by Alix Labelle
There was a strength in her that even she was unaware of.
The thought of the enslavement came to mind. It pained him just to think of that look of longing in her eyes when she’d had to leave. She didn’t deserve this. She would have helped him without the bind.
Just like that, he found himself basking in the glow of her compassion, her intelligence, her gentle manner. His heart fluttered just at the sensation of her name on his lips. The idea of her came with a kind of clarity he had never felt before.
He made a decision. He would clean his own clothes, find her, and remove the entrapment, even if it meant that she wouldn’t want him around her any longer.
***
Janice, the wedding planner, shook her head. “These are nothing like roses.”
Moire stood on the other side of the counter in the shop, staring at the woman with the expensive suit and the big hair. She knew she would say that. “No. That is because they are not roses.”
The man, who would be the groom, turned to glower at her. “I said I wanted roses. Didn’t you tell this woman to get roses? What is she, stupid?”
“Gerald, don’t let this get to you. Why don’t you call your husband-to-be and ask how the cake tasting is coming along?”
Gerald rolled his eyes at the both of them before barging out of her store, leaving the door swinging behind him.
Moire thought about Tarys, the only thing that could take her mind off the diatribe of demands the capitalist burden of making money had placed on her shoulders. “What are we doing here?” Janice asked with the kind of condescension you would expect from an elementary school teacher.
“Look, if you can’t do roses, I just thought that it would be nice if it didn’t look like you were trying to.”
“It’s not about what you think is best, Moire. Just shut up and give me what the client asked for.”
“I just wanted to give you something truly beautiful.”
“I’ll decide what’s beautiful.”
Moire’s eyes stung. She pursed her lips, willing herself not to cry out of anger. Not this time.
Her bell rang as someone barged into her shop. “I fear that would be a mistake.”
Her eyes flashed wide at the sight of Tarys standing just over the threshold. “I thought I told you to stay at home.” She reveled at how he almost glowed in the sunlight. She knew him coming here was a bad idea, but she couldn’t deny the fact that she was glad he had done it.
“And who are you?”
Tarys glanced at her and then back at Moire. “Her…lover.”
Janice glanced from Moire to Tarys and back to Moire, a new kind of respect in her eye.
“I came to escort her to lunch.”
Moire could have been flying.
Janice cleared her throat. “Well, I wouldn’t want to intrude. There is clearly no other work to be done here. I expect you to get back to me with your other sketches by tomorrow.” She left.
Tarys chuckled as he approached her.
Moire stepped from around the counter. “I thought I told you to stay in the house.” She tried and failed to hide her satisfaction.
He shrugged. “Well then, you should have tied me down.”
Moire grimaced at him. “Of course. That is definitely a thing within my abilities.”
“You don’t know your own strength.”
Moire shook her head. “I really, really need to get you something real to wear,” She stepped back behind her counter.
He shrugged. “I feel just fine.”
Moire caught herself smiling like an idiot all over again, but when she looked up at him again, she could see a kind of dark shadow in his eye. What was he hiding? “You don’t look fine.” She reached out to touch his forehead without even thinking about it.
Half of her expected him to throw her hand away, another half of her expected him to ignore it, but he did neither. He covered her hand with his and then left it there. She could feel her warmth seeping into him and vice versa. Even with the counter separating the two of them, she felt so close to him that they could be the same person.
“Listen. I need something from you.”
Moire nodded. “Anything.” She gulped, realizing too late how desperate that sounded.
“I have to get home.”
She nodded.
“To Kahara.”
She froze, her eyes stinging all over again. The thought of him leaving made her want to vomit. “No. You can’t leave.” She stepped away from him, her back pressed against the back wall.
Tarys huffed out a breath. “This is all my fault.”
“What is?”
He gestured loosely at her. “You, feeling this way.”
“Can’t you just stay for a moment? Why do you have to run off so fast?”
“I won’t be able to go anywhere unless I can contact them anyway. I need you to help me with that. I don’t have the energy, or the strength to do it on my own.”
“I’ll do anything for your good, but I won’t help you.”
Tarys’s chest went all big as he sucked in a huge breath. “Just come here.”
“Why?” Moire asked even though she was going to do it anyway. His pull reached her on a cellular level. He controlled the ebb and flow of the air in her lungs.
He took her face in both of his hands.
She gazed into his eyes, but he seemed to be looking right over her head. “What could I possibly do?”
“Shhhhhhhh…”
She winced. “What are you doing?”
“I miss the time when you couldn’t even find your own voice.”
“I learned how to speak to you.”
He pursed his lips. “You really must be quiet.”
“Why?”
But he had already begun to ignore her. He placed one of his hands on her forehead, the touch more comforting than ever.
“It really isn’t that hard, Tarys,” he said.
“Are you talking to yourself?”
He placed his other hand on her lips.
Moire glowered at him, begging for an explanation, but at the same time hoping he wouldn’t let her go.
He looked back down at her, and as he stared his eyes grew softer. His hand slipped away from her lips.
