by Ashley West
“No, I didn’t talk to him,” she said, as if the very idea was ridiculous, which it was. “I slapped him and got the hell out of there. Why would I have talked to him about it? Why are you taking his side?”
“I’m not!” her mother insisted. “I’m only saying that there’s something to be said for...making the best of a bad situation. And maybe you shouldn’t have hit him?” Both Roxy and her father stared at her, and she huffed, folding her arms. “What?”
“What should she have done then?” her father asked. “Hitting him was definitely the best course of action in that situation, I think. If he doesn’t respect her enough to keep his hands to himself, then she’s going to have to show him there’s consequences.”
“Alan,” her mother said. “Don’t encourage her.”
“What do you mean, don’t encourage her? You don’t want her to stick up for herself?”
“Of course I do, but it’s not like this is some man off the street. It’s not like he’s human. He could actually hurt her, and there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s nothing anyone can do about them and we have to work with them and make the best of it.”
“So I just let him have his way with me whenever he wants?” Roxanne said. “That’s the solution here? Sacrifice my future and my self-respect so they don’t get pissed off and try to kill us all. Awesome. I’m so thrilled for my future.”
And with that she stalked off, going into the room that had been hers when she lived there and slamming the door.
The best of a bad situation. What was she even supposed to say to that? Of course it was a bad situation. She didn’t want any of it, but there was no way out. This was bigger than either of them, and they were both pawns in the bigger game. But that didn’t mean that she had to be the one who gave up everything. Her dignity and self-respect still mattered, and she wasn’t just going to put up with Aedian treating her like she was some kind of toy just because he was bigger than her and his people could kill them all.
...Okay, so when she thought about it like that, she could kind of see where her mother was coming from, but still.
Honestly, the thing that made her the maddest about this whole situation was the fact that she’d thought they were making progress. Building their relationship, such as it was, off of sex wasn’t the best idea, but it was better than the constant bickering.
Roxy knew that he saw her as an equal in the bedroom, and having him try to use that against her, or just use her for that, really, made her feel like there was no way to win.
And she hated that feeling.
Her parents didn’t bring it up again, and Roxy spent six days at her parent’s house, wondering if she could just stay there forever. She assumed that at some point they were going to come and make her go back to the compound to be with her ‘fiancé’, but until then, she had no intentions of leaving.
The more she thought about having to go back there and possibly apologize to Aedian for lashing out at his bad behavior, the angrier she got, and so she put the whole thing out of her mind and focused on other things.
She had lunches with Sam, she continued her hunt for the perfect job, and she made dinners with her father, laughing at his stories and just enjoying being with her family. She didn’t feel like an outcast, and she didn’t feel like a weakling, and gradually some of her anger faded.
One of those distance making things seem like less of a big deal kind of things, probably.
Whatever the reason, she was more relaxed, and therefore completely unprepared when there was a knock at the front door one morning.
Her parents were both at work, and she assumed it was the mailman or someone delivering something, so she didn’t think twice about going to the door to answer it. Of course, when she saw Aedian standing there, her heart kicked into overdrive and she thought that maybe she should have been more worried about them coming to get her.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, anger flaring up all over again.
“I wanted to speak with you,” Aedian said.
Roxanne rolled her eyes. “And you always get what you want,” she muttered under her breath. “Come in. And watch the horns.”
Aedian blinked, but ducked his head and walked in through the front door, looking comically large in her parents’ modest house. His head was nearly to the ceiling, and he looked like he was afraid to move for fear of breaking something. For once, he was wearing a shirt, and she knew that it was common practice for them to clothe themselves more when they were in human areas.
There was a wariness to his expression, and Roxanne frowned. He didn’t seem angry, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t, and she refused to let her guard down.
“Are you going to tell me what you want?” she asked.
“I wanted to speak with you,” he said again.
“Yeah, you already-” she was cut off by the whistle of the kettle in the kitchen, and she sighed, remembering she’d put it on to make tea. “Come on, then,” she said, motioning for him to follow her into the kitchen.
She turned the burner off under the kettle and rummaged in the cabinets for the peppermint tea she favored. Her parents always had some on hand for when she visited.
When she turned back towards the door, the sight of Aedian sitting at the kitchen table startled a laugh out of her. It was just that he was so large, and the kitchen chairs were rickety and small. Small enough that her father, at six feet, always complained about them, and Aedian was definitely nearly a foot taller than her father.
In fact, he looked so out of place, that the laughter bubbled out of her. The kitchen was painted a peach color, and there were flowers on the molding and baseboards, and it was just so funny to see this hardened warrior sitting there, eying the sugar bowl on the table mistrustfully.
Aedian’s head jerked up when she laughed, and he narrowed his eyes at her. “What is so funny?”
“You are,” Roxanne said. “You look so uncomfortable.”
He shrugged. “This is not my home.”
