Page 54 of Cloverleaf Station

Because he loved him too.

Kieron shut his eyes and resisted the urge to bite hard into his lower lip. He’d been doing such a good job of not thinking it! Not while they were working together, not while they were eating together, not while they were having sex, not while they were sleeping side by side, and Elenus was snoring, and Kieron could just poke him in the side, and he’d automatically roll over for him. Shit. Shit. It was one thing to have to deal with the feelings, it was another layer of awful to have to deal with the words too.

He loved Elenus. He loved Catie like a parent loved a child, but he loved Elenus. That lanky, too-tall, too-smart, too-pretty son of a bitch.

Maybe you don’t really love him. You’ve never been in love before, after all. Not even with Zakari, and you know he would have married you and brought you into his family if he thought you wanted that. He loved you so much. Xilinn loves you.

Those were the only adults Kieron could think of who had ever loved him, so it wasn’t much of a sample size to draw from, but the way he felt for them—and it was love, it was—wasn’t the way he felt for Elenus. Elenus inspired different, bigger, grander feelings. He inspired something that could be almost as dark as it was light yet at the same time made him want to set all darkness aside. Bigger than hate. Bigger than lust.

Damn it to the far side of the universe, why did I let it happen?

“Are you thinking of me?”

Kieron’s eyes snapped open. He stared up from his seat at Elenus, horrified that perhaps everything he’d been thinking about was written on his face. “What? Why would you think that?”

“Because you were frowning,” Elenus said lightly, not letting it get to him. When did anything ever get to him, when it wasn’t connected to Catie? “I simply assumed that frown was for me. Nine times out of ten they are, right?”

“No.”

“But this one was.”

“No, it …” Kieron didn’t want to lie—it seemed like too much effort for not enough reward since Elenus would see through it anyway. Evasion it is, then. “I’m going to go check the experiments from the control room, excuse me.”

“Catie’s song isn’t over yet, though.”

Oh, that was true. “I’ll … ask her to play it again for me later.”

“No, later won’t work.”

Kieron paused in the middle of standing up. “Why not?”

“Because we’re going to be talking later, so you might as well listen to her song now.”

Kieron looked warily at Elenus. “What … exactly … are we going to be talking about?”

“Oh, lots of really uncomfortable things that make both of us want to run away, or start a fight, or lock ourselves in places where we can be alone for a while,” Elenus said. The words were light, even mocking, but his expression was serious. “And we’re going to do it because we’re godsdamn adults who can avoid the stupidities of their pasts by being honest with each other. No big misunderstandings right now, not between you and me. Do you hear me?”

This was the last thing Kieron wanted. Couldn’t they just … enjoy each other’s company for the next few months before quietly parting ways once the radiation dimmed?

Apparently, they couldn’t. A frisson of fear went down his spine … followed closely by anticipation. “All right,” he said at last.

“Good.” They both sat and listened to Catie’s song all the way through to the end. It was beautiful.

What was coming next probably wouldn’t be.

Chapter twenty-three

They made it all the way to Kieron’s bedroom and shut the door before Elenus began speaking. “You can stop looking like that. Seriously, I’m not about to hit you.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Kieron snapped. “Stop treating me like a child and tell me what this is all about.”

Elenus sat down on the edge of the bed and crossed his legs at the ankles, leaning his long body back on his hands as he stared at Kieron, decidedly unimpressed. “Oh, trust me, this is me treating you like an adult. If I were treating you like a child, you’d definitely know it. There would be kinder, more oblique language involved, and I wouldn’t say things like, ‘You fucking idiot, what the hell did you think I was going to do, trap you here without a ship?’”

“As though you’d given any thought to anything beyond Catalina when you got here,” Kieron replied. “You can’t tell me you wouldn’t have blown up my ship on your own in order to save her.”

“No, that’s true. But that’s not what happened, is it?” Elenus persisted in being level toned even as his eyes spoke volumes, mostly insinuating how unimpressed he was with Kieron’s grasp of logic. “Your ship did get smashed to bits, true, but that was your idea, and you offered it up because you love Catie. All excellent, fantastic, the best. But I have another ship, you know. Why wouldn’t I make the Lizzie available to you so that you could do the one thing you’ve devoted the last few years of your life to, especially after the sacrifices you’ve made for Catie and me?”

“Because she’s special to you,” Kieron gritted out between clenched teeth. “Nothing is more special to you than your ships. The Lizzie might not be as advanced as Catie, not yet, but I know you’re working on upgrading her. You’re incredibly possessive of your intellectual property. Why would you ever let me take her away from you, to a place so far from your home and from this place, when you could just as easily tell me to catch a ride on the next mining ship that comes through?”