The Future Chosen [was Anti-Dynasty/Extraordinary]

Broken Chapter 8

There could have been someone else, after Lourdes, and before Zamara.

When Lourdes had broken up with him, he was angry, and stayed angry past the point of remembering why. He didn't spend the time, as Emil suggested, hooking up with every woman he met. He thought about his next relationship as carefully as he did everything else.

He tried to plan love.

Emil had laughed in his face.

He chose someone, crazy as that seemed now. Andres made an academic exercise out of it, spending several weeks just on research. Studying which district was most advantageous to "marry into." Which sectors were prosperous and influential. Which families held a stake in these sectors, and which politicians were in their families up to the fourth degree (you were considered one family if your grandparents were siblings or related by marriage).

Then he narrowed it down to three families, to three particular women in those families.

And then finally, one person. They attended the same function once, and he managed to introduce himself to her. She knew who he was, and was friendly. If he asked her out, maybe she would have said yes.

She was two years older, and he liked that she was taking a master's degree in education. He liked the way she looked, even though he didn't factor that at all despite good looks being a Javenijk marriage requirement. She had dark hair, though he wondered how it would look if she grew it longer. If it would curl slightly at the ends, and feel light and feathery to the touch.

Then the obvious: He was looking for Lourdes, somewhere else.

At this point, after months of working on this "hobby" and finally meeting her, he ended it. They saw each other at another function, months later, and he was polite but no longer as friendly. She didn't get back in touch either.

***

He carried Lourdes over the threshold as they entered the private villa. He was planning to do that anyway, because he didn't want her to have to go up the three steps that led to the door.

"What do they think I'm doing right now?" Lourdes asked, her breath tickling his neck.

"Physical therapy."

"What does the physical therapist think I'm doing right now?"

"Your afternoon walk."

"And where does the guard who watches us walk think we're at now?"

"At an emergency consultation with the surgeon on duty because your stitches hurt."

"Nice." She was giggling, and it made him feel like he could carry her forever. "You're so good at sneaking around."

They learned, and then perfected this while in school, getting their Public Administration degrees at 513, where by law all future civil servants should be studying. It was one thing to be a college student sneaking out to meet a girlfriend; this was something else.

He wondered how far she was willing to go with this.

He was afraid to ask.

As soon as he locked the door he was kissing her. Kissing her before her feet hit the ground. Her mouth opened up to him with a whimper, that stabbed at his heart. It was as if she couldn't believe, still, that this was happening, that they were here. He wasn't sure how they ended up on the couch but he laid her down carefully, and spent a long minute just looking at her, feeling her hair on his fingers.

Light and feathery.

He was not going to find this again.

"I want you," she told him, voice filled with another kind of tension. "But I don't know if I can yet."

"Only when you're ready."

"I just feel like..." Her voice broke, and so did his heart, then. "Like there won't be time."

He kissed her so he wouldn't have to see the tears. "We'll find time. We'll make it. I'll get us to this villa again. We'll do it in the tiny bathroom back in the hospital, if we have to."

"Dear god, I hope not. Let's make a better memory to hang on to."

She thinks the time in Callemara is all we have, Andres realized. Lourdes thought he had risked everything for ten days with her, and then they would go back to their lives, to accepting the impossibility again. She thought he risked everything to make a new memory.

No,he was crazier, braver, stupider than that.