Page 82 of Elanie & the Empath
“He’s no longer in Thura. He’s left us.” Steady green eyes met mine. “He’s leftyou.”
“What?” I said again, the only word my mind could conjure. Sem wouldn’t have just left me. It was impossible.
“I’m telling you the truth.”
My internal lie detection program indicated he was being honest with me. My internal lie detection program was wrong. It had to be. “Did you”—I swallowed back the bile surging hot and acidic up my throat—“hurt him?”
Gol flinched, wounded by the accusation. “No.” His hand rose to cover his heart. “Of course not. I would never hurt another being, not here. Not in Thura. Please, Elanie. This will go better if you’re sitting.”
I stood my ground. Mostly because I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe.
“Very well.” Gol sighed, interlacing his fingers in his lap. “Your fiancé”—there was some heat in the word—“came to find me. He said you two had an argument. A fight, was his word.”
“Sem went looking for you?” Spots swam in front of my eyes as an excessive adrenaline warning scrolled across my visual field. Why would he seek out Gol? He didn’t even trust Gol. Why wouldn’t he come find me first? Why wouldn’t he talk to me? Had our fight made him that upset? I’d never fought with anyone before, and maybe I was bad at it. Maybe I’d hurt him, pushed him so far away he decided never to come back.
Gol’s voice was flat, so level I couldn’t tell if he was being cruel or kind. “He said he couldn’t stay here anymore and wanted to get back to your ship, but that you didn’t want to join him.”
I could only stare as the world around me went very, very still.
“He said that he cared about you too much to ask you to leave this place.”
My own words sliced through me:I won’t give up my freedom again. And if you care about me at all, you won’t ask me to.Maybe he really had left. Maybe he was doing exactly what I’d asked him to do.
“Why did you let him go?” I grasped at the burning pain in my belly. “He’ll die out there.” Without me to keep him warm. Without me holding him every night. “He’ll die.” My voice broke as a tear rolled down my cheek. “Why did you let him leave?”
“I couldn’t force him to stay,” Gol explained, and I wanted to scream at his suddenly compassionate expression. “That’s not what Thura is about. I tried, though. I swear it. I even asked him to wait until you were here soyou could at least say goodbye. But he’d made up his mind.” His chin dipped, as if in shame. “I gave him a snowglider, furs, rations, thermal generators, and all the equipment he said he would need to fix your pod. He won’t die out there, Elanie. I made sure of it. But he is gone.”
He wasn’t gone. Not yet, anyway. “He’s going to the pod?”
As Gol nodded, I moved at bionic speed, darting around our hut, searching for items that weren’t there: a coat, hat, gloves. Because none of those things were needed in this tropical paradise, in this place I couldn’t survive in without him. “I need to go after him. You have to help me. I need furs. I need?—”
“He doesn’t want that.” There was a gravity to his voice, to these words. It pulled on my feet until they stuck to the floorboards. “He doesn’t want you to follow him.”
My temples throbbed. “What do you mean?”
“He told me that you wanted to stay here. That’s what he wants. He believes you can be happy here, and he understands why you want to stay.”
“I’m happy when I’m with him!” It wasn’t Thura at all. It was Sem. It had always been Sem. “I want to be with him!”
“I’m sorry.” Gol’s compassion cooled. “But he doesn’t feel the same. He left without saying goodbye, without telling you this himself, because he didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
That couldn’t be true. It couldn’t. “He wouldn’t…just…leave,” I said through sudden, gasping sobs. I’d never cried like this, like my eyes were rivers, like my lungs were collapsing. “He wouldn’t do that…to me.”
Anger darkened Gol’s slanted brows. “He did leave. And you deserve better, Elanie. You deserve better than a weak and cowardly Portisan who abandoned you so easily.”Gnashing his teeth, he growled, “He is no man. And he isnota Thuran.”
I wanted to argue with him, tell him he was wrong, pound my fists into his chest until they were sore and bruised. But I couldn’t. Because my heart was breaking.
I buried my face in my hands, my tears streaking like meteors down my cheeks. Unable to stand anymore, I sat on the bed beside him.
Gol reached for me, folding me in arms that were too big, holding me with a grip that was too tight. “I am sorry, my dear. But I’m not surprised. He’s not the first organic to leave us, and he won’t be the last.” His voice was harsh, but when I looked up at his face, I found nothing but a kind understanding. “Thura isn’t meant for them. It’s meant for us.”
“We only had one fight.” My throat burned. My eyes burned. Everything burned. “Why would he leave me over one fight? It isn’t like him.”
His arched brow felt accusatory as he asked the question I’d been refusing to ask myself. “And you believe that you knew him well?”
I did. I knew I did. I knew Sem better than I’d ever known anyone. Didn’t I? We’d kissed and had sex and held on to each other through countless cold, dark nights. Only they hadn’t been countless. Because it had only been a month. And maybe a month wasn’t long enough to really know anybody. “I do,” I said with nothing close to conviction.
“You believe he is the type of man who would listen to you? Believe you even when you were upset?”