“No,” she agreed. “It definitely wasn’t made with your kind in mind.” She went about making her tea and then leaned on the counter with the hot mug, blowing across the steaming surface before taking a sip. “So what did you want to talk about?”
The wariness returned, and he sighed, dragging his claws through his hair. “I wanted to...apologize.”
Roxane blinked in surprise at that, nearly dropping her cup. “What?”
“That’s the word, yes? Apologize? We don’t say that much among my people.”
That was hardly a surprise. She was sure that when they hurt people they meant it. But she was still stunned that he’d come here to say that. “For what?”
“For the way I acted. For not listening when you told me no.”
And he even knew what he’d done wrong. More than ever, Roxanne felt like she was in an episode of The Twilight Zone or something. He sounded sincere enough, even though he looked like he was worried that she was going to hit him again.
“You’re sorry for that?”
He nodded. “Is that surprising?”
“I... I guess so. I just. I didn’t expect you to realize you’d done something wrong. I know how you feel about humans. And you were banging on about how I belong to you, so I just assumed…” she trailed off and shrugged.
Aedian sighed and glanced around the kitchen once more before looking at her again. “At first I didn’t know what I had done wrong,” he admitted. “I am not used to people resisting my advances. But I had a talk with Demos. You know Demos?”
Roxanne furrowed her brow. “One of the other champions?”
He nodded again. “Yes. He understands humans in a way I do not.”
“It’s not just humans, though,” Roxanne put in. “You shouldn’t treat anyone like that.”
“That’s what Demos said. He also said that you do not belong to me.”
“Demos is smart,” Roxy said. “But I guess...it’s not entirely your fault. The lang
uage your people use is hardly favorable for you guys treating us like people. I mean, you call us ‘prizes’, so that definitely sets up the whole ‘you owning us’ thing.”
Aedian tilted his head to the side as she spoke and then shrugged a shoulder. “I...guess.”
She sighed. It was apparently too much to have that particular conversation just now. Well, progress was progress she supposed, and the apology was more than she had been expecting.
“I would have thought you’d be glad to be rid of me,” she said, sipping her tea and looking at him.
“The treaty-”
She snorted, cutting him off. “You don’t care about the treaty. I could see that at the tournament. That was all about you needing to prove that you were strong, not because you wanted to be saddled with a human wife and locked into prolonging your race.”
“I...what?” Aedian asked, frowning in confusion, and Roxy figured that his gift of tongues wasn’t cut out for catching up with her logic, so she sighed.
“You weren’t any happier with me than I was with you,” she explained.
“That’s true,” he allowed. “But...we are stuck with each other. Because of the treaty. I might not care about it, but I respect it. I have no other choice.”
And that was true enough. They were both victims, though Roxanne thought she had perhaps gotten the shorter end of the stick, but then, Aedian probably felt the same way. She sighed and put her cup down, tugging on an errant curl that fell into her face from her sloppy bun.
“Do you respect me?” she asked. “Because I’m not going back with you if you don’t.”
He looked at her for a long moment, clearly thinking. Finally he inclined his head. “Yes. I think I do. You aren’t weak. Well...you’re a human, so you’re weak by nature, but you’re strong for your kind. You stand up for yourself and you don’t allow disrespect. That is a strength. I am sorry for what I did, but you reacted with strength.”
“I slapped you.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Strength.”
They were such a simple people, it seemed. Defending yourself was strength and rolling over and taking abuse was a weakness. Well, Roxanne had never been someone to let people walk all over her when she could help it, so she didn’t think they were going to have a problem there. She looked down at the floor for a moment, thinking, and when she looked back up, Aedian was on his feet, walking towards her with slow carefulness.
She watched him warily, unable to forget what had happened the last time he’d been coming towards her. But this was a different thing entirely, and she let out a slow breath as he approached.
Carefully, he reached up and touched her face, giving her ample time to step away or tell him to stop. She didn’t, though, smiling a bit when his calloused palm came to rest on her cheek. It was, perhaps, the most gentle he’d ever been with her, and she looked up and into his strange eyes, wondering what he was doing.
“You challenge me,” he murmured. “You try to be my equal.”
“I am your equal,” Roxy retorted. “I don’t care if you’re bigger and stronger than me, there’s nothing I can do to change that, and I am a human. That’s just the fact of the matter. But if we’re going to do this, and we don’t have a choice in it either way, then I’m not going to let you treat me like I’m less than you. Like I’m...some burden you got saddled with. You might feel like that, and I do too, to some extent, but we’re going to be equals in this because that’s how marriages work.”
“Not on Calphas,” Aedian pointed out, and Roxanne surprised herself by laughing instead of getting angry.
“You’re not on Calphas anymore, big boy.”
Something like humor shone in those silvery eyes, and Aedian looked at her for a long moment before he was dipping his head down. “May I?”
She gathered that he wanted to kiss her, and there was something about the way he asked that made her smile and her stomach flip over pleasurably. “Yes,” she murmured back.
