ZER

TWENTY SIX

Our drive back home is unbearably quiet, to put it mildly. I don't waste time to wait for him to help me out of the vehicle, I storm inside straight to MY bedroom. After I change to my new sleeping gown, which I bought for us, now I regret it, it's thin and sexy definitely not something I would like him to see me in now. As if my thought is a cue, I hear him open my bedroom door.

"I have no good excuse to defend my action." He starts, "I don't like to think about her, let alone talk about her. I didn't see the need for you to know my past as I feel the same way to you. We are who we are when we meet and not before that. But I can see how not informing you that she'll be there is a mistake, which Is why i'd like to apologize." I hear every pain from his words.

"I'm sorry." He says right behind me. "Tell me how to fix this, I will, with whatever cost I won't think twice." He places his hand on my arms, running them up and down. I can feel myself start to melt to his touch.

My heart is a traitor to my logic.

"Tell me about her," I tell him.

I can hear him sigh, "I don't know much about her."

I turn to see him in the eyes, now I'm sure he's telling me the truth. "How do you not knowing a female you were paired with?"

"As you know, male doesn't have the privilege to choose with whom we are going to get paired with, all I knew, she chose me, and it was the worst time of my life." He cups my face with his palm and resting his forehead on mine.

"Did she disrespecting you?" He asks me.

"Nothing that I cannot handle." Poorly handled.

"Say the word and I will make sure you will never see her again."

I can see that he's speaking the truth. "What would you do?" I ask out of curiosity.

"I will tell the council to send her to the other part of the planet. Out of the capital city."

Do I want that?

"No." I tell him. "I want her to see us happy. I want her to see how blind she was when she let you go."

I can feel Zer smiles, "I like the fire in you." His lips move along my jaw. "I like everything about you." Black dots I've to learn to love start dancing on his eyes, "I cannot live without you, Kate." He tells me as if it is a sin. "If... if one day you choose to leave me, I'm not sure I will let that happen. I'm not sure I will be able to let you go, I'm not sure I can accept it, and moving on." His hands are moving the thin straps of my sleeping gown, sending it to fall into a puddle around me.

"I'm not sure I can use my logic not to force you with all my power to stay with me." He captures me, one hand behind my neck and the other behind my waist. "Do you understand what I'm telling you?" slowly I can see the blackness creeping out of his eyes, running along his face to the tip of his nose.

"Just... give me all of you, always have your best interest in my well-being, and please... never, ever, lie to me, and I promise you never have to worry about me leaving you."

His thumbs caress my jaw, "You have my word." With that, he holds me up and I lock my legs on his hips, our lips are greedy to taste each other's skin, our hands are restless as we run them along each other bodies, and the intimacy we feel between us is nothing like before.

Before this, our intimacy is to fill the void in our body, and our mind, but as I feel him inside of me, I could swear I feel his soul inside me too, and by the look in his pitch black eyes, I can feel him holding a part of my soul inside him too. And nothing fulfilled me the way he does to me, with his body, his mind, and his soul. His heart officially belongs to me as mine his.

I have no intention of asking him to give it back or does he has any intention of giving mine back. I can feel his emotion towards me as clear as I can feel my own to him, and it was beautiful, yet somehow frightening. To know a person holds so much power over me, to hold so much power of a person. If he dies, I die, if I suffer, he suffers. He is I and I'm he. There is no line where he starts and I end, we both just somehow blends seamlessly into one mind, one soul.

Oh, how much do I love him.

***

I woke up in the morning with Zer's head between my legs, now he always has a cup of extra strong cofftea and some of me in the morning, and I start with my day screaming out his name from the bottom of my lung as I hold onto his hair for dear life.

We don't say another word about last night or mentioning his ex's name. He told me about their pairing, and how devastated she made him feel. How for years people around him pitied him to be separated from her, and how now he comes to the realization that nothing can ever happen between them and didn't matter what he does, say, or didn't matter how hard he tried to keep their pairing, they could never stay together.

She isn't for him and he isn't for her.

So I bid my husband goodbye and wishing him a good day at work, he rubs his nose to mine and places his face on my neck as he inhales my scent deeply, promising me to come home as soon as he can.

I spend my morning learning how to cook his favorite dish, from scratch, I tell DAI to instruct me, not to assist me. I stop at lunchtime to call Zer, we are talking about nothing for quite sometime before he regretfully tells me he needs to go, and I let him hang up but not before I tell him how much I can't live without him.

In the afternoon I ask DAI to read me some history of Tzarian. I found that nowadays Tzarian is actually a Tar-Zenirian, an ancestor from a hundred million thousand years ago, they are explained as the most powerful being ever alive as they can control and bend the time, as well as some natural element. But they apparently, were trying to be ahead of themselves and somehow messing with the universe leading to their almost extinction. Whoever left are forced to altering their DNA to cope with the new life their own kind accidentally set up, and by doing so the new Tzarian lost their time controlling power.

When I see the prediction picture of Tar-Zenirian I cannot help but think about the times Zer's physical appearance turns black. Tar-Zenirians were pitch black. Not the dark black which turns dark grey under the light, but dark as the black hole kind of pitch black. I cannot tell where is the edge of their eyes as everything is just black. Black skin, black eyes, black teeth, black nails. Black.

Although I can see from their features that Tzarian has come along way from Tar-Zenirian, I can still see strikingly similarity between them. The shape of their face, the shape of their eyes, the look of their hair, the build of their body, the shape of their shoulders, chest, and arms, although Tzarian seems to have a longer, more proportional length of legs. But one cannot miss the common trait. I wonder if my husband is more Tar-Zenirian than Tzarian.

You have, ONE mail received.

DAI informs me, and I can see in front of my door there is a metal basket with a big envelope inside. I bring it inside and thinking if I should open or not, and decided to open anyway, if it's urgent I can call Zer, perhaps he's waiting for this mail? But to my disappointment, everything is written in Tzarian, so I just leave it on the dining table for my husband to look at when he's back. Speaking about that, I should go and take a shower before he comes home.

So I rush upstairs to take a shower. When I finished I can hear DAI's greeting from downstairs.

"You're back!" true to his words, he comes home early. But what I see changed in a matter of second, with a blink, I feel as if a weight was dropped on my body, heaviness around me, inside me, on me, and I found myself fighting to just breathe, and Zer...

His whole body is pitch black.