The Alien’s Seduction by Zoey Draven
Chapter Twenty-One
By the time that they made camp that night, Crystal had counted over four dozen tevvax plants they passed on their travels that day. And every single time, she couldn’t help but remember the night before, a constant reminder.
Her other constant reminder was Cruxan’s quietness. Crystal hadn’t realized how much she liked his voice until she’d barely heard it all day. Tension was at an all time high between them. She could feel it in every step they took and while she figured it had something to do with that morning, Crystal still felt slightly confused about his demeanor that day. Was he angry at her?
The landscape hadn’t changed much throughout their journey, so when they made camp that night, it was next to another agave tree, though it wasn’t an enclosed space like the previous night. They were out in the open, wedged up against the side of a black, jagged boulder.
“I’ll help you get the gourds,” Crystal murmured quietly when Cruxan settled on the spot.
He only nodded.
A short while later, they returned to camp with three gourds each. Cruxan had also managed to catch their dinner for the night which he’d called virvira yesterday. They reminded her of rabbits…if rabbits had giant, sharp teeth and claws like a velociraptor.
He got a fire started in no time at all and once they placed the water gourds close to the flames to heat, Crystal couldn’t take the quietness anymore.
“Are you angry with me?” she asked softly, watching as he dragged a limp virvira onto his lap, beginning to skin it.
His gaze flashed up to hers and Crystal felt her shoulders relax. His eyes weren’t angry. She recognized anger. She knew it well thanks to Leo.
“Nix, luxiva,” he said softly. “I am not.”
“You’ve been so quiet today,” she commented.
His gaze returned to the virvira, but he didn’t reply.
She didn’t wait for one as she hesitantly asked, “Is it because of this morning?”
She didn’t want to bring it up, but all day, she’d felt a little sick about the way she’d dismissed his words so easily. There had been raw emotion in his voice that morning and she’d pulled away…just like she always did.
To keep herself safe? Yes. So why did she feel so miserable about it?
His hand paused on his dagger. She didn’t carry it anymore. She’d given it back to him yesterday morning.
His words seemed measured and even as he said, “I do not know for certain. It might be many things, not just this morning.”
“What things?” she couldn’t help but ask.
A small exhale of air left him. He seemed to think for a long moment before he said quietly, “I am trying to make sense of what is between us…and what is not. I am trying to understand you, to understand myself. Because I feel like I am different with you and sometimes it makes me feel like a stranger to myself.”
Crystal’s lips parted before she swallowed hard. “You don’t think you’re yourself around me?”
She didn’t know how to take that knowledge but it made her…sad. She knew the way she was. Sometimes it pushed people away because of how reserved and guarded she could be.
And she didn’t understand herself either because she’d purposefully wanted to put distance between them…but the fact that she had succeeded made her want to cry.
Why am I like this?she thought.
Because of Leo?
No, she thought. Perhaps he planted the seed, but I was the one who watered it, who watched it sprout, who let it grow out of control until it consumed me.
It had been five years since Leo. Five years. His influence and the memory of their dark relationship might always be with her but she didn’t have to let it consume her.
“I am different,” he said. “But I am different just for having found you. I cannot ever be the same.”
Her heart stuttered in her chest.
“Do you wish it was different?” she couldn’t help but ask softly.
“What would be different?” he asked, his gaze returning to her.
Crystal swallowed. Her eyes flickered to the golden flames.
“Me,” she forced out, though she fidgeted with her fingers as she said it. “Do you wish I was different?”
“That is an impossible question, luxiva,” he told her, frowning.
“Just tell me,” she said. “I want to know.”
“I wish…” he trailed off, making a frustrated sound in the back of his throat.
“Cruxan.”
“I wish that you were not so determined to push me away.”
Her heart squeezed, but she already knew that. But him voicing it seemed to hurt even more.
His voice quieted as he said, “I wish that you would give this a chance. I do not know what we can be…but you do not either.”
Crystal swallowed, feeling the weight of this conversation.
“You would be asking me to give up my home, my sister, my ambitions,” she said softly. “If I gave this a chance and gave in to this, that is what I would be giving up. Everything. Would you do the same for me?”
His gaze zeroed in on her from across the clearing.
“Would you give up everything and leave Luxiria behind for me?”
“If you asked it of me, tev,” he said, his eyes hard and unyielding. His certainty, the absolute certainty in his tone, made her breath whoosh out of her lungs.
“How can you be so certain of that? Of me?” she asked, bewildered, blinking.
“Why is it that you believe you are not deserving of that certainty?” he asked, his tone frustrated.
Crystal saw it then, his anger. But it was a different kind of anger. It was anger directed at her, on her behalf.
She wasn’t frightened of that anger. It was the opposite actually. She felt that anger seep into her and warm her, not make her feel icy cold.
“I don’t know,” she stumbled out.
