Triangle

by Sara L Daigle

  She halted, keeping her back to him.

  “Thank you for taking care of me last night. I … appreciate it. Despite what you think, it is not in your job description to mother me through a colossal idiocy on my part.” He leaned against the doorjamb, letting his shielding relax slightly. “It was the move of a friend, not an assistant, and I do appreciate it. I’m not entirely sure why you came to my rescue, but I understand that you did, and I’m … sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  She turned. “I know what it feels like, to be where you are,” she said softly, her anger smoothing away. “Maybe I wished I’d had someone do that for me.”

  Merran took a deep breath in through his nose. Denial stirred again, but he couldn’t avoid the fact he’d reacted quite violently over what had been supposedly just a casual relationship. The problem was, he still loved her. He loved Tamara more than he had ever realized while dating her, but it didn’t change anything. Maybe it didn’t even mean anything, which shook his world and made him feel sorry for himself. “Maybe we can compare stories sometime.”

  A smile flashed across her face, etched with a deep sorrow he recognized immediately, even though he’d never seen it before from her. “Maybe. Finish getting dressed, we’re running out of time.”

  Merran reached down to pull on his shoes.

  She walked away, then stuck her head back into the room. “Oh Merran?”

  “Hmmm?” he asked, tying the laces on his shoes.

  “You’re welcome. See in you in a few.”

  He made an affirmative noise and put the finishing touches on his ensemble. When he came out of the bedroom, he felt much, much better—even his headache was beginning to fade. By the time they headed out to face the interview, he felt almost like himself again. Ketiana followed him down the elevator and out to the street, her heels clicking on the cement as they headed for the limo that waited in front of the steel and glass high-rise. The sound made him wince, sharp enough to poke at the lingering headache, but he didn’t say anything to her about it as they climbed into the limo and Ketiana gave the driver the command to go.

  His publicist had arranged for him to meet the reporter in the Janus Agency’s office in the Lower Downtown area, known as LoDo to its inhabitants.

  Ketiana pulled another sports drink from the limo’s fridge and handed it to Merran.

  “If I drink too many more of these, I’ll have to stop the interview multiple times to use the bathroom,” he said, but he took the drink from her anyway.

  “Better that than throwing up in her lap.”

  “Haha,” he said, unscrewing the top and taking a sip. “Who is it I’m meeting again?”

  “Her name is …” Ketiana glanced down at the tablet on her lap and swiped her finger across its surface until she got to the notes she was looking for. “… Elise Winters. The story she gave Dana was that she wants to raise the profile of her magazine by interviewing you. Are you ready to face a reporter who is going to try to get information out of you that you don’t want to give?”

  Merran made a face. “Probably not, but I’ll do what I have to.”

  Ketiana studied him for a brief moment. “I’m coming into the interview with you.”

  “You don’t trust me.”

  “Do you trust you?”

  “Right now? Not particularly.” Merran took another sip of the sports drink and rested his head against the seat. “Fine. Come with me. Answer questions for me. Keep me from making an ass out of myself.”

  “That’s going to take some doing,” she said, but there was a hint of amusement around her mouth. “Why don’t we just cancel this?”

  “Because we have to cooperate with the media, and canceling it is going to piss her off. The last thing I need is to get a reporter pissed because I treated her poorly. Journalists tend to get nasty when I do that. And this particular reporter works for Women’s Issues Quarterly. That magazine has been overly concerned with my behavior and not focused enough on my accomplishments in the past. I’m intending to set the record straight this afternoon. Starting it off with a cancellation because I have a hangover isn’t going to look good.”

  Ketiana frowned at him. “That’s pretty prepared for someone who’s as hungover as you are. I thought you didn’t feel good, didn’t know who you were meeting, and weren’t prepared.”

  “Once you told me the name, I remembered the other details. I never face an interview without some preparation.”

  She made another face at him. “I think you’re going to be able to handle this interview just fine.”

  “Oh, so now I can go in on my own?”

