LIGHTNOVELONLINE Arc 1 | Chapter 12: That was… Enjoyable
Olivier’s belt clinked as he slid it back into place. Emilia watched him through lowered eyelids, her day and the happy sex hormones catching up with her. If they’d been near anything worth sleeping on, she definitely would have considered it. His eyes flickered up to her, just for the barest moment, before he was stepping forward and helping right her clothes because she’d apparently just been standing there with her romper around her feet. Hilarious. She hoped Olivier’s Censor had recorded her for later.
The aethernet shuddered slightly as he knelt, summoning water from it to rinse her clothes and then her body once again. Where the first time—before they’d fucked—he’d rinsed off remnants of dirt from the raid, this time it was all sweat and the stickiness of sex that his skill wiped away. He didn’t touch his own clothes, marred with dirt from her raid, from when he had touched her before so thoughtfully cleaning her up while they waited for her to come down from her high, from when he’d forced her to wait until she could fully consent to sex. Now, when he pulled her romper up—although, not before he leaned forward, pressing a kiss to the constellation of stars that wrapped around half of her ribcage, a sprinkling of aether shuddering into her—he was the messy one.
“So polite,” she mumbled, smiling up at him as he adjusted her straps. He was so tall, so broad and muscular, it made her feel like a doll—fragile, so easily broken if he only tried.
He hummed quietly at her, the sound of people leaving their jobs beginning to reach them through the alley—when had it gotten so late? Fucking nebulas, had she spent too long at the restaurant or too long fucking Olivier in the alley? She wasn’t sure, but her Censor lit up to tell her it was almost dinner time, although she wasn’t sure she was hungry just yet. Only tired.
“That was… enjoyable,” Olivier said. He’d never been good at knowing what to say after sex, and the consistency of it, even decades removed, made her smile a little sharper. The big strong non-dev, taken down by a good lay.
“Don’t generally enjoy yourself with anyone?” she asked, curious. Olivier was hot, but like everyone in his family, a complete workaholic. His family might have been trying to hook him up with random girls since before she’d known him, but he’d never taken it seriously—not before the war, certainly not after… Okay, she occasionally checked up on people from her old life. So sue her… or maybe not.
“I have someone I see regularly. It is nothing serious.” He hesitated for a moment, adjusting the waistband of her romper, his fingers dragging across a ticklish spot that she knew he must have remembered, and making her squirm. “They are also not a woman.”
She gaped at him. “Seriously? Do your parents know?”
Olivier shook his head, freezing for a sliver of a second as he assessed a message through his Censor, so fast that unless they knew his habits well, she doubted anyone would know that’s what he had done. “It isn’t serious,” he repeated, shrugging as he stepped away, his hands lingering on her hips like he couldn’t bear to let go just yet. She hoped she’d have bruises there later.
“Open relationship?”
“Not a relationship, just an arrangement.”
“Ah~” she sighed, bobbing up and down on her toes. Olivier had been sensible enough to move them out of the thorny patch, and the moss beneath her feet was soft and soothing. “My boyfriend isn’t serious either,” she said, for lack of anything else to say. How do you politely excuse yourself from the presence of an old acquaintance? “We’re open, though,” she added when Olivier’s expression tightened slightly.
“I… see…” he said quietly. Another message. Another.
“Someone looking for you?” she asked, hoping her tone didn’t sound too hopeful. She liked Olivier, but she needed to get out of here before he figured out too much about what she’d been up to the last decade.
“My mother,” he said tightly—too tightly. Their eyes met for a moment, held together by understanding that even a decade apart couldn’t erase.
“I’m sorry.”
Olivier shrugged, like there wasn’t anything to be done about it. “She doesn’t like that I’ve grown out of obeying her every demand.”
Emilia’s gaze, which had been following a bug—a real life one, her hallucinations having long disappeared—scurrying through the plants at their feet, shot up to him. “Seriously?”
His eyes slid back to hers—or maybe they had never left them while hers wandered. “Seriously,” he deadpanned back to her, and then she was laughing, leaning into his chest, his hands sliding up her sides and shoulders, soft and tickling, like he wanted to take her again—he probably could if she let him. She wasn’t going to, not now.
“Wow,” she sighed when her laughter ebbed. She leaned back, eyes trailing over him. She slid a memory of him in this moment into her Censor, saw his lips twitch as though he knew exactly what she would be using that memory for later. “Never thought I’d see the day when you’d go against your family’s wishes.”
“It has been a long decade,” he said, the look that shot across his face seeming to imply that he immediately regretted his words.
“It has,” she agreed, ignoring the implication behind his words—the “You would have known these things, if you hadn’t vanished.”
“You have to go?” Olivier asked, stepping away from her and letting his hands drop, and Emilia wondered if he knew how telling his tone and body language were. The slight tinge of sadness edging his voice, the way he moved slightly to the side, as though to block her from leaving.
“I should make sure my friends got back to campus okay,” she said, mentally swearing to herself. She hadn’t meant to reveal she was a student at Astrapan.
