death is the only ending for the trash queen

Part 21

I can't handle this right now.

"You know that precious knight you're eyeing?" Cale gleefully escalated, her eyes alight with the familiar desire to get a rise out of Alver. "I fucked her first."

Alver let go of Cale's shoulders.

He really was a fool. Over and over. He hadn't realized it, not until she said it, but he let some tiny part of his heart hope that Cale's severe reaction from before had been jealousy.

He hadn't been wrong.

He'd just misread which person she was jealous over.

In retrospect, it was obvious that Cale and the knight had some sort of history.

Cale pressed up against him and this time bit his throat but he didn't respond other than to wince from the sharp pain.

She's really talented at breaking my heart even when I think I have no expectations.

Perhaps that was where Penelope's misunderstanding had sprung from. She'd somehow learned something about the knight and one of her parents and jumped to the heteronormative assumption that it was her father involved.

Cale's teeth grazed his shoulder but she was losing her steam, drunk and dizzy and tired after marking up Alver's neck.

"...it's your fault..." She slurred miserably and Alver sighed.

She was blackout drunk.

Funny that he saw his drunkard of a wife actually drunk for the first time ever.

With a numb pain ringing in his heart, Alver lifted Cale up and carried her over to the bed. Placing her neatly down beneath the sheets and crumbling to the ground at her bedside.

"Coward..." She muttered darkly. "...never coming to bed with me..."

"I'm in love with you."

The words came out painfully easy. But with Cale drunk out of her mind, it practically felt like talking to himself.

She barked out a laugh, cruel and savage. Exactly what he would expect should he ever seriously confess. "That's rich, what do you want so badly that you'd lie like that?!"

"You."

Alver slumped against the bed frame closing his eyes as he tried to reorganize the various feelings of heartbreak.

"I want you."

Penelope and Cale, happily cuddled up like a real family together.

"I want to be family with you."

Cale's burning eyes glaring into his and seeing deeper than he'd ever shown anyone before.

"I want to be your lover and husband."

Penelope's bright smile as she ran into his arms and her cold glare as she curtsied.

"I want to be the father of our daughter."

Cale's groggy face as she woke up, full of emotions he couldn't identify.

"I want to wake up next to you."

Cale's soft lips.

"I want to kiss you."

Alver laughed hollowly and looked down at his hand, alarm immediately filling him at what he saw.

His skin.

His real skin.

Dread and horror filled him with equal measure as he felt his neck for the necklace his mother left him, horrified to see the chain broken and the pendant lying on the floor where Cale had pinned him to the wall.