Crossbow practice wasn’t half as fun as sword practice, but I rather enjoyed it. It had given Casersis and me a chance to talk and bond over something we both found fun. True, we were able to bond over sword forms, but that was so physically taxing after a while, and it required constant concentration. Though, Casersis had said it would become instinct after a while and require little concentration at all. I couldn’t wait for that. I was so excited because I had always loved swords, knives, and armor.
Hell. Casersis had said I could get armor made in Adradis if I wanted because elves still wore it regularly. I was so excited about that shit that I nearly made Casersis take me yesterday, but I held myself back, but only because going to that place made Cass sad.
Today, we started with crossbow practice since we proved twice that sword forms led to hot, sweaty sex, and it would be best to get everything done so we could bask longer in the afterglow. And since we were working on crossbow practice, and it wasn’t about to lead to sex anytime soon, and Casersis seemed to be in a good mood, I brought up, once again, what had been bothering me while I loaded the next bolt into my very epic-looking crossbow.
“So, Cass…”
“I dislike the tone in your voice,” he muttered.
I chuckled and nudged his shoulder with mine. “You’ve been distant for days, Cass. And I know you don’t feel that way, but some of your actions make me think you don’t want to be seen in public with me. And more often than that, you seem so sad that it physically hurts because you won’t tell me what’s wrong, so I can at least try to help. So, either you tell me what’s going through your brain and get this shit out in the open so that we can deal with it, or I might have to resort to drastic measures.”
He blew a breath through his nose as he lifted his crossbow, his arm straight and steady, his eyes on the target instead of his weapon, and pulled the trigger. I grunted as his bolt struck the center target, perfect bullseye. “I promise you, beauty. I am not, in any way, ashamed or afraid to be seen with you in public for any reason.”
“Then what’s your problem?”
He frowned and, without looking at me, pulled his crossbow string back to load another bolt. “It is complicated.”
“Because you’re a complicated guy,” I teased. I lifted my own crossbow, trying to mimic Casersis’s stance, and sighed as my arm trembled under the weight of the weapon. “And this thing is heavier than it looks.”
“Your strength will increase with our training,” he assured me. And I knew he was just trying to change the subject. Good luck with that. I was worse than a terrier with a toy. “We will start adding exercises to get your arm strength up, but I am positive you will hate me after your first session.”
“Oh God, what are you going to do to me?”
He finally glanced over at me, his blue eyes piercing. “You will be spending fifteen minutes a day, per arm, holding that crossbow out in front of you. Then you will do the same while holding it out to either side. Then we will gradually increase the length of time and the weight as you build strength.”
Childish as it might be, I groaned and was tempted to throw a fit. “You better have some way of keeping me entertained during that hour.”
The grin he gave me made me want to smack him upside the head, but I somehow managed to ignore it and just raise a questioning brow at him. “You had better, Cass.”
“Oh, I think I can find ways of entertaining you,” he murmured. “At the very least, I can guarantee a mutually profitable rewards system.”
I snorted as I lined up my target and pulled the trigger before my arm shook itself to death. “I bet you can.”
We practiced for a few more minutes, Casersis hitting the bullseye every time and ignoring the fact that I rarely ever actually hit the target because of my quaking arm. But I wasn’t about to let him off the hook. He may have thought I had forgotten my original train of thought, but he would be wrong. Dead wrong.
When we were reloading after we retrieved the bolts from in and around the targets, I glanced over at him again. “So, are you ever going to tell me what your problem is?”
Casersis blew out another frustrated breath, pausing with his hand between his crossbow and his quiver of bolts. After another breath, he finished the move, retrieved a bolt to reload his crossbow, and spoke as he pulled back the bowstring. “It is not a simple matter, beauty. Please give me time.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ve given you plenty of time, Cass.”
He flinched at my tone but shook his head. “I must wrap my mind around my problem before I can openly discuss it. Can you give me that time?”
Finished reloading my own crossbow, I pointed it at the ground, glad to give my arm a rest, and leveled him with my most unimpressed look. “Can’t you just say what’s bothering you? Cass… I can help you wrap your mind around it if you give me a chance. Let me help you!”
The way Casersis hung his head, the way his shoulders slumped, I knew I wasn’t going to get anything out of him, and that just pissed me off. What was he keeping from me, and why was he keeping it so close when all it was doing was making us both miserable? I couldn’t understand him. The worst thing was, I was getting to the point where I didn’t want to understand him, and that scared me.
