncommittal noise. “A wife is just a mated man’s female, from what I know.”
“That’s not wrong. But basically, a lot of women are expected to take care of their men when they get married. A lot of human men are so damn lazy. In most of the foster homes I lived in, a woman’s husband would just sit on his ass when he got home from work, and watch TV while his wife cooked for him, and cleaned up for him, and did the laundry for him. Even if she’d worked just as long as him, he expected her to do everything for him.”
Quake snorted. “Those males sound like a waste of space.”
I laughed. “They kind of are.”
“You can’t seriously believe that I’ll ever become that kind of mate, Margo. Even if it was in my nature—which it isn’t—I have too much magic to live that kind of life. I could spend all day patching cracks in the damn world, and I’d still have power thrumming in my veins, coursing through my skin, pushing me to do more. To see more. To live more.”
“Damn. That sounds… intense.”
“It is. Sex is supposed to be an effective way to dissipate that magic, which is another reason I’ve been looking for a mate for so long.”
Oh.
My defenses rose. “If that’s your way of—”
“That’s my way of telling you why I’ll never be one of your lazy human men, Margo. Nothing more.” His voice was firm. “Should we ever have sex, it will be because you can no longer resist the urge to feel me inside you. Not because my magic is annoying me.”
A laugh escaped me. “Alright, then.”
My stomach chose that moment to growl.
