The Girl Who Cries Colors

The male, Welk, pats his sizable stomach. “What, this? This is pure muscle.”

Evert laughs and shakes his head. “Sure it is.”

Behind me, Sylred is greeting his fathers as well, Yored and Perel, and I can tell by their shy and quiet demeanors that that’s where Sylred got his level-headed peacekeeping ways from. The parents have all been travelling together, so we haven’t seen them in months.

Evert’s mother comes up to me next. I start to hold out my hand in greeting, but she just throws herself forward and wraps me in a hug.

“Fucking hell, Ma. Go easy on my mate,” Evert chastises.

Evia is a good head shorter than me, and her arms can’t reach all the way around my middle, but she doesn’t seem to mind because she just starts to rub my belly like it’s a genie’s lamp.

“Look at the home you’ve grown for my grandbaby!” Evia says excitedly to my belly. “I haven’t seen you in ages!” She looks me up and down and nods approvingly. “I’ve told you before, you’ve got good hips, Emelle. That’s important, you know. Good hips can make all the difference in labor. How are you feeling? Any lightning crotch?”

I blink at her. “Ummm…”

“Ma, don’t get fucking weird and talk about my mate’s crotch,” Evert cuts in.

Evia rounds on him, putting her hands on her hips in a very motherly fashion. “Evert, I really wish you wouldn’t swear.”

He just leans in and pecks her on the cheek. She melts instantly, and her scowl turns to a beaming smile. She smacks him on the arm. “Oh, I just can’t stay mad at you!”

“Let’s sit,” Ronak says, leading me to the table.

I move to the left, so that Ronak can sit at the other head, directly across from his mother, but he stops me. In a deliberate move, he sits me down at the head of the table, so now it’s me and Resha facing-off.

When Resha narrows her eyes at me, I make a face at Ronak, but he just sits down on the chair to my right and places a hand on my thigh. I don’t know if it’s to offer comfort, or to make sure I don’t bolt.

He’s really messing up my Operation: Make Resha Love Me mission.

Chapter 12

When we’re all sitting, the table soon picks up with several conversations at once, and I watch as my genfins reconnect with their parents. Okot sits on my left, and joins in the talks. It admittedly took a bit for them to get used to having another non-genfin in our covey, but the males saw him turn into his lamassu bull form once, and they’ve respected him ever since.

By the time the food arrives, the guys and their parents have shed the stuffiness of their first meeting, and now they’re all swapping stories about their time apart. The guys and I catch them up on all things Amorette, which is always a sure way to get everyone one the same page. Except Ronak’s parents, of course, since Ronak banned them, they haven’t actually met Amorette yet. I’m hoping to fix that.

Huge platters of tender meat, grilled vegetables, and spiced rice gets brought out, and all of the alphas from each covey serves his mate first, before serv

ing the rest of his covey. It’s such a sweet gesture to see Ronak serving me, Okot, Evert, and Sylred, and I can’t help the smile that spreads across my face.

“How was your vacation?” I ask Resha. I have to kind of yell, since we’re sitting at opposite ends of the table, so everyone else’s conversations cut off, as they wait to see what she’ll say.

Resha takes a bite of her food and chews extra slowly, making me wait. I just keep smiling patiently. Finally, she says, “It was fine.”

My eye twitches a bit. She sure isn’t making this easy on me. “The guys tell me that you all went to visit one of the tropical islands south of here. That must have been lovely.”

“There were too many insects.”

I start scratching my arm. “Oh, that’s too bad. You guys do have crazy looking bugs. There were some gross ones on the earth realm, but those are nothing compared to the bugs here. I found a bug in my closet a few weeks ago that looked like a giant grasshopper except with people-lips.” I pucker up my lips and tap them to demonstrate. “They were seriously luscious. I was tempted to grab some lipstick and put it on the thing. But I’m pretty sure it catcalled to me when I walked by, so I threw a bowl over it and waited for Ronak to come home so he could take it outside.”

Resha looks like I’m going to make her ears bleed if I don’t stop talking. “If you were a proper genfin mate, you would not cower in your own home because of a little bug,” she says.

“This sucker wasn’t small.”

She just stares at me, unimpressed.

I look over at Ronak a bit desperately. “It was as big as Ronak’s—”

He clamps a hand over my mouth before I can finish. The parents shift uncomfortably in their chairs. Evert snickers.