When he kissed her, it was with careful intensity, his mouth meeting hers, lips caressing. He kissed her like he was afraid to break her, but she could feel the want behind it, could taste that he was restraining himself even though he wanted more, and she knew that it was out of consideration for her, and it warmed her.
In return, Roxy pressed up into it, kissing him harder and gripping at the front of his shirt with her hands, breathing going ragged the longer they kissed.
They might have gotten more heated, their hands already starting to grab at each other, if it weren’t for the sound of someone clearing their throat in the doorway.
Roxanne lurched away from Aedian, banging her hip on the counter in her haste. She looked up to see her father standing there, looking bewildered and a little afraid. She didn’t think he’d ever been this close to one of the Calphesians by choice, and especially he’d never seen one practically pawing at his daughter in his home.
It struck her as funny that she and Aedian were expected to get married and yet he’d never met her parents.
She cleared her throat and placed a calming hand on Aedian’s arm, feeling his agitation there under the surface. “Dad, this is Aedian,” she said.
“I gathered,” he replied, voice faint. “Hello.”
“Aedian, this is my father,” Roxanne continued, stressing the last word in an attempt to make him see that it was important for him to be polite.
Apparently respect for fathers was something that Calphesians understood because Aedian inclined his head in a gesture she’d never seen him make before. “Hello. An honor to meet you.”
“Uh...likewise?” Alan said, glancing between the two of them in a clear ‘what is happening’ gesture.
“Aedian came here to apologize,” Roxy explained to him. “For what happened.”
“Ah. Well. That’s good.”
“Your daughter is strong,” Aedian said. “You should be proud of her.”
Roxanne smiled, surprised, and her father nodded. “I am. Proud of her. She’s a hell of a girl. I’m glad you can see that.” He hesitated and then shook his head. “Would you like to stay for dinner? Seems strange that we’ve never really sat down and talked to the uh...man our daughter is marrying.”
Aedian blinked and looked to Roxanne, who was just as surprised. She shrugged and then nodded, and Aedian smiled uncertainly. “Thank you,” he said. “I would like that.”
And honestly, her life just kept getting more and more bizarre.
Chapter 7: The Natural Progression
Dinner with humans was an...odd affair, to say the least. Aedian had very limited experience with humans this close, aside from Roxanne, he’d never really spent more than a few minutes in their company, and generally preferred to keep it that way.
Humans were different from Calphesians, there was no getting around that, but sitting there in that kitchen with Roxanne and her family, Aedian was forced to think about whether the differences were all bad.
Yes, they were smaller and inherently weaker, but they had strengths that Calphesians never had.
They had a closeness that none of his people could boast, and emotional support, which was something Aedian had never had. Too many of his kind grew up without parents for one reason or another, and seeing the way the family unit worked on Earth made him think that it was a shame that he’d barely known his own family before they were killed.
There had been a lot of laughter, and though it had taken some time for them to warm up to him being there, a large, unwieldy presence in their kitchen, they’d included him in their stories and jokes as the night progressed, and more and more Roxanne had turned that smile on him, her eyes warm and delighted.
When it came time for the evening to end, Aedian had stood at the door, prepared to take his leave without Roxanne. He hadn’t come to try and force her to come back with him, after all, and there were only flimsy reasons why she couldn’t stay among the humans if she wanted to. It wouldn’t be breaking the treaty as long as they still got marrie
d and had children, and Calphesian family units rarely stayed together all the time, so no one would really mind all that much if they didn’t. It was the offspring they cared more about, anyway.
He’d been planning to explain all of that to her before he left, but before he could, she’d been grabbing her things and following him to the door.
“Ready?”
Aedian had frowned. “You do not have to come back with me. I know you’d prefer not to.”
Roxanne shrugged, shouldering her bag. “It’s not a big deal. Plus most of my stuff is there anyway.”
Her sudden change of heart had him off balance, but he was learning that it was pretty much how he was always going to feel around her, so he just inclined his head and motioned for her to lead the way out.
Aedian had walked to her home from the compound, needing the exercise to help clear his head, but he rode back in Roxanne’s car, cramped and uncomfortable and grumbling about human contraptions the whole way back to the compound.
Instead of being offended that he was talking bad about human things, Roxanne giggled under her breath, clearly amused by the way his head was bowed to keep his horns from scratching her sunroof.
She seemed lighter than she ever had before, and her mood was infectious, leading Aedian to take her bag from her when they made it back and carry it up to his—their —rooms without a word. And she let him, which he was going to count as progress.
He watched her put her things away, including the small plastic container of leftovers from her mother, and then she turned to face him, hands on her hips.
“We had a fight,” she said.
He inclined his head, acknowledging that. “One of many.”
Her lips crooked upwards in a smile. “True. But you know how married people deal with fights on Earth?”
“We aren’t married yet,” Aedian pointed out, and smiled a bit when she huffed and rolled her eyes at him.
“That’s beside the point,” she insisted. “They have sex. Make up sex.”