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He was right.
He was completely, utterly right.
And I suddenly felt stupidly, ridiculously guilty for judging him so harshly when I honestly had no idea what he had experienced. We had spoken a little bit about it earlier, and he’d told me that he had struggled. That his life had been difficult.
I hated that I, of all people, hadn’t listened. Or at least, hadn’t listen closely enough to let it change the way I looked at him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t apologize to me; I’m your mate,” he said simply.
“If we’re really going to be stuck together forever, I think that’s more of a reason to apologize to you. Not less.”
He laughed out loud, neither agreeing or disagreeing with me.
“Well, I’m sorry for judging you. For most of my life, making snap judgments kept me alive. They weren’t always accurate, but it’s better to be safe than to put yourself at risk. Or at least, it used to be. I’m still trying to figure everything out, now that I’m here and things are so different. When I get nervous, I get defensive.”
His lips stretched in a wide grin. “I’ve noticed.”
I smacked him lightly on the arm with the back of my hand, and he laughed.
We finished cooking, and then sat down to eat together. It was strange, but good strange.
Chapter5
“So what didyou do for fun, when you were bored as the king?” I asked Quake, leaning up against the stone wall. We were sitting on the floor again, since I’d roast any furniture we tried to make ourselves at home on. The pasta had a few herbs and seasonings in it this time, and I was pretty sure I’d found a new obsession.
“The last few years, I spent a lot of time helping Storm with Dissiri,” he said. “It was nice to be useful. I like children, a lot. Before that, I’d spend most of my time traveling over our lands, patching up cracks. With the water, wind, and fire running as rampant as they do here, there’s always something to fix. But when you’ve been everywhere, it all starts to seem the same.”
Damn.
I didn’t want to relate with him, or understand him, but I got what he was saying. It actually sounded pretty reasonable to me.
“You’re not going to ask me to have a kid, are you?” I checked.
He barked out a laugh. “I know your answer already, so no.”
My lips curved upward.
I’d seen Quake interact with Dove enough to know that he would be a kick-ass dad. Not the drunk, abusive one I’d had before he got himself shot and landed me in foster care; the overprotective kind who screamed their kid’s name at football games, and made pancakes, and took them on vacations just because they wanted them to see new places and experience new things.
“What did you do for fun?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I liked to read. I was actually a librarian—and I ran social media accounts, to talk about books. It was easier to live in fantasy worlds than in my own.”
“What’s a social media account?”
Oof, that was hard to explain.
I gave my best effort at detailing it, and he nodded thoughtfully. Whether or not he’d really figured it out was up in the air, but he had at least tried to understand.
“So you lived and breathed books,” he said.
“Yep.”
“And yet, you were disappointed to come here? Angry, even?”
He wasn’t judging me, I didn’t think. He just sounded curious.