“Nix, I think you do,” he replied, going back to skinning the virvira. “You just wish for me not to know.”
Crystal’s breath hitched. When she opened her mouth, no sound came out and she helplessly watched him without knowing how to make whatever this was better. Without telling him about Leo, she didn’t know how to make him understand…and for some reason she didn’t want him to know about Leo.
She didn’t want him to know how pathetic and weak she’d felt, how frightened and ashamed she’d been during that time in her life and all the years after it.
At the same time, Crystal didn’t want that relationship to define her anymore. She wanted to put her past behind her, to move forward towards better things.
A part of her wanted to believe that Cruxan was one of those better things. She just didn’t think she had the courage to risk that.
A way to move forward was to talk about it, to air it out like a dusty, dark room that hadn’t seen sunlight in a long, long time.
She waited until Cruxan was finished with the virvira and had washed his hands with one of the gourds. She waited until they sat quiet, listening to the sizzling meat and the crackling of the fire. She waited until she knew that if she waited anymore she would lose her nerve. Already, she had lost her appetite.
So, though her hands trembled so much she had to press them into the tops of her thighs, though her mouth was dry and her throat felt scratchy, Crystal said, “I have only been in one relationship in my life. And it was a terrible one.”
Cruxan’s gaze settled on her, pinning her in place.
Looking into his eyes, she admitted quietly, “His name was Leo and he abused me in every way he could. Physically, emotionally…and sexually.”
Crystal couldn’t point out what changed in Cruxan because his features never shifted. But something did change in him, so suddenly and startling that she was momentarily taken aback by it.
“I met him when I was seventeen. A child, really. I was naive and young and I just…I just wanted to be loved,” she admitted. “He was handsome and charming and he made me feel special. I dove into a relationship with him quickly and for the first five or six months, it was really good. I thought I was in love and I ignored some warning signs during that time. I ignored comments from my sister and my mom because I didn’t want to believe them.”
And she’d paid the price for that, she thought.
“But shortly after that, his true self began to come out, slowly but surely,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around her body when she shivered.
“Tell me everything,” he rasped, his voice dark and hard and unyielding. She straightened at that voice.
“He had a temper,” she murmured quietly. “He would get angry really quickly. The first time he hit me,” Cruxan growled in the back of his throat, looking away for a brief moment, “he was mad that I was running late. We were going to his friend’s house for a party and he was picking me up. I kept him waiting for maybe five minutes and when I finally got into the car, he didn’t say anything. He just gave me this look, one I’ve always remembered, and then he slapped me across the face.
“I was so stunned, I just sat there while he drove to his friend’s house. He didn’t say anything but once we got there…it was like nothing had happened. He told me to smile and I did,” she admitted, disgust rolling in her belly though for Leo or herself, she didn’t know. “I acted like nothing was wrong because I didn’t know what else to do. He was in a good mood at the party and afterwards, he was so sorry about it. He apologized profusely, saying it would never happen again, that he loved me, that he just had a bad day, every excuse he could think of. And I accepted it. I thought it would never happen again.”
But it did.
Cruxan was unmoving from across the fire, his face so still. Except for the fierce ticking of his jaw, except for the slight clenching of his fists, she would have thought he was a statue.
“It started happening more and more. He started hitting me and grabbing me in places where I could cover the bruises,” she said. “I was eighteen by then, still in high school, and I would wear long-sleeved shirts, scarves, long pants almost every day to hide it. At first, he would always feel bad about the abuse. He would apologize, he would buy me gifts, he would treat me so well afterwards…and like a fool I always forgave him. In my mind, I thought I had even deserved some of it.”
Looking back, that hurt most of all. That she had such low self-esteem, such low confidence, that she always took him back.
“Those stretches of reprieve got shorter and shorter over time,” she said. “He started telling me that if I left him, no one would ever want me again. That I wasn’t pretty enough or thin enough or smart enough or talented enough or whatever shit he wanted to spew that day. Over time, I believed that too. It’s strange the way the mind works. He said it so often that I actually started to believe it as fact.”
She shook her head, wiping away the angry, mortified, sad tears that dripped down her cheeks.
“When I graduated high school, when I told him I wanted to go to art school, he said I couldn’t and so I didn’t. When I told him I wanted to go over to my mom’s house or go see my sister, he told me I couldn’t…and so I didn’t. I’d grown into someone that I didn’t even recognize. I lied all the time so no one would know the truth, to my friends, to my family, until I had no one left but him. And now I realize that was what he wanted all along, so that he could control me completely and isolate me from the people that loved me most.”
Her gaze flicked to the fire. She didn’t need to see Cruxan’s face to know that he was barely restraining whatever was bubbling up inside him. She felt it, stirring in her own chest, like they were connected.