Olivier said nothing about it, although he had obviously made a note of it. Made a note of where to find her, if he needed her in the future. Made a note of where to check, to make sure she was still alive and kicking.
“Don’t tell anyone, okay?” She looked at him pleadingly, hoping he would understand why she needed this—why she needed to exist in a world separate from the one that he belonged to. No, that wasn’t right. She didn’t need him to understand why, she just needed him to trust her, or better yet, dislike everyone else in her former life enough not to tell them. He could do that! Olivier had always been an outlier in her life! He’d even gotten into a very out of character fight with her ex once. Granted, said ex was now dead, but still! He’d also had a few of them arrested by military SecOps another time, during the war. That might have been deserved, but it still showed a general dislike for the people she knew.
Would he like her friends now more? Pria would annoy him at first, but then they’d bond over seeing too much of other people. Sil and him would be awkward and silent. Beth and Olivier… Emilia had no idea what they would be like. They’d probably immediately love or hate each other, depending on their moods—not to mention whether Beth could get over the whole non-dev thing. As for Elijah…
Emilia’s lips pressed tight, trying not to laugh at the image of Oliver and Elijah together. That would… not go well. Possibly even worse than it had with her ex.
Olivier studied her for a moment, his body still angled slightly into her path, just enough that had she wanted to push past him, she would have to actually push. If he noted her amusement at his expense, he said nothing of it. “Alright,” he said after so long that Emilia had begun to believe he wasn’t going to agree. “Let me give you some money before you go.”
“I don’t—” she started to say, mouth snapping shut when he glared at her.
His eyes dragged over her again, head to toe, before snapping back up. He didn’t say anything, but she knew what he was thinking. “Yes, you do need my money.”
Apparently, even slightly cleaner, she still looked rough. Which, fair. Also, rude. Well, he also now knew she was a starving student who hated raids. It wasn’t exactly hard to guess that her bank account ran on fumes.
She huffed, muttering about bossy old men and ignoring the way he muttered back about bratty little princesses, but this time, when his Censor tapped on hers—not asking for full access this time, just a request to be allowed to send some money over—she let him in. The money slid into her accounts and she didn’t even bother to check how much he’d sent—whatever it had been, it was surely too much. She definitely wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while—possibly ever. It wouldn’t surprise her if the amount were truly disgusting.
Then, a contact number slid into her Censor. Olivier de la Rue, it read.
“I wasn’t sure if you had erased it, or not,” he said.
She looked back to him, finding, for perhaps the first time since he had entered the alley—save when he had been rearranging his clothing—that he wasn’t looking at her. She followed his gaze to the top of a tree, reaching up towards a small stream of natural light slipping between the towering buildings around them. Most of the plants on the planet could survive in the dark, as long as they had natural air around them, filled with chemicals that could replace the light of the sun. They wouldn’t generally thrive, but they could live. These alley plants were thriving, though. If she had still been close to Olivier, not hiding from his world, she might have asked what in the world was going on in his family’s ancient compound. She wasn’t, and she let her curiosity die inside her.
“I didn’t,” she said, adding the updated photo of Olivier to her records—so serious, too serious—although she left the one that would light up her vision if he called—if her Censor let his call through, which it wouldn’t—as an adorable one of him sitting at their kitchen table, sex tousled, shirt long-lost and pants still open—although he had tucked himself away by then. He had been watching her then, too.
She pushed the image away, something curling in her stomach at seeing it—at seeing a body that no longer existed. She had never seen the healed result of the burns that covered so much of his body—had run away before he had even come out of the coma—but she had seen the burns, sizzling and spreading as she almost died trying to save his life. As she tried to make him stay with her.
And then she had been the one to leave.
“You don’t let us call you.”
“I don’t.” She glared at him, still examining that stupid tree, all his focus on that tree, tucked away in the dark of his family’s compound so she couldn’t see more than its top, desperately seeking light it didn’t actually need, just desperately wanted. The leaves at its top were the same fresh green colour as Olivier’s right eye, the clouds far above still tinged with pink.
“Fine,” she grumbled, unblocking his calls. Her Censor still would have notified her had he—or any of the other people she had blocked from calling or finding her—tried to call, but only after they’d given up. A few people still tried calling her, every once in a while. Most had long since given up. Only three—now four—people’s calls were allowed through. Two of those people barely called anymore. “If you call me too often, I’ll block you again.”
Olivier’s eyes snapped back to her, all interest in the tree gone since it had accomplished its purpose of pissing her off. So fucking annoying, that even after all this time, not having his attention locked onto her was like a scab she couldn’t not pick at. “Thank you.”
Emilia growled at him, finally pushing off the wall to leave. He stepped aside, cocky smile ghosting over his face. He let her pass, let her leave him standing there alone in the mess of plants as she ran away from her past—from the mess of love and blood that hid there—yet again.
She thought she heard him whisper goodbye, but when she turned back, just before she reached the corner that would return her to the street, he was gone. Gone, just like he had been that first time they parted.
