Page 114 of Planet Zero
“What situation?” His voice dropped to a threatening near-whisper.
“The situation where you couldn’t resist me because you had no other choice.”
“I always had a choice,” he stated flatly.
Addie took a shuddering breath. “Like you did with Samantha?”
Mentioning Samantha’s name didn’t make Zoark any more cheerful. “It isn’t the same!”
“She tapped you against your will.”
His eyes sharpened. “Who told you that?”
“You did. When I came to your tent, after our first time… You were crazy with fever, and you thought I was her. You said things…”
He kept looking at her. “So itwasyou.”
“Do you believe it was her?”
“I thought I dreamed the whole thing up.”
Addie felt awful. Their one passionate coupling - and he didn’t remember it; thought she was someone else.
He smiled then, a cold smile. “It’s true, she had tapped me when I was at my weakest, but don’t underestimate my participation. I hadn’t been unconscious with Samantha. I had allowed for it to happen. I just hadn’t expected to live long enough for it to matter.”
Addie swallowed thickly. “Did you hate her?”
“No.”
“Love her?”
“No.”
“Was she important to you at all?”
He sighed. “I tried to care. She didn’t make it easy.”
“I don’t understand.” She was being intrusive. But the past had a way of molding the future, and Addie suspected a lot of Zoark’s issues were rooted in that cursed city.
“Samantha was like a wind,” he said, looking into the distance. “One day that wind blew from the valley, all warm and smelling of flowers. Then the next day it was like a storm that comes from the mountains, cold and gusty, tearing at the flesh. And some days there was no wind at all. I never knew what I was going to get, where I stood with her. She had this clear, soft laugh that went to your bones. Some days she would look at me with her wide blue eyes, and I knew she needed me. Some days she said she loved me. And then there were days when I would come home from the hunt to find her with other males.”
It was Addie’s turn to pause and reflect. “Not all human women are like she was. Not at all. She sounds like an unfortunate exception.”
“That’s all I saw in the city. I admit, the others were easier to deal with than Samantha, but they all liked male bodies too much to stay true to one.”
From what she’d just heard, Addie thought that this manipulative Samantha woman had been deeply miserable herself, and she had sought to unload some of her unhappiness onto others. Zoark must have been an easy target. He could absorb a lot of shocks, and his protective instincts would never allow him to slap around a small weak woman, no matter how mean.
“Frankly, she sounds unstable,” she told him.
“She was a restless one,” he agreed. “She was forever torn between her convictions and her desires. I felt sorry for her.”
Fluffy Ihr squeaked from above, spotting a bug he considered prey.
“Let me take you back,” Zoark said.
“Don’t you need to, you know, dothatbefore we head back?”
The answering motion of his head was slow and negative.
