My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 278

Elara

"Are you lonely?"

The question caught him clean across the jaw. I saw it land before he covered it, the small flinch, and then the cover came down fast and smooth.

"No." He gave me an easy grin. "Why would I be lonely? I have everything a man could want, right here in this room."

I smiled back at him, and I didn't argue, because I didn't need to. Eyes don't lie. Mouths do all day long, but eyes are stupid, honest things, and his had already told me. And for one moment, standing under his fake sky in his too-much room, something turned over in me that I think was pity. He'd done this to himself. Built his own cage with his own hands and locked the door and threw out the one person who made him want to live, and now he stood in the wreckage of it trying so hard to be happy, reaching for the joy he'd murdered, hoping if he danced under enough stars it would come back.

"You're the happiest person in this room," I said.

I didn't mean it as a knife. That's the part that surprised me. It came out plain and true, because he was the happiest one here, no contest, and the reason was simple. He had a life. A broken, self-poisoned one, but a life, a thing that was his, that he could ruin and rebuild. I had none. I was a body somebody else owned, a smell sealed into skin, a woman counting steps in the dark. He could be sad in his own house. I couldn't even be myself in mine.

I moved before the thought could get its hooks all the way in.

"We are not dancing to this," I said. "This slow miserable thing. God."

I went to the corner and hit the button, once, twice, three times, until the strings died and something with a pulse came up in their place, low and quick, the kind of thing that lives in the hips. I was already moving before I turned back to him, my shoulders going, and I came across the floor toward him loose and easy, and after a beat of standing there like a startled ox Kane found it. He found the rhythm in his feet and his hands, and he met me halfway.

I put my hands out and he caught them and pulled me in, and we danced. Properly. Feet and shoulders and the bump of a hip, the two of us moving to the beat under a ceiling full of stars meant for a child that was never coming. He spun me out and I came back laughing and he caught my waist and I let him, and his hands went lower than a dance needs and I didn't move them, and he leaned in and put his mouth at my neck and I tipped my head and let him have it, both of us grinning into it, living in the only thing there was to live in. It was a grey little patch of ground, that room, sitting in the middle of everything rotten we'd both done to get there. But a real thing can still grow on grey ground. For an hour it grew.

The song wound down on its own. Something slower slid in behind it and neither of us reached to change it this time. The beat dropped away and we just swayed, my back against his chest now, his arms crossed over my front, his chin resting on the top of my head. The stars turned slow overhead. We talked the way people talk when the heat's gone out of a moment and left something warm in its place.

"It's a good room," I said.

"It's a good room."

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