She didn’t waste a second. “Please. Don’t. Leave.”
But his gaze had shifted from her eyes to her lips. He lowered himself to her.
Moire’s eyes flickered shut as he kissed her. In that moment, she felt like more of a person than she had in a long time.
“I can’t do it,” he said as he broke away.
“Do what?”
He looked at her as if he hadn’t realized that she had heard. “If you could come with me, would you help me?”
“What? Come with you?”
“To Kahara.”
“You want me to leave Earth?” She didn’t believe him.
Tarys ducked his head. “What, exactly, do you have to leave? This tiny shop?”
Moire clenched her jaw, ignoring the pang in her stomach from his insulting words. “This tiny shop is my life’s work.” Her flowers were her life line. They had helped her through the worst parts of her childhood. The only things that seemed to listen to her. They depended on her for survival. With those flowers, she mattered. And yet, he wanted to take her away from them. She could already feel herself fading.
“But you have a gift. You’re capable of so much more than building decorations.”
Moire raised her hand. “Okay, first of all, I highly doubt that. And, second of all, maybe this is all I want.”
“I cannot stress to you how important it is that I find my way back home. I need to tell them what happened to my colony.”
“So…go.” Her voice broke. “But I can’t go with you. I have a… life here.” She hated the flimsy cover.
He huffed. “Okay. This is getting circular. You know you don’t want to see me go.”
Moire glared at him, determined to hold her own. “Don’t tell
me what I want.”
He grabbed both of her arms. His energy was intoxicating. “Just because your mother died—”
Moire’s eyes went wide. An image of her sick, half-dead mother in a hospital bed rose to mind before she could construct a wall against it. “What?”
“She did have cancer, right?”
Moire ripped herself out of his grip. “Please stop talking.”
“You can’t let what happened tie you down.”
“You don’t know shit!” she screeched, feeling lightheaded from the outburst. How cocky of him. Her mother’s death was only the beginning, the bang that set off the avalanche.
“Fuck me!” His hands clenched into fists.
Moire glared at the sign above the door: Carol Brendan.
Tarys followed her gaze, just like she didn’t want him to. “Do you even want this shop? Or are you just here because it’s hers?”
Moire stepped back behind the counter. She hated her job, but she loved her flowers. So what did that mean?
Tarys leaned over the counter. “Moire.”
“Does it matter?”
He placed a hand on her cheek.
She hated the way it calmed her.
“You’re better than this.”
There was a ring as the door opened. A woman with a briefcase walked in, her high heels clicking noisily against the floor. Another wedding planner.
Moire cleared her throat.
“I’ll just…” Tarys stepped away.
Moire watched him leave.
Chapter Six
Moire came home that night completely frightened of what she might find. Her fight with Tarys had left her rattled and unsure of herself. A huge part of her didn’t want to think about letting the shop go… letting herself go.
She unlocked her front door and stepped inside, a strange smell assaulting her nose. She dropped her purse on the side table and made her way down the hall and into her living room. A gasp slipped past her lips when she saw that he had completely disassembled her television and was fiddling with some wires behind it.
He glanced up at her. “Oh thank the gods. Come here and bring your phone.”
“You destroyed my TV…”
He shrugged. “Can’t you just buy a new one?”
Moire sank down into her couch. “I don’t want to do this.”
Tarys spoke without looking at her. “You don’t have to. I figured out a way to handle it myself.”
Moire gazed at him, her eyes wide with horror. It was different when she could decide. “What?”
“I’ll harness the energy from this devise. That, along with the excess of organic matter in this room and my own strength, should be enough to throw a good signal. Anyone in a Kaharan observatory won’t be expecting it, so it will stand out.”
Moire sunk onto her knees on the carpet. “I wasn’t counting on it.”
Tarys glanced back at her, his head bowed. “I know.”
“I thought I would be able to choose.”
“We both know that wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
She let her hands rest in her lap. “Will you just stop for a second?”
He turned toward her. “I have to do this.”
“Doesn’t at least a little part of you want to stay?”
He chuckled once. “There is nothing in me that would even consider staying.”
Moire bowed her head, that sinking feeling seeping down through her entire body. Her thoughts swirled around in her head, becoming nothing more than nonsense. A lump the size of an orange lodged itself in her throat.
He crossed the room in three short strides and knelt down next to her. “But all of me needs you to come with me.”
“Are you afraid that I’ll run to the government and tell them about you? Is that why you want to rip me away from everything?”
“No. I trust you.”
“So stay.” Moire didn’t know how many other ways to say it. She pressed her head onto his shoulder, her tears wetting his tunic.
“Do you see what we’re doing? I can’t stay here and you can’t come with me. There’s something very wrong about that.”
Moire hated this with everything in her. Why couldn’t she just let this go? Why couldn’t she be anything other than the stupid florist her mother made her promise to be? “But you can stay,” she pleaded.
She felt him shake his head. “I have a duty to my people. I have to go home.”
