“That memory ain’t good enough for a second longer. And for the rest of the foreseeable future, I’m making sure that I get a fuck of a lot more than a memory.”
The space between my legs tingled with that memory, with the remaining effects of the morning.
The twinkle disappeared from his eyes, and they darkened, as if he could read my mind.
“This is a thing?” Polly asked excitedly, breaking the silence and the erotic stare-down.
Thankfully. It was all kinds of wrong to be having those thoughts in front of my baby sister. She might have been far from a virgin, but still.
Not appropriate.
She waved her hands between us. “You two, you’re together?” She narrowed her eyes at me, then Keltan. “Finally?”
I frowned at her. She’d asked a barrage of questions about Keltan after we’d kicked her out on the Tiffany’s night, and then we’d had a fight. Far from our first. But something so much more serious than my penchant for a steak, or leather handbags, or terrorizing the men who fucked her over.
That was all surface, scratches that healed quickly and were forgotten quicker.
This one wasn’t. And I still felt the sting now, one year on.
“You’re making a mistake, breaking this up,” she said.
I glared at her. “No, Polly, I’m not. Plus, there’s nothing to break up. We were nothing,” I lied, to her and myself. I gave her a look. “You don’t understand.”
She glared back. “Why?”
“Because I live in the real world,” I clipped harshly. “And there’s no fairy tales in the real world.”
She regarded me, too sharply for someone so young. So unPollylike.
“I believe in happy endings and miracles and soul mates and love at first sight,” she said, brows furrowed but smiling. Somehow embodying both frustration with her sister who wasn’t getting the memo of her happiness communicated down below the nose. “What’s so wrong with that?” she folded her arms.
I regarded the sister who had always had her head in the clouds and her spirit running fair ahead of logic or reason.
“Because this is the real world, Polly,” I said as gently as I could yet still trying to communicate the harshness of the sentiment. “That stuff, it has no place there. You have to think a little more. Of the future. Of these decisions that will affect your real life while you’re too busy living in a fairy tale.”
Her grin left and her eyes sparked with anger that was rare but legendary in our family. “And what’s wrong with that?” she accused. “Who says that real life and a fairy tale aren’t the same thing?”
I narrowed my own eyes. “Logic. Reason,” I said calmly.
She rolled hers, pacing the room, the sleeves of her dress flowing with the movement. “Oh, and what have those things done for anyone? For you? You tell me that I live in a fairy-tale world because I believe in magic and love and soul mates. Well I’ll tell you about life in your own.” She whirled. “You guard your heart so fiercely that you become a victim not to the heartbreak you’re so adamant to protect yourself from but from yourself. From that logic and reason and from the nothingness that comes from that. So, you think I’m living my life wrong because I jump too much? Well I think you’re living yours wrong because you don’t jump at all. Yeah, my ocean may be wild and full of troubled waters, but the stillness of yours isn’t natural, Luce. Not at all. I’d rather get my heart broken a thousand times because it means I get to love a thousand times. My biggest fear would be living my life without even trying. Without even tasting what it could be.”
She stepped forward, her face cold and empty. “It would be being you,” she finished, the lance of the words spearing me deeper than I ever thought they could. “You’ve got a man who is ready to give you a life on a platter. Who is ready to give you glorious waves, but you don’t let him in because you would rather drown in your own stillness. And that is what I think is stupid. Not the decisions I make.”
On that, she turned on her fringed boot and left.
And I stood in the middle of the room, bleeding from the wound of harsh truth that came from the sister I thought lived in fantasy and saw the world through rose-colored glasses.
We reconciled but it always hung between us, that fight. The truth to it. It floated away, or seemed to, with Keltan’s presence and Polly’s smile.
“Yeah, we’re together,” Keltan answered for me when I was silent. He skirted through the door and brought me into his embrace, kissing my head easily. Effortlessly. Like it was a gesture he’d been doing for years. “Finally,” he murmured against my head, eyes on me.