“I don’t know when I stopped loving him,” she whispered, knowing Cruxan would hear the quiet words. “But to replace that love, I feared him instead. I would do anything to keep him happy, to keep him calm. He had good days, where he seemed like he was in the very beginning, but I knew by then that it never lasted. He would tell me that I could never leave him, that he would find me wherever I went and make me regret it if I did. It was like he knew I didn’t love him anymore, but he still wanted me. He still wanted to control me. And when…”
Her stomach clenched but she pushed through it, needing to get it all out.
“When I stopped wanting his touch, when I wasn’t receptive to sex anymore…he didn’t care,” she said. “He took what he wanted anyways.”
Crystal heard his guttural curse, felt the rippling tension in their camp, tension so thick that she felt like she could suffocate on it.
“I wish I could say that I left him after that,” she admitted. “I—I wish I could go back and shake myself, scream at myself, anything to make me see reason. But I didn’t even leave him then. His hold was so tight on me and he’d told me enough that if I left, he would find me. I felt trapped. I felt scared. I felt alone.”
“Luxiva,” Cruxan rasped, like all the breath was pulled from his lungs.
“I told you my mother died. What I didn’t tell you was that she called me the night before she did,” Crystal said. “She called me, begging me to leave him, once and for all, that she missed me, that she needed me, that it broke her heart every single day thinking about me with him.”
Her voice broke at the end and she could hardly bear to look at Cruxan through her watery vision, but somehow found the courage to face him as she told him her ugliest truths.
“It’s what I regret the most. It’s what I hate the most,” she whispered. “That I had chosen Leo over my mom and that she’d died knowing that I was still with him, knowing that I wasn’t strong enough to leave when she’d begged me to. I had experienced a lot of terrible days and nights with Leo…but undoubtedly the worst day of my life was when my sister called to tell me that our mom had died.”
She still couldn’t even put into words what that day had been like, all the emotions that had bombarded her. Crystal had numbed herself for so long that the moment the floodgates opened to those emotions, they had destroyed her. They had broken her down until she was only left with two options: either sink deeper into nothingness or build herself back up, little by little, which was what her mother had wanted.
“I left him the next day,” she said. “I also wish I could say I said every last thing to him that I ever wanted to. But no. My sister and I packed up all my things from his place when he was gone…and I simply left. I snuck out like a coward. And it was easy. I turned off my phone, my sister checked me into a motel until the funeral so if he turned up at the house, he wouldn’t find me. He showed up to her funeral, looking for me, but he couldn’t get to me, not the way he wanted, not with so many people around. And the day after the funeral, my sister flew me down to where she lived in California. She helped me get on my feet, I started therapy, I got a job, I started drawing again…I lived for the first time in my adult life. And I haven’t seen him since.”
Crystal took a deep, shaky breath before exhaling it slowly. She felt drained after that. She didn’t think she’d ever told that story in full like that, only in pieces, here and there.
Most importantly, she felt raw. She felt vulnerable. She’d just laid bare the darkest time in her life and he could process it however he needed to.
Maybe he thought her weak now. Maybe he thought differently of her. But she couldn’t change her past, as much as she wished to. She would give anything to erase Leo from her life, to spend that time instead with her family, with her friends, to go to college, to explore that time going into her twenties without fear. But she could never get that time back. It was gone, just like her mother, just like Leo.
“I’m telling you this because…” she trailed off, biting her lip. “Because I want you to understand why I am the way I am. I can’t magically make the memory of him, of the things he did, the things he said, go away. The memories are scars that I might always have and they are the reason I’m so guarded. I have to be…because I can’t ever experience something like that again. I won’t.”
Cruxan’s nostrils flared but she couldn’t read him, couldn’t read what he thought now that he knew everything.
The smell of burning meat reached her nostrils and her eyes flicked to the expertly cut slabs on the hot stone. Ruined now, but she wasn’t hungry anyways.
“Will you say something?” she asked softly, her fingers fidgeting as she waited, as his silence permeated their small camp.
Cruxan looked at her for a long time. He opened his mouth, closed it, before repeating the sequence.
Finally, he made a sound in the back of his throat, his eyes going to the burning meat on the fire.
“I…” his jaw clenched and unclenched. “I need to go hunt again.”
“What?” she asked, perplexed.
“I will return shortly,” he said, climbing to his feet. She craned her neck up to look at him, disappointment and something that felt like bitter rejection filling her chest.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Alright.”
Tears filled her eyes again, but she looked into the fire. Cruxan seemed to hesitate for a moment before he made a sound in his throat and walked away from the camp, disappearing behind the closest line of agave trees. She listened for him, but heard nothing.
Was this how he’d felt this morning? When she’d rejected his words?
What goes around comes around, she thought, hurt.
Maybe he did think differently of her now. Maybe hearing her story had changed his opinion of her. Maybe he thought she was still the same damaged girl that had stayed with an abuser for almost three years.
It’s probably for the best, she thought, staring into the flames. It would make things easier, especially when she left.
So why did it feel like a dagger to the chest?