  “Yes. I’ll wait for you outside. Good luck.” She gave him an affectionate mental hug that blurred the usual firm boundaries between them.

  Merran allowed the hug, rather grateful for her care. “Thank you.” He went in to talk to the reporter.

  By the end of the meeting, his head was throbbing again and his stomach was upset. Elise Winters had bombarded him with hostile questions, a reporter who knew him only from his media image, a woman with a strong prejudice against men in general and him in particular. His shields still a bit wonky from his binge the night before, it was virtually impossible to hide from her determination to write a nasty article rather than a positive one, so he cut the interview far shorter than she wanted.

  He stalked out of the room and ran into Ketiana.

  “So it didn’t go well?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Ketiana raised an eyebrow. “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  She was silent until they got into the limo again. “Not going to be a good article?”

  “Not unless I want to smear my name into hell and back,” Merran replied, resting his head against the seat.

  “Do we need to have a talk with Dana about just who she schedules for interviews?”

  Merran shook his head, closing his eyes. “No, this one was my fault. Dana told me, quite clearly, that the magazine was hostile toward me. I told her to set it up anyway, because I thought I could change anyone’s mind.”

  “And you can’t?”

  “Apparently not.” In truth, he hadn’t tried. After it became glaringly apparent that Elise Winters was not interested in anything but his sexual exploits—although not in a tabloidy way, rather more like someone who wanted him to be a stalking horse for all the men that had treated her badly—Merran had lost his temper and cut the interview short. “She was more interested in talking about how chauvinistic and arrogant I am rather than consider anything positive I’ve done.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Get me home, Kate. I want to climb into a dark pit and disappear forever.”

  Ketiana nodded and wordlessly helped him up to his apartment. She ordered some food, paid for it, and shared the meal with him without saying anything. Merran mindlessly ate what she put in front of him and went straight to bed without paying much attention to her.

  He thought Ketiana might try to impose on his solitude, but she didn’t. For a split second, he was sorry about that—there was again silence from his link with Tamara and Alarin, and he knew they couldn’t be abstaining this long. To have that link silenced opened doors for him that had been closed since he’d formed the link with Tamara, but as much as he might want a physical connection, Ketiana wasn’t the one to explore with him the limits of his new freedom. For one thing, they worked together, and for another, Ketiana was being far too mothering right now. She’d responded to his vulnerability, and having sex with her would just increase that—dangerously so, even though she was Azellian and well used to the vagaries of sex, love, and friendship.

  He threw himself on his bed and lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling as he heard Ketiana move around in his apartment, straightening up and letting herself out, the elevator dinging as it arrived and she left. How crazy is this? Free for the first time in months but unable to do a damned thing about it. A smile tugged at the edges of his mouth, appreciating
the irony, if nothing else. He sighed and closed his eyes, remembering the reporter and her attempts to make him look worse than he was. This is the last time I override Dana on her recommendations, he thought to himself, letting exhaustion tug at him. His body, still somewhat upset at him for the overindulgence of the night before, took the upper hand and pulled him into sleep before he could do much more than start to think about relaxing.

  After the breakup, Tamara struggled with a peculiar sense of drowning, but she managed to hold herself together enough to hide it from Alarin. At least she thought she had—Alarin mentioned nothing about it, but he certainly seemed much calmer now. He was in a cheerful mood, even playful. Tamara’s own mood was strange, as though her mind had split in two. A part of her participated in Alarin’s playfulness and pretended everything was just fine, but the other part was melancholy, even depressed. Merran and she might not have had as many day-to-day interactions as she and Alarin, so she didn’t precisely miss him, but there was a hole, a gap in the number of people she could turn to. Besides Greg, Alarin, and Justern, Merran had been one of those people. Now—well, it remained to be seen where they would end up. Question was, could she be just friends with someone she had loved? But had she loved him, really? If she had, why didn’t it hurt more? Had she always seen him as only a friend? And if he was just a friend, telling her they couldn’t sleep together should have hurt less, right? It was beyond her abilities to sort out what she really thought, so she pushed the whole thing into her subconscious and threw herself into her schoolwork.

