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“What is the emperor’s real name?” he said.
I thought long and hard and pretended I was going to answer a couple of times before shaking my head.
“I don’t know!” I said.
Cleb gasped and looked from me to Waev and back again.
“You must know!” he said.
“I promise you, I don’t,” I said.
He told me, and it sounded so foreign I couldn’t have repeated it back to him if he asked.
“Wow,” I said. “You must be very clever to know something like that. Say it again.”
He did, and I feigned my astonishment.
Waev smiled but pretended not to.
“I’ll leave you two to it,” he said. “I’m afraid I know all the answers to these questions and I might accidentally reveal them.”
He had a better sense of humor than I expected for a stiff head of the household. He also had a good sense of a developing relationship. He was my crutch when it came to being with Cleb. Now we were alone and I got to see if he would continue to trust me without his friends nearby.
Cleb sprayed the flowers with a liquid in a bottle. The flowers made a sucking noise and reached out for him with their leaves and petals. Okay, now I was astonished. They had actual living flowers on this planet?
“Ask me another one,” I said to Cleb.
We played like that for a while. We moved across various topics fast and it helped color in the kind of people these Titans were. Cleb focused more on his toys and his desire to show them to me.
“I promise, I will come look at your toys later,” I said.
“Okay!” Cleb said with a beaming grin.
And when he started asking me about games Titan kids usually played together, his interest turned to the games we had on Earth. I told him about Tag and he was hooked.
“That’s it?” he said. “You just chase each other?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “You can add extra rules if you want, but mostly it’s trying to catch each other.”
“But it’s so simple! That can’t be fun!”
“Wanna bet?” I said, putting my watering can down.
He squealed as he took off. When I caught him, I ran my hands under his arms and across his belly. He squealed with delight and excitement. Then I turned around and ran.
“Now you catch me!” I said.
We chased each other for twenty minutes before we ran into his uncle and his smoldering frown.
Cleb wasn’t intimidated by him at all, but I was. I don’t know how anyone couldn’t be affected by that sizzling glare.
Maybe it was the argumentative streak in me, but I wanted to tear him down and make him drop to his knees and beg for mercy…
Or maybe that was how every girl reacted in his presence. It was clear half the female staff couldn’t keep their eyes off him. He was tall and broad across the chest but he was all business and without mirth, as if God forgot to add humor to the mix.
No… I sensed that wasn’t quite right.
In his purple haze eyes, I saw a spark, something not too dissimilar from Cleb, a mischievous streak he kept buried deep down.