A sloppy sob fell out of her mouth. She wrapped her hands around his neck as their lips found their way to each other. As he laid her onto her back, all Moire could think about was why.
Why. Why. Why.
He kissed her with a kind of desperation only a man in love with her could muster. She wrapped her legs around his waist as he pressed his body into hers, imagining that she could trap him there, that it could be just that simple.
He slipped his hand under her shirt, his fingers cupping her breast. A moan slipped from her lips as she pulled his tunic off. He pressed his hand in between her legs, rubbing her above her panties. Moire closed her eyes so that she could really feel him. Her head went limp, her eyes rolling and her neck arching.
The more he gave of himself, the more she wanted. His bulge pressed up against her thigh. Her own body pulsed at the touch. Thoughts swam around and around and around in her head until they turned to mush.
Her cunt throbbed, one spasm after another as he entered her. It was a rhythmic, dynamic hug between two lovers.
He slid his tongue across her cheek, the warm organ leaving an icy trace of himself. His grunts grew more pronounced as Moire slammed herself up against him. She wanted more and more and more of him and as the seconds became uncountable, as the hour became eternity.
It was the most dynamic sex she had ever had, that unique sensation of feeling a man inside you but also knowing exactly what he felt. As they climaxed, Moire wondered if there had ever, in all the history of all of the universe, been a man and a woman as connected to each other as she felt to him.
***
Tarys slipped his pants back on while he waited for Moire to return with the water. He shook his head as he eyed the contraption. His worse fear had been realized. When he awoke for the first time to Moire’s eyes, he had an intuition that she might be the one destined for him to bond with, but he ignored it because the statistical probability of that being true was extremely low. And yet somehow it had happened.
But could this have possibly come at a worst time? Moire said she didn’t want to leave. He had only offered to take her with him at first because he thought the enslavement drove her to act against separation. But if they were meant to bond, if they had bonded, the enslavement had no effect. Whatever he felt for her, whatever she felt for him that could not be helped. He could do nothing to eradicate it.
“Here.”
Tarys turned to find Moire wearing her terry cloth and extending a glass of water toward him.
He nodded. “Thank you.”
She huffed out a breath. “So, are we going to talk about this?”
Tarys raised an eyebrow. To admit to her that the Bonde existed between the two of them would be counter to the ongoing effort in the front of his mind to get home at all cost. “Yes. I need you to hold my hand and follow my lead.” He placed his hand on the exposed wire behind the defaced screen.
He did his best to ignore what would have most likely been an expression of pure horror on Moire’s part. “I meant about us.”
He let out a calm breath. “There isn’t much to discuss.” With that, he initiated the process. His grip grew tighter on Moire’s arm, because he could feel her squirming. As his body flooded with energy, he avoided her gaze and ignored her yelps of confusion.
His heart thudded as he became acutely aware of the flow of her blood, of the ebb of her emotions. Finally, he hit what felt like a wall. The signal beamed back at him at a force he could not stand. He let go of the wire and stepped away, dropping Moire’s hand. His skin smoked, slick
sweat dripping down his back from the effort.
“You’re still leaving?” Moire stalked away from him.
“What is there to be said?” He kept his gaze down. “You told me you could never leave, and I will not make you sacrifice your mother’s memory to come with me. Now you don’t have to do anything.”
In the pause that followed, he dared to stare at her. Her body was tense, her fingers curled, and her lips folded into a frown. “I don’t understand. I don’t have the strength to leave you and I—”
Tarys would have gagged her if he could. He prided himself on being in control of his emotions, but watching her like that, knowing what she would say, he couldn’t trust himself to stay the course. “Don’t,” he pleaded. He disgusted himself.
“I love you.”
***
There. She said it. Moire was under the impression that those were the magic words, and that throwing them at him would fix anything. But it was like he got worse. Those beautiful silver eyes had grown red rings around them. His jaw was set rigid.
She didn’t know what else to do, but she knew she couldn’t go with him if he didn’t love her back. She was sure of her emotions, but to sacrifice everything, she needed confirmation. “You can’t just stand there,” she whispered as she stepped toward him.
But he raised his hand in protest. “Don’t ever say those words again.”
Moire’s heart crumpled, but she wouldn’t let it go that easy. She knew what she had seen. “No. Why are you doing this? I love you. Don’t you get it? Just…just say it back.”
“It isn’t real!”
His roar echoed through the house and nailed her to her spot. “What?”
“I did this. I manipulated your energy. I made it so that the next person who touched me would fall in love with me. I did it to protect myself. It could have been anyone. It doesn’t matter that it was you.”
Moire shook her head. No no no. This wasn’t the truth. She wouldn’t believe it. “No, you didn’t.”
“Think about it. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“It isn’t true.”
“So how do you explain being obsessed with me without even knowing me?”
Moire knew the truth. She could see through his arrogant misinformation even though she couldn’t figure out what he was trying to hide. “How do you explain falling in love with me?”