“Then what is it?” I asked.
“It’s the fact that you live in the same house with her, you sleep under the same roof, you’re both royalty, you’ve had adventures together, and the two of you speak a language that no one else understands.”
“Well, that’s not exactly true. I mean, not that many people on Earth speak Caelesian, but –”
“You know what I mean,” she interjected, cutting me off. “Basically, the two of you connect in ways that you and I can’t.”
“Look, I can’t deny that Myshtal and I have a rapport,” I admitted. “You can’t go through what we did on Caeles and not develop a bond of some sort, but it’s not like what you and I have.”
“Yeah, what you and I have is very different,” she stated in a huff, letting go of my hand and crossing her arms. “I’m the one you’re not engaged to.”
I laughed. “You say that like it’s a competition.”
She gave me a steely look. “You said that, not me.”
“Fine, I said it. So will it make you feel better if I even up the score?”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll just get engaged to you, too,” I announced with a smile, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her close.
Electra burst out laughing. “Ha! That’s your idea of evening up the score?”
“Sure,” I insisted with a nod as Electra leaned towards me and lay her head against my chest. “If I’m engaged to you, that’ll be an additional connection that you and I have.”
“Well, I hate to disappoint you,” she said, feigning a stern tone, “but on Earth, we don’t just arrange marriages at the drop of a dime. Maybe on Caeles they sell women off as brides for a candy bar when they want a snack, but here we do it differently.”
“Well, in that case, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way,” I stated. “I’ll just ask your father for your hand.”
Suddenly, Electra went stiff. Although I had meant for my statement to be generic, I had inadvertently touched upon a sensitive subject.
Electra had been raised by the Alpha League since she was an infant. However, she had recently found her birth parents, and the details about them had been sobering, to say the least. For starters, her biological father was in prison, while her mother had suffered a psychotic break shortly after Electra’s birth. Even worse, the entire maternal side of her family – but for one notable exception – were essentially bad apples whose calling card was synonymous to “Supervillains R Us.”
The only silver lining was the fact that her father, Vir, was actually a good guy who – from what I had been told – didn’t deserve to be behind bars. That said, it didn’t appear that parole was likely to happen any time in the near future. (It certainly didn’t help that Vir had recently broken out. There had been extenuating circumstances and he had willingly turned himself back in, but he clearly hadn’t earned any brownie points with that maneuver.) Nevertheless, Electra and her father had started developing a relationship and had grown close, but it was obviously an area in which my girlfriend was pretty touchy.
Fortunately, Electra plainly realized that my faux pas was completely unintentional, and after a few seconds I felt the tension drain out of her.
“I think you might be putting the cart before the horse,” she finally said, a little snarkily.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Well, anything like that is obviously years away, but before you start asking anybody for my hand, you might want to figure out whether I’ll say ‘Yes’ when you pop the question.”
Chapter 27
Electra and I didn’t return to the party. We simply stayed on the balcony, talking and spending some much-needed quality time together. (And it’s just as well that we didn’t go back, since I’m sure something else would have happened to sour the mood. It just seemed to be a recurring theme whenever Myshtal and my girlfriend drifted into each other’s orbit.)
Thankfully, our friends weren’t offended when I gave them a telepathic heads-up that they were on their own, so to speak. Likewise with my mother and grandparents, who made sure Myshtal got home safely. In fact, the only person not too keen on the idea of me and Electra being off by ourselves was Esper, another member of the Alpha League who generally served as Electra’s de facto guardian. (It had recently come to light that Esper was also my girlfriend’s aunt, which explained why she had a tendency to be overprotective on occasion.)
I hadn’t seen her at the party, but I’d known she was present and had no trouble making mental contact with Esper, who was typically ranked as the most powerful telepath on the planet. She, in turn, had given me very specific instructions on when I was to have her niece home – and how swiftly I was to depart thereafter. To someone on the outside looking in, it might have appeared that Esper didn’t like me. In truth, however, she actually approved of me as Electra’s boyfriend. That said, I clearly hadn’t done myself any favors in her sight by returning from Caeles with a fiancée in tow.
Thus it was with Esper’s directives still fresh in my head that I teleported Electra home at the appropriate time. A big smooch before she went inside let me know I was pretty much forgiven for any transgression, and I teleported home and went to bed in a generally good mood.
*****
I woke up the next morning to the sound of my cell phone ringing. Still groggy, I checked the time and noted that it wasn’t exceptionally early, but – after a late night – I had actually planned
