Star Side

Chapter 42

Levi's salt and pepper hair was edging on unkempt again and he had a few days worth of sparse beard. His musky velvet and favorite couch smell was particularly strong. He smelled and looked like a lazy Sunday morning where the last thing you wanted was to get out of bed and make breakfast.

I blinked it away. This was not the situation to be feeling so. The intensity in his gaze and the arms on either side of me made that laughable.

"Look me in the eye, Jo," he growled.

"Um, uh," I looked, but gawd if it didn't make me feel autistic.

"I love you, bitch. I think you're hilarious and attractive and you should tell your god damn insecurities to shove it and stop acting like the only reason I do is because you're the only woman I've been around in thirty years who isn't my sister."

I couldn't help but blink again. "But I am the only woman you've been around—"

He shut me up with his mouth. Hard.

The only time I'd been kissed in my life had been on a dare. It'd been the first and last time I'd played Truth or Dare. 'Kiss the ugly girl' was a favorite of peoples.

But that terrified peck was nothing like this. Levi's mouth was hot, wet, and slightly parted and covering more than just my lips. I thought I could even feel a bit of his teeth through my upper lip. He even tasted like lazy Sunday mornings, with a hint of the curry he'd been having with Naomi. For the first time, I thought curry would make an alright breakfast choice.

Then his mouth was gone and he was back where he'd been before, if not a might closer, dark eyes level with mine and nostrils flared.

"Just listen," he said, sounding just a mite breathless, which raised the hairs on my arms. "I've had my fair share of relationships. I've tried those genetically beautified bitches. There's a reason they call it being 'shallow.' Anything that comes from such superficial attraction is just that, superficial. But you..." He lowered to a knee so he was looking up at me from my knees, the palms of his hands sliding down the back of the couch, brushing past my arms. "From the moment you met me, from the moment you knew of my past, you didn't judge me for it once. There was never a moment you weren't honest and frank with your thoughts, which were always kind and accepting. You moved me more with an off-hand joke than any touch of a woman I'd felt before. Naomi may be my family, and I know she loves me, but you're the first to have befriended me without such bias." He sighed in a fast puff and put his forehead to my thighs, letting his forearms come to rest on either side of my hips. "There. I've spent my quota of talking for day. Be grateful and believe it."

For a few minutes we stayed that way: me staring down at his head, speechless, and Levi all but hugging me with his face on my thighs.

"Also," he said at length. "I'm a boob guy. You got the perfect breasts for drowning in."

I laughed a little at that. I felt him smile.

Truly, my heartfelt moved.

But the so called 'insecurities' of mine couldn't be brushed away so easily.

I took a deep breath to steady myself as I gathered my thoughts. I'd have to make this precise. Gilrack's instincts were still raw, so there was no telling what he might do if he should return and see Levi like this, and I had yet to decide to fully reject him—if rejecting an alien would fix whatever carried him away.

"I...I was born a mistake," I said. "My mom was fifteen and didn't want to give me up for adoption. I used that as my excuse, that she was too poor and young to think about genetic therapy, but the truth is my siblings didn't have it either and they came out looking just like the other half of the population who didn't bother. But you know, the moment my sister was born, my step dad called me 'Miss Ugly.'" I looked to the side. I'd never actually told anyone besides a therapist any of this. It just sounded too much like I was asking to be pitied. "My mom didn't stop him, said it was an endearment, and my siblings called me that too. When I became a teenager guys made it a dare, like a right of adulthood, to kiss the ugliest girl in school, even though I'm sure there were other kids uglier than me."