  Late one afternoon almost two weeks later, she sat studying in her room. The almost empty room was oddly relaxing to study in, maybe because Alarin’s apartment was cramped, now that most of her clothes and other personal belongings were there. She and Alarin hadn’t talked about her moving in with him; it had just sort of organically begun to happen. That first night in the apartment, after Merran ended things, had led to quite an intense session between them—their first completely solitary session actually. She hadn’t sensed Merran’s presence with them at all that night. Afterwards, she hadn’t discussed that phenomenon with Alarin, but for the first time in her and Alarin’s relationship, he seemed to gain confidence, as though all the time before, he’d been playing second fiddle to her relationship with Merran, as if he were the “other man.” Now? Well, things had changed, most emphatically.

  A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. Hastily, because, as usual, she’d been forgetting to scan for people nearby, she perused the area outside the door and recognized Kari’s familiar mental patterns. Something had her excited. Tamara got up and answered the door. “Hi Kari.” She didn’t bother to pretend she hadn’t realized Kari was there. Normally she kept the odd things she did to a minimum, but today she didn’t care.

  “Hey girlie,” Kari said, unconcerned as she bounced into the room, her eyes sparkling. “Whatchya doin’?”

  “Studying,” Tamara replied, returning to her desk.

  Kari perched on the bed. She glanced down at the smooth comforter. “Not sleeping here, are you?”

  “Why?” Tamara leaned back in her chair.

  Kari grinned. “You never make your bed. For it to be made means it hasn’t been unmade.” She rubbed her hands together.

  Tamara glared at her friend. “I don’t never make my bed.”

  “Almost never.”

  “Fine. I’m spending the nights over at Alarin’s apartment. What’s got you all bouncy?” she asked, somewhat grumpily. She hadn’t told Kari about her change in status.

  Kari ignored her question. “Did you move in with him?”

  Tamara shrugged. “Essentially. Not that my dad needs to know that. I’m going to get a lecture on tying myself to Azellians again.” She frowned at Kari. “Out with it. I know you didn’t come over here to see if Alarin and I moved in together or not.”

  Kari grinned wider. “Perceptive little thing, aren’t you?”

  “We’ve known each other for a while, after all.”

  “I have a date.” She clasped her hands together and managed to look smug.

  “Oh my God, don’t tell me Danny finally asked you out!”

  Kari shook her head. “Better actually.”

  “Better?” Tamara frowned. She’d been out of it lately, but not for that long. Who else had Kari been chasing for years but their fellow classmate? “I didn’t realize you were interested in anyone else.”

  “Better, better, best. I’m going out with Damiar Darvyne. I’ll finally get a chance to taste what you’ve had with Alarin.”

  “Who?” Tamara asked blankly. Wracking her brain, she couldn’t remember who Damiar Darvyne was. Azellian, obviously, but who was he? She couldn’t remember anyone at the embassy with that name.

  “Damiar Darvyne, one of the new exchange students? God, Tam, you’ve been out of it this past week. Of course, you didn’t go to the welcome party for the new exchange students either. We really hit it off. Over the past week, I’ve talked to him at least ten times. We have almost all our classes together. He’s really hot too. Not someone I’d expect to look twice at me, but he seems to be as interested in me as I am in him.”

  “Which one is he?” Tamara vaguely remembered having seen him when she and Alarin met the students in the cafeteria before … she cut off that particular line of thought abruptly. That had been right before her life turned upside down.

  Kari grinned. “He’s the cute one.”

  “The one with dimples and dark eyes? The Healer?”

  Kari did a double take. “Rory? You think Rory’s cute?”

  “No, of course not,” Tamara said hastily, to cover up the fact she did think just that. “I just don’t remember any of the new Azellian exchange students very well.”

