“That’s not what I said, Celeste,” Joe told her patiently.
“You don’t need to say it,” the banshee clipped. “Your actions are screaming it. I’m supposed to accept my own ex as family? I’m supposed to be happy that he’ll now be all about my stepsister?”
“No one is saying that,” said Joe.
“But you don’t care how hard this is for me. No, don’t say you do. Don’t lie. If you really cared, your first reaction wouldn’t have been to congratulate them. You’d have at least been sensitive to how this would affect me.”
Joe flapped his arms in a helpless gesture. “What would you have us do, Celeste? Really? We can’t change this situation. We can’t make someone else be Piper’s anchor. Nor can we erase your past with Levi. We can only move forward.”
“As one big, happy family?” Celeste snorted. “You wouldn’t expect that of her if the situation was reversed. You always put her feelings before mine, and then you’re always so surprised when I point out that you love her more than you do me.”
Told you it would come, said Piper, her mind gently bumping Levi’s. The psychic contact eased his entity’s tension slightly. The demon found the banshee pathetic, but it worried her dramatics would eventually cause Whitney and Joe to back her.
Celeste’s eyes welled up, and she wrapped her arms around her body. “You always plead with me to try and get along with her. Do you really see that ever happening now?”
As the room temperature abruptly cooled, Levi looked to see that Piper’s eyes had bled to black.
Her demon glared at Celeste, who froze. “I cannot begin to tell you how much dealing with you bores me,” it told the banshee, making Levi’s demon chuckle. “I will say this only once. No machinations on your part will prevent the forming of the anchor bond. I would not allow it. She would not allow it. And as much as you wish to ignore it, he would not allow it. Throw petty tantrums if you must, but know they will achieve nothing.”
Pleased with the entity’s statement and the assertiveness with which it had spoken, Levi’s own demon lost every bit of its tension.
The moment Piper’s entity subsided, Levi announced, “Piper and I are leaving now.” Eating a meal with these people … yeah, that wouldn’t happen this evening. “We have somewhere to be.”
Celeste swiped at her tears and turned to her father. “Well you should go and again shake the hand of the man who doesn’t at all care how his selfish actions are going to affect the people in this room.”
“Selfish,” Levi echoed. “Hmm.” So she still does a lot of projecting?
Yep, Piper replied. “I’ll speak to you again soon,” she told her mother and Joe, who looked as though they’d prefer to ask her to stay but thought better of it.
In the car, Piper clicked on her seatbelt and said to Levi, “Well, welcome to the family. I’ll bet you’re so excited to be part of it.”
He switched on the engine and pulled out onto the road. “I like your mom and Joe. Celeste might think that acting like a drama queen makes this difficult for me, but it doesn’t. She’s easy to dismiss. Just a brat throwing a tantrum. It took me a while to see the real her, because we didn’t spend much time together, and she’s good at showing people what she thinks they want to see. I didn’t care enough to look any deeper or I would have seen how much more there was to her.”
“You didn’t care for her as deeply as she believes?”
“I didn’t care for her at all, Piper. I barely knew her.”
“The way she tells it, you were serious about her but struggle too much with commitment and so the two of you had to part ways.”
“I have no problem committing to anything. That said, I’ve never been in a serious relationship. I never met anyone I was serious about. But Larkin’s right when she says I walk into relationships with a closed mind and don’t make an effort to build something real. If I wasn’t that way, maybe I would have at some point found myself truly interested in someone. But after years and years of being given the ultimatum of ‘it’s me or your roles—choose,’ it became instinct to keep my relationships casual and not invest anything of myself into them.”
“You don’t expect them to last.”
“No. And they don’t. It’s usually me who gets dumped as opposed to doing the dumping. Can you guess why?”
“Because you don’t care enough to bother doing it yourself.”
He nodded. “And that was how it went down with Celeste. I don’t know if she truly believes I loved her or if she simply wants to believe it.”
Maybe it made Piper a bit of a bitch, but she was relieved to hear that he hadn’t loved Celeste. It smoothed over the jagged edges of Piper’s jealousy. Plus, she didn’t have to worry that he might later change his mind about reconciling with the banshee.