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“Pissed that I was outed and have been getting harassed on the daily?” I suggest.
Margot nods. “Yeah. Let’s call Xavian. Have him pick you up. I’ll go smooth things over with the team.”
My heart gives a little flutter in my chest when she suggests calling Xavian. I’m not going to lie … I really missed him tonight. But at the same time, if he were here, I think things would have gone down differently. Very differently. As in,baddifferently. At least Margot and I able to come up with an actionable plan.
For the first time in years, I actually feel … lighter. More hopeful. Like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to keep living my life tucked away in the closet.
“Oh, but Kal?” Margot calls to me as she’s walking past the valet podium. “No hooking up with the bodyguard. He’s cute, but we’d have to fire him. Remember that.”
My heart drops into my stomach. Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know.
26XAVIAN
When Aiken and I pick up Kallista, I can’t help but notice she seems brighter. More radiant too, as she slides into the back of our jammer and chirps a cheerful hello. Okay, not that I’m complaining about this change in demeanor, because if she’s happy, I’m happy, but I want to know what did it. So I can replicate it, of course.
Kal even goes so far as to lean forward in her seat and tug on the end of my ponytail. “Hey, can you turn on the A/C? It’s hot as balls back here.”
Aiken lets out a whoop of laughter, but all I can do is stare at her for a few seconds before I can recover.
“You have a dirty mouth, you know that, princess?” I say, then fiddle with the air conditioning so it’s nothot as ballsin here anymore. But no matter how cold I set it, the damn jammer won’t maintain a comfortable temperature. It was manufactured in Camio, a planet of constant rain and wind. It wasn’t meant for the sizzling heat of Zenos. There’s a chance I might’ve been overselling the jammer’s capabilities to Margot when I said it was the fastest on Terra. The weather is definitely going to slow us down.
Kallista answers my jab with a pretty laugh, and we zip into the air to head back to her hotel.
“I don’t want to go to the hotel,” she says suddenly. “I have some time before I’m expected back in my room. Can we find a secluded beach somewhere, or something?”
This girl. Always changing plans on a dime, always expecting everyone to drop everything for her. And then there’s me, the fool who doesn’t mind that she gets a new idea in her head every thirty seconds, who would be more than happy to cart her off to a secluded beach. It’s been too long since I’ve stepped foot on one, too. Not since my last day with the team.
My heart lurches in my chest at the painful memory. I should be over it by now, but I’m not. I’m ashamed that it’s left such a deep scar on my heart, because I should be better than this, right? Should be healed.
Aiken looks at me in question, and I nod. “We can try, but I don’t know this planet.”
We pull up a map on the jammer’s interface window, and I mutter directions into it, hoping that I used the correct words to get me some decent leads. I’ve always been terrible at searching for things on the internet, even with A.I. assistance.
A cheerful ping sounds, and a picture of a beach only half a mile away pops up.
“Analysis in progress. Please wait while I gather information for you,” the A.I. says in a pleasant female voice. Turns out the beach is open to the public and it’s “not at all busy.” I hope that means there’s no one else there.
Aiken drops me and Kallista off at the beach, and Kallista frowns when she realizes the Gorcian is leaving us behind. “Oh … doesn’t he want to come with us?” she asks.
“He did, but I didn’t want him to make you feel awkward or that you had to be in show mode with a fan, so I asked him to give us some space. He’s off to find a club to go drown himself in— Don’t worry, he’ll come back when I call him,” I say as I slide my hands into my pockets.
We walk side by side toward the white sandy path where the beach begins. Verdant, sweet-smelling trees studded with leafy pink and purple flowers sway in the breeze, and the stars overhead twinkle like red and purple festival lights. This part of the galaxy has the most stunning set of stars I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of them.
“Drown himself in what?” Kal asks, keeping her gaze firmly ahead on the ocean waves.
“Women. Drinks.” I shrug. “But mostly women.”
She chuckles, and my breath catches in my throat. Every time. Every time she laughs or smiles, something inside my body melts. I can’t help it, which is annoying, because it makes doing my job while remaining a professional that much harder. She takes a seat in the cool sand, and I sit down beside her.
“This part of the galaxy is stunning,” I say, looking up at the stars. A few meteors fly overhead. This view never gets old. “Growing up on Terra, we had so much light pollution, you couldn’t make out anything beyond Venus.”
“Luna wasn’t much better,” she murmurs. The waves kissing the shore is the only sound we can hear. It’s different, being somewhere so blissfully quiet. The cacophony of sounds on Terra—mostly from the jammers, jets, hover buses, and other modern “conveniences” of machines—was unbearable. Couldn’t even hear myself think unless I was down in the water, twenty feet below the surface. The ocean was the only place I ever truly felt calm.
“We had the view of the stars,” she continues, “but it was cold. So, so cold. And it was mostly just the lonely void of space staring back at me. I had this bubble window in my bedroom, over my bed. And every night before I fell asleep, the last thing I’d see was the blackness of space.”
The way she tells her story makes the situation sound … bleak and depressing. I frown when I look down at her and notice goosebumps forming on her bare arms. She’s in a shiny peach gown, which makes her ass look amazing, but at this time of night, she’s got to be freezing. Without thinking, I drape my arm around her to share my body heat with her. She goes completely rigid beside me.
“Shit. Sorry,” I say, snatching my arm away. “I shouldn’t … that was stupid of me.”