  Kari gave her a strange look. “The only other guy among the new students? The one with the gorgeous coppery bronze hair that comes down to his shoulders? He’s also got the longest lashes and darkest blue eyes I’ve ever seen on anyone before. I never thought I’d find a guy with long hair and without a single tattoo attractive, but I think he could wear a man-bun and I’d find him sexy.”

  “Oh him.” She’d noticed a guy with striking dark blue eyes that day when she’d met all the new Azellians, now that Kari had described him, but he hadn’t impacted her mental radar much at all. The altercation between Alarin and Merran right afterward had distracted her pretty thoroughly.

  Kari frowned at Tamara. “Are you okay? You’ve been in kind of a weird mood lately.”

  Tamara shook her head. “I’m fine. Just tired. I’ve got papers to write for the semester of hell. Worse than last semester. So what’s Damiar like?”

  “I’m not sure but I can’t wait to find out.” Kari rubbed her hands together in anticipation. “I wonder what color the other hair on his body is. I guess I’ll get to find out too.”

  “Kari!”

  Kari grinned. “What?”

  “That’s not something I wanted to hear! You already have it planned that you’re going to sleep with him?”

  “Sleep? No. Have sex? Probably.”

  “The first time you hang out? He’s going to read your mind, you know.” Despite the Azellian effort to keep their abilities quiet since Justern’s trial and the subsequent revelation of Azellian psi through Greg’s Healing of him, their psi had become an open secret among most humans. Kari, who might not have known about all of Tamara’s secrets, certainly knew her friend had psi, and she knew the other Azellians did, too.

  “Ah, maybe not the first or even the second. But given the chemistry between us, soon.”

  Tamara shook her head. “You just completely blow me away, do you know that?”

  “We can compare notes. He has a roommate, though, and so do I. Can we borrow your room?”

  Tamara stared at her. “What?”

  “You aren’t going to be needing it, so can we borrow it?”

  Tamara’s skin crawled. “Uh, no.”

  “Why not? You have a whole ap
artment. We don’t even have privacy.”

  A thought occurred to Tamara. “Is Damiar’s roommate human?”

  “No, he’s sharing a studio apartment with Rory just off campus.”

  A grin tugged at Tamara’s lips. Given both Merran and Alarin’s complete unconcern about privacy for what humans considered the ultimate in private matters, Kari would find herself probably not needing Tamara’s room. What sense of decorum they’d bowed to was purely because of Tamara’s own discomfort, and she knew it. Fresh from Azelle, with an Azellian roommate, Damiar would be even less worried about it. Kari might find herself in for more than she’d bargained. “All right, sure. Fine. Go ahead. Use my room if you need to.”

  Kari frowned at her. “I was sure you’d put up more of a fight than that. What’s got you looking like the cat that swallowed the canary?”

  Tamara shrugged. “Azellians are different,” she said, suppressing her smile. “It should be interesting to see how you adjust to it.”

  “Like how?”

  “I don’t want to spoil it.”

  Kari made a disgusted sound. “That’s not fair.”

  Tamara grinned. “Nope. Talk to me again after the first time you sleep with him.”

  Kari’s cell phone rang then, and she looked at the number. “It’s him,” she said, giving Tamara a look. “We’re not done with this conversation, Tam. Hello, this is Kari.” Tamara listened unashamedly to her end of the conversation. “Hi.” Her voice softened. “Yeah. Sure. How about twenty minutes? See you then.” She hung up.

  Tamara stretched. “Off to see the boyfriend?”

  “He wants to check out something at the arts co-op and knows I’m an art major. He knows I have a key. Don’t jinx it by calling him my boyfriend.”

  Tamara laughed. “All right. Call me later.”

  “You’ll be at lover boy’s?”

  “Probably, but call me anyway.”

  “Okay, talk to you later,” Kari promised, and she left. Tamara laughed to herself. Feeling much better, she returned to studying.

  Her cell phone rang after she’d almost managed to finish the work she’d intended to do that day. She swiped her finger across the face of the phone. “Alarin, hi,” she said, unable to stop her smile.