I loved Casersis. Sure, he was mysterious, and I wanted to pick him apart because I hated secrets. But he was a genuinely good guy. His heart was in the right place more often than not. He tried to do his best.
But damn it, I wanted to see him happy and keeping this shit locked inside was killing him, which was killing me. And the more he kept that shit inside, the more he hid it from me, the more I started questioning myself.
I lifted my crossbow and fired a bolt at the target, not even surprised when it sailed over the giant target and hit a tree behind it. I just lowered my weapon and went back to reloading, ignoring how it made my arms and fingers hurt to pull back on the bowstring, ignoring how everything from my fingers to my chest to my abs hurt from aiming. All my fatigue was doing was keeping me from using the damned crossbow to beat Casersis into the ground. I wasn’t normally a violent person, but I was pissed off, and my imagination ran wild. And the image of beating Casersis into the ground like a nail with the crossbow as my hammer was oddly satisfying.
My mind wouldn’t leave me alone, and I wondered if Casersis was having a similar problem. Was he starting to have second thoughts about our relationship? Hell, even I was starting to wonder if we could work. I couldn’t deal with all these doubts. I wasn’t sure I could deal with living forever, either. If I wanted to die now, I couldn’t wait for old age. I’d have to either end it myself or piss someone off to the point of killing me. Not that I wanted to die or anything. I loved living. But, forever sounded a little too daunting. Sure, most twenty-one-year-olds thought they would live forever, but after watching my parents die in front of me, I wasn’t your normal twenty-one-year-old. I had a firm grip on reality.
For most, reality was simple. You lived a set amount of time that varied depending on genetics, health, and other factors. No one lived forever. Taxes would never go away. You know, that kind of thing. But with Casersis, all of that just melted away. If we didn’t want to pay taxes, we just left the world and went to another. Forever was ours unless someone or something killed us.
It was as terrifying as it was wonderful.
I watched Casersis reload with a heavy heart. He had shut me out again, and I hated it. I didn’t want this to be us. I didn’t want a wall between us. And with that thought in mind, I set my crossbow down and crossed my arms over my chest to stare him down.
I had to admit, the way his muscles flexed under his thick sweater when he held up the crossbow, the way his hand never trembled as he held the heavy weapon, it was so hot that I wanted to drag him off to the warmth of our bedroom. I couldn’t wait until the spring when I could see him fire a crossbow shirtless. Jesus. Just the mental image had me hot and hard.
This wasn’t working. I couldn’t stay mad if I stared at Casersis because everything he did turned me on. I blamed my hormones as much as I blamed Casersis. He knew what weapons training did to me, and I had a feeling he was doing it on purpose.
“Cass…”
Casersis sighed and lowered his crossbow. “Dustin, please…”
“You’ve been avoiding this for weeks.”
Casersis’s expression crumpled, and he leaned against the tree behind him. It took him a moment, but he finally looked over at me, sadness glittering in his eyes and etching a tiny line between his brows, and whispered, “I do not know how to say it, Dustin. If I did, I would have told you weeks ago.”
His sadness hurt. Physically hurt like I got kicked in the chest. I went to him, wrapped my arms around his waist, and pressed my forehead against his temple. “Try?”
A humorless laugh gusted into my hair. “I have been trying. For weeks.”
I shrugged and kissed his ear, knowing that was a low blow. “Then ramble about it, and maybe I can help you get it straight.”
The suggestion made him uncomfortable. I could tell the moment his entire body stiffened that he wouldn’t answer me, that he wouldn’t try. When Casersis became uncomfortable, he shut down, and he was doing that very thing right now, and I still didn’t know him enough to figure out how to keep it from happening.
Even my broken whisper of, “Cass, please don’t shut me out. It isn’t fair,” got little more than a bowed head and a murmured, “I am sorry, my beauty.”
And it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to me, but it also wasn’t fair to him. I could deal with this shit. I honestly could. What I couldn’t deal with was Casersis being sad all the time. If he wanted time to think, great. I could do that. But this was killing him. Every day he seemed more morose than the last, and that was what I couldn’t stand. Watching him suffer hurt worse than hitting my thumb with a hammer, hurt worse than taking a steel I-beam to the chest that one time when George got the twitches while working the crane. It felt like the world was crashing around us, and we had the tools to keep it from happening, but they were in another room, and we couldn’t get to them because somehow, Casersis lost the key.
