SoKeefe Moments

Chapter 42

This is the moment we've been waiting for guys. STELLARLUNE SPOILERS AHEAD!

        "I can do this," Sophie told herself, ordering her legs to carry her forward.

         If she didn't start moving, she was going to look like a creepy stalker hiding behind the pterodactyl enclosure to spy on Keefe.

         He'd still been training with Grady when she got home from FoxFire, so she'd headed upstairs and paced around her room, trying to figure out what she was going to say. 

        But now she had her speech prepared. And Keefe was sitting all along next to Verdi's pasture  drawing more of his memories, and Sandor was off checking in with patrols, giving her a little goblin-free privacy. 

        She was out of excuses.

        I can't do this. I can do this. I can do this. 

        And she had to do this—because Edaline was right. 

        If she didn't talk to Keefe, all those unspoken words were going to morph into a giant, ugly truth monster that would eventually gobble up their friendship and spit it back out in lonely, broken pieces. 

        Keefe meant too much for her to let that happen. 

        Even if she was pretty sure she was about to get rejected.

        And after that less-than-peppy pep talk, her legs refused to get moving.

        This is ridiculous, she told herself, adding a mental countdown.

        Three.

        Two.

        One.

        She'd barely taken a step before Silveny swooped out of the sky and landed next to Keefe, flapping her wings and stamping her hooves and letting out an exuberant whinny and...

        There was no way Sophie could get through the conversation with a steady chorus of KEEFE! KEEFE! KEEFE! flooding her brain.

        She'd have to find another time.

        The next morning seemed promising. Sophie had barely slept anyway, so she got up early and grabbed a platter of sweet berry swirls, figuring she could pretend she'd stopped by the Grove to bring him breakfast and then slowly ease in the scarier subjects. 

        But Keefe was already awake, pacing under the swaying branches of the Panakes tree. And as Sophie started to head over, she heard him snapped his fingers and saying evil-sounding things in his mom's eerie voice. 

        "The star only rises at Nightfall!"

        "Stellarlune is my legacy!"

        "You would have a queen!"

        Nothing appeared from the void—but Keefe seemed determined to figured it out.

        And when he tried a particularly bitter "I will destroy my son!" Sophie knew it definitely wasn't the right time for a nice long chat about her feelings.

        Keefe looked a little less gloomy when she checked on him after school that afternoon—but he also asked her if she thought it was weird that Ro hadn't shown up yet. And Sophie had actually been getting a little worried about that—even though she knew it could easily be that Ro was so close to ambushing Cadfael that she was choosing not to leave. It felt like they should at least try to check on her—and by the time they'd added a fresh layer of Linquillosa to Sophie's wrist and asked Grady to see if he could get an update from King Dimitar, it seemed smarter to wait another day for all the intense emotional stuff.