Because I Love You✔️

Chapter 13: Bargain

Chapter Thirteen: Bargain

For several seconds, Ella simply stood stock still, unable to believe the level of audacity she'd just been subjected to was real. She waited, watching his retreating form, expecting him to turn around or give her some sign that he was jesting, but when none was forthcoming she lost it.

"Hey! I wasn't finished speaking!" she roared, stomping her foot. "Don't you turn your back on me!"

"Go away," he immediately rasped, voice barely audible over the rain. "You're literally the last person I want to see right now."

She snapped her mouth shut and bristled with anger, face growing hot, but he only kept walking which triggered her further. Seeing red, blood boiling, pulse pounding in her ears, she stormed after him with her boots smacking the cobblestone and snatched his limp wrist, dragging him to a violent halt.  

"Foolish creature!" she barked, violently jerking him around and shoving him back a step. "How dare you?! What right do you have to try telling me to go away?! This is my town!"

He looked at her with eyes swimming in bitterness and unhappiness.

"I have every right, since my current state of mind is your fault," he told her, not breaking eye contact. "You have her face... you have her eyes... her voice, her hair, her body... you even have the same fucking mole above your lip, but you're not her... you're not my Ella."

Her mouth twisted and she tensed, nose wrinkling with outrage as her temper blinded her vision and deadened her sensibility. Taking a step forward, she shoved him again with all of her strength, knocking him so off balance that he actually fell to the ground.

"You're right! I'm not!" she spat, folding her arms. "I don't even know what your Ella saw in you, but whatever it was, she was a fool for it! A weak creature like yourself has no right to address me so familiarly! Not even if you are the last primordial sprite of the south! You're pathetic!"

He sat there, face completely hidden by the soaked black hair that brushed against the ground even when he was sitting up like that. 

He sat there, strands of ridiculously long ebony covering his bare chest, those ivory horns gleaming dully in the wetness, those claws lax on the stone, 

He sat there, silently, not saying a word.

She glared at him in disgust when he refused to respond, growing even angrier as the seconds ticked by, waiting for him to react, to say something, to explain himself. Her pulse pounded in her temples when he was not forthcoming, and because of it, her snapped again.

"You know what?" she asked in a voice laced with honeyed venom. "If you really want to die, go ahead. Kill yourself. I won't shed a tear. Unlike that foolish girl you loved, I could never love a bastard like you, especially since I hate everything that has to do with cats. You're a freak."

When he still didn't respond, she drew one of her daggers to the ground in front of him, hoping for some sort of reaction. She watched as he lifted his head to look at it, but she wasn't expecting it when it happened... wasn't expecting the shock it gave her.

Instead of continuing the self-pity act, he lifted his eyes all the way.

And he was smiling.

Not brokenly, like she'd seen up to this point... it was a genuine grin, one of the lopsided and dopey variety, and somehow, even though his bright blue-green eyes were still full of tears, his pupils had expanded in a way that looked almost identical to a kitten's.