With a sigh, I stepped away and picked my crossbow back up. “Maybe we should skip sword training today.” I couldn’t look at him. It was killing me. Just thinking about this was making it hard to breathe, hard to think. “Maybe we should spend the day apart, you know? We’ve been spending almost every minute of every day together since you went on vacation from your jobs, and before that, we spent every waking minute you were home together.”
I didn’t dare look at him. I didn’t dare.
“No… no, Dustin—”
I headed toward the targets to retrieve our crossbow bolts. “Find a way to get your head out of your ass and talk to me, Cass. I’m heading back inside.” And even though it felt like every step I took was leading me to a torture chamber, I left him there in the side yard to go clean and put my crossbow away. It was bad enough that I was still struggling with everything that was happening to me. I couldn’t deal with Casersis shutting me out right now, on top of everything else.
Instead of dwelling on it, I went and grabbed a fresh shirt, wetted a washcloth, and wiped my arms, neck, and chest off from the sweat, and once I finished dressing, I headed out to Casersis’s desk to go back to drafting the gazebo. It was a project I was excited to get started on in the late spring. I had almost everything planned out except for what types of benches to put in. Did I have a built-in bench around the inside perimeter? Did I build benches out of wood and wrought iron so we could move them wherever we wanted? Or did I set up a swing in the center facing the forest so Casersis and I could cuddle while watching nature through the falling water generated by the rooftop fountain?
I was leaning toward the swing. It sounded the most romantic, and I wanted romantic things for Casersis. Yeah, I was hurt, and I was pissed that he was keeping things from me, that he didn’t trust me to help him sort through his shit, but I still loved him and wanted to make him smile. I trusted that, given time, he would tell me. I had to trust in that because otherwise, I’d go batshit in ways that physical labor and training wouldn’t be able to touch.
I started working on the shape of the swing. Did I want it to be ergonomic or old fashioned? Or did I do one of those circular bed types that I saw in a few old shows from the 2000s? Did I want chains or rope to hold it up? What kind of cushions?
The project took up my entire concentration so that when Kevin came in and took a seat across from me, I startled and dropped my stylus.
“Something wrong, Kev?”
He smirked. “Dad’s being a shit.”
“Yeah. I’ve noticed that, too.”
Kevin snorted and shifted until his ankle rested on his opposite knee. “I’ve tried to tune it out, but his avoidance is driving even me nuts. I don’t see how you put up with it.”
I sighed and saved my work. After powering down the workstation, I slumped down in the comfortable desk chair and rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. “Mostly because I can almost feel how distressed it makes him. Cass wants to tell me, but it’s like he can’t. It’s killing him, but I just don’t know how to pry it out of him without losing my cool and getting in a fight with him. I want to help him, not push him away.”
Groaning, I thumped my head back against the chair and stared at the ceiling. “I’d ask you if you knew what was wrong with him, but even if you knew, I’d want Cass to be the one to tell me. I just hate how he’s making himself miserable by keeping it locked away and how it’s making me miserable because when I ask, he shuts me out or changes the subject thinking I don’t know what he’s doing.”
Kevin grunted and ran a hand over his short hair. “I wish I knew, kid. If I did, I’d at least let you know if it was something stupid you needed to drag out of him, or if it was something important that you needed to be patient for.”
“Either way, it’s important,” I said softly. “Whether it’s important to us or not, it’s important to him, or he’d have spilled his guts long before now. He wouldn’t continue letting it torture him. Or, at least, I hope that would be the case.”
Kevin nodded. “I hope so, too.”
“What’s he up to?”
“Moping around for the most part. He’s in polishing all his weapons. I have a feeling afterward, he’ll come looking for you again. He’s rather predictable, especially where you’re concerned.”
I laughed and scrubbed a hand over my face, then stood for a long stretch. When I relaxed again, Kevin was standing, too. “You need anything before I head out?”
“Nah. Thanks, Kevin.” I pushed the chair up to Casersis’s desk and headed for my room. “I’ll entertain myself for a bit with a role-playing game.”
He nodded, and I headed in, closing the panel behind me. My eyes instantly landed on the stuffed kitten Casersis had won for me at the fair, taking ages to earn enough tickets without cheating by using magic. Just remembering it made me feel my wrist and frown when I remembered I had taken the leather bracelet off for my shower. I’d forgotten to put it back on again, and my wrist felt wrong.
Without another thought, I went into the bathroom to fetch it and struggled for a few minutes until I finally got the clasp to hook on the opposite ring.
I needed to get out. The thought of sitting on my ass, playing a game in my room suddenly made my skin crawl. So, with that in mind, I activated my CommLink. “Call Kevin.”
