Cal considered her proposal for several long moments before he shook his head. “No.”
“No?”
“No, I don’t just want to see you occasionally,” he confirmed, suddenly certain he didn’t want to let Elise out of his sight. Who knew what would happen? She could decide he wasn’t worth the trouble, or slip away as soon as she had what she wanted. He couldn’t allow that. He wouldn’t. “I want to know what it’s like to be with someone all the time,” he insisted. “I’ve never had that.”
“You’ve never lived with someone else?” A curious look of sympathy settled on her features. “Do you have a home, Cal?”
It was his turn to be confused. “Yes, the fog.” He gestured over his shoulder, to the rolling waves and distant, twinkling skyline. “I drift.”
The closest he’d ever come to having a physical home was the Aerie, but even he knew it barely counted. The acolytes kept him in isolation for the first year after his creation, only allowing him companionship when it was intended to indoctrinate him into their cult. In the second year, the elves discovered his presence in their city and took custody of him. He wouldn’t say the cell block beneath the Tower was his home either. Considering he escaped their dungeon and spent the next one hundred and thirty-seven years dodging Thaddeus II’s increasingly aggressive attempts to recapture him, he doubted she would count it, either.
Looking at Elise’s tightening expression, Cal decided to withhold those stories for now. He didn’t want her pity, after all. He wanted more from her. Much more.
“Right, okay.” She cleared her throat. Elise was quiet for a moment, her eyes pinned to some spot in the middle distance, before she appeared to come to some decision. Chin lifting, she asked, “So… why don’t you come home with me, then?”
Cal was moving before he’d made the conscious decision to do so. In a moment, he was before her again, his fingers seeking out the wispy ends of her hair. He couldn’t seem to keep his hands off of it. Did it only curl in the moist air, or did she wake up with a head full of curls each morning? Cal wasn’t sure why it mattered to him — why all the little details that made up Elise mattered — but it did.
“You would take me into your home?” he pressed, incredulous, as he scanned her face for any hint of unease or guile. Surely he couldn’t be that lucky. “I’ve never been in a real home before.”
He didn’t think to censor himself, but watching her expression pinch with sympathy reminded him that he probably should. Cal would give her his grim story, but he didn’t want her to look at him like he was some broken thing. He wanted her to look at him like…
Well, he didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew he didn’t want that.
“I don’t need a home,” he felt compelled to add, for his pride’s sake. “I live in the fog. I usually have everything I need, but when I don’t, I come here and get whatever it is from the acolytes. What they can’t give me, I seek elsewhere.”
And if something was truly beyond his reach, he wasn’t above trading favors with Kaz, who seemed to have his green fingers in every shady part of the city. That was how Cal ended up with so many caches, hidden behind rocks or high on unscalable cliffs or in alcoves between massive bridge supports.
Kaz was happy to provide him with whatever he asked for, but that didn’t surprise Cal. The orcish spymaster belonged to the Solbournes after all, and even though he liked Kaz, he also knew that getting on his good side was all a part of the long game he and the Solbournes had been playing for over a century.
They would never get his loyalty, but he could give them a favor or two when it benefitted him to do so.
Elise bit her lip hard enough to make the rosy flesh turn white before she released it again. “But you’ve never had a home, Cal. A place where you feel safe and warm and loved.”
It wasn’t a question, so Cal didn’t feel obligated to answer it. Instead, he soothed some of his agitation by playing with the ends of her hair. The texture was different from his. While his hair always felt thin and silky enough to be difficult to hold onto, hers was thicker, with a slight curl that continued to fascinate him.
“If I go home with you, will I feel those things?” He looked up from where he’d curled a lock of her hair around his fingertip to fixate on her lips again. They were a lovely peach color and ever-so-slightly glossy. Would she let him kiss her a second time? He felt like he’d missed something the first time and he desperately wanted to find out what it was.
Elise touched his arm. It was the lightest brush of her fingers, but it ran through him like a lightning bolt. “I don’t know that I can promise that, but there’s no harm in trying, right?”
Cal sucked in a sharp breath. He didn’t know much about relationships or what it was like to have a home, but he knew there could be a great deal of harm in what they planned to do. Not to her — never to her, if he could help it — but definitely to him.
Too bad he didn’t care.
Cal was hungry for the warmth she spoke of so reverently. He wanted to taste the life she lived, to bask in her smile and eat at her table and get even the briefest glimpse of what Kaz called matehood. He wanted all of it with a desperation that had transformed into an endless, cavernous ache, and he damn well intended to get it.
Bringing a lock of her hair to his lips, Cal murmured against the strands, “Deal.”
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FROM THE DESK OF ELISE SASINI, TEXT MESSAGES RECEIVED ON FEBRUARY 3rd 2045:
DAD - 10:08 AM: Tell Dorothy to kiss my ass
DAD - 10:09 AM: Proud of you, kid. Keep making trouble
DAD - 10:10 AM: You should stop writing books, though. I don’t need this kind of competition ;D
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