Page 55 of Taken to Lemora
“Yeffa.” She laughs a little harder and tries to pry my fingers off of the table. I’m resistant. “Come on. Let’s get you up to your room before Raingar has a nervous breakdown.”
I shake my head, not sure how to answer as I lean against her, letting her take my weight. I’m sweating. And Istink. “What ohring torture is this?”
“Ah, it’s one of a kind.” She chuckles and kicks aside a foot belonging to a very large male asleep on his back on the floor.
“I stink.”
“Yeffa. But everyone else stinks more. I think Carvern pissed himself last lunar.”
“Who is Carvern?”
“This idiot,” she says, shoving a male roughly aside as we reach the stairs. He topples off of them, dead weight, and hits the ground face first.
I’ve just gotten the dry, dusty railing firm in my sweaty grip when I hear a booming voice slash through the space. “ESSMIRA, ARE YOU OKAY!”
Charana helps me turn, catching me when my foot slides off of the top stair. The soles of my feet are bare and sticky.
Raingar stands in front of an open door with the proprietor of the inn just behind him. She’s a Lemoran female with bright white horns and among the kindest dispositions I’ve encountered yet. She’s carrying a tray. There are two more Lemoran females with a huge tub suspended between them. Raingar’s got his arms laden with jugs and a large leather satchel and that’s when I spot Moreth in the back of the small cluster.
My stomach floods with fear and dread. “Are you…what is this? Are you taking me back…”
“Essmira…what? Nob! Nob nob nob!” I feel like there’s so much I’m not remembering, but I can’t focus.
I start to sweat even more profusely while even more violent chills ransack my body. I’ve never felt like this. I’ve been sick only a handful of times my entire life — Igmora and Tyto made sure of it — and never so miserably.
I lower my gaze to the floor and tighten my muscles, trying to clear my head and gather my thoughts and prepare for battle, if there’s going to be one — between Raingar and I, it seems there always is.
But…there isn’t.
Because Raingar stomps through the inn, several curses and pained cries going up when he steps directly onto creatures’ limbs, or uses his blocky feet to shove them aside. He unloads all of the things in his arms on the table where Charana once sat, and then his body drops hard onto the ground at my feet.
Thud. His palms face up, reminding me far too much of my position pose, and he looks up at me with a look of pure helplessness in his gaze. It startles me. I blink a little wider, nausea and delirium parting as a lucid memory slashes through my illness.Raingar dancing with me on the tables. Raingar tucking me into his chest and holding me close. Raingar telling me beautiful, soft things in the heat of the lunar.He said he’d try for me.
I’ll try for him, too. Did I tell him that?
“Essmira, I…” He shakes his head and then he does the unthinkable. He tilts forward, bending so that his horns graze the floor right at my bare toes, some brown, some red. “Forgive me, miriga. Forgive me.”
My shaky legs finally give out and Charana isn’t quick enough to hold me up. I plop down onto the floor directly in front of Raingar, close enough to reach out and touch his horns. I lift a hand. Everything else falls away. The entire room. Everyone in it but us.
I concentrate the best that I can as I bring just my middle, longest finger to Raingar’s left horn. I stroke it from the white tip to the black base. It brings me closer to Raingar, so close I’m leaning over him. So close, I can see his rough skin ripple and smell lobba and sunshine on his skin. He shakes once, with force, before tipping his face up to meet my gaze. He looks so hesitant and unsure, a little afraid.
I lick my lips. He looks at my mouth. He licks his lips. I focus on his.
And then I whisper, “There is nothing to forgive.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“It is. Before I got to Winter’s End, I’d already forgiven you.”
The shock on Raingar’s face is clear enough to make me snort and laugh and hiccup, but the abrupt movement makes my stomach lurch up into my throat. I try to back away as bile pitches and churns, but Raingar comes forward.
I hold up my hand and back up onto the lowest stair, but Raingar keeps coming forward, and closer, and then…it’s all too late. A violent surge of nausea hits me and I’m sick all over my mate.
I choke on sick and then I heave again, giving everything in my stomach up…all over his lap. Raingar, with bile all over his knees and chunks of…I’m too horrified to even think of what…staining his pants, bursts into wild ruckus laughter. It doesn’t take long for Charana to laugh…or for the whole inn to laugh with her.
Raingar stands and I hear a male somewhere shout, “Wouldn’t want to piss off that female!” Another chorus of laughter goes up and I’m horrified and so embarrassed I could die — that is, if the lobba doesn’t do the job first.
“Don’t worry, I think I’ve learned my lesson,” Raingar quips, returning to my side with a bucket and a damp rag. He sets the former underneath me while he presses the cool cloth to my forehead and then the back of my neck.
