Page 128 of Mate
“Did you give her your number, or did she just help herself to it?”
“The latter.”
Unsurprising. I look down at my toes. Study them for a minute. “Can I ask you not to tell her aboutthis?” I make a vaguely neurochemical-imbalance-shaped gesture. “She’d never let me live this down.”
Koen crosses his arms, stern. “I doubt someone who’s regularly having interspecies sex has a single toe to stand on. Besides, she rarely needs toaskto find out shit.”
He’s right. I just feel so . . . exposed. Wrung out.
“Why are you so ashamed of this, Serena?” He sounds genuinely confused.
“I don’t know.” I snort out a laugh. “Maybe it’s just easier to worry about what people are thinking than about . . . about the real shit.”
“Such as?”
“That my father killed your parents. And you killed mine.”
I can’t believe it all fits in exactly ten words. Our pasts, woven together. One— no,fourmore reasons we could never work. As though we needed them. They come with a garbled mess of questions that I haven’t even begun to wrangle free. Do I resent him? Does he hate me? Am I angry? How much of this is his fault? Should I carry my parents’ sins? Can I forgive? Can he? Is there anything to forgive here?
He’s just as stumped. Fiddling with these impossible thoughts. Gives me a stuck, resigned look and says, “Couple goals, am I right?”
I laugh. The low, rolling sound that slips out of him could be laughter, too. We regard each other like that, no judgment, no fear of being judged. I could live in this weird limbo for the next century.
“I would do it all over again,” he murmurs at last, eyes never letting go of mine. “Even knowing what it did to you. And for that, I’m sorrier than I’ll ever be.”
We are not Human.
His pain squeezes my chest. “I don’t want you to . . . If when you look at me you see Constantine, I don’t want you to— ”
“Serena.” He shakes his head. “When I say that I would do it all over again, I also mean that I would go through what he did all over again. If it brought me to you.”
It’s a lovely thought: that the mistakes of our parents could have as little impact on our relationship as a butterfly flapping its wings. Thatusis a choice we can make. That we might not be constantly running out of time.Toolovely, maybe.
I lift my fists. “Right or left?”
He snorts. “Fuck this losing game.”
“Do you really want to renounce one of two prizes, both of inestimable cash value— ”
He takes my left fist, gently peels my fingers back, and holds my eyes as he brings my palm to his mouth and—
“Ouch.”
“It’s what you get.” His lips brush against the soft bite he left there. I try not to shiver as he slides lower, to the mark on my inner wrist. His eyes do odd things as he inhales deeply.
“Killer,” he murmurs. “You smell . . .”
“Good? Bad? Musty? Like beignet?”
He lets go of my arm. Runs his tongue over his teeth. “Close. You smellclose.”
Ifeelclose, too. “You chose left. Therefore, you get a premium— ”
“Cut the crap.”
“Fine. I’m going to show you something. Come.”
He follows me to my bedroom, but when my hand wraps around the doorknob, he grips my wrist to stop me.
