Page 75 of The Seducer
“I don’t care,” I said with a knot in my chest. “The way I feel when I’m with you…” My voice was thick with emotion. “Last night was amazing.” Cupping her face with both my hands, I stared into her eyes with intensity. “I’m not walking away from that.”
Athena wrapped her hands around my wrists and pulled at them, but I didn’t let go of her face.
“I didn’t tell you that I loved you last night, but I think I do.”
“That’s good,” Athena whispered. “If you can love me, then you can love someone else too.”
A sense of panic was rising within me. “I don’t want to love someone else,” I insisted. The way she just stood there, looking at me with her eyes overflowing with tears, made it sink in that she had made up her mind.
Releasing her face, I took a step back. “So this is it then?”
Her sad smile twisted my insides. “Yes. I hope you will see that we have given each other a great gift.”
My jaw hardened. “No, I don’t see that at all.”
Athena’s shoulders fell and with a sigh, she breathed, “Hopefully, in time, you will.”
A knock on the door was followed by Hans popping his head in. “Are you ready to go?” he asked me, and I wanted to shout that I wasn’t, but if Athena didn’t want me, I couldn’t force her.
“We’re already late,” he said in an apologetic tone. “We have to get going.”
“Goodbye, Athena.” My voice was dripping with bitterness. “Thank you for last night,you were a great fuck.” My pride took that last cheap shot. It was that same pride that forced my feet to walk to the drone without looking back. My heart on the other hand was shouting for me to run back and beg for Athena to love me.
I could do that. I was an Nman and we never begged.
“Our first stop is a hospital about two hours from here,” Hans said as the drone took off. “There will be a lot of press to witness your meeting with the local doctors and patients.”
I looked straight ahead, with empty eyes. Five days earlier, I would have cracked a joke, and made fun of the tension, but the loss that consumed me at that moment was too intense for me to care about what Hans thought of me.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Hans asked me half an hour later, when I still hadn’t said a word.
“No.”
“Sometimes it helps to talk about your emotions,” he said, “and as part of my mediator training, I took a lot of psychology classes.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I just meant that I might be able to help you if you tell me what you’re sad about.”
I snorted, and turned my head away. “Unless they handed out magic wands at those psychology classes, I doubt there’s much you can do.”
“You could let me try,” Hans coaxed.
I wanted to shout at him to leave me alone, but Hans was just trying to be nice, and I needed his help.
“Look, I’ll play nice in the hospital and wherever I need to be, but you gotta do me a favor, man.”
“Sure, what can I do to make you feel better?” Hans asked.
“I’m not leaving the Motherlands without talking to Laura.”
“Laura? You mean Magni’s wife?”
“Yes. Your people know where she is. I don’t need to know where she lives, just set up a meeting where I can talk to her.”
“I don’t have that kind of power, I already told you that I’m just a rookie.”
“But a creative rookie. Put those mediator skills to use and make it happen.”
