She let him pull her in, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her cheek to his chest. “Oh, Loki. Look at us. Both so convinced we’re worthless people, so confused by others caring.” Closing her eyes, she kept projecting, pouring her sympathy and caring and desire for this wounded, struggling man out.
“Look at us both,” he repeated, nodding into her hair. ”Imagine what we could accomplish if we were without sentiment.”
It was something he had tried to achieve, but almost had to admit he could not. Yet here was a creature whose existence revolved around emotion. How tiring her life must be. He was exhausted already.
Summer thwacked his back lightly. “You’d be dead, because I wouldn’t have this power. I’ve known people who tried to cut off their emotions, and it didn’t end well for them.” Leaning back enough to look him in the face, she went on, “Loki … I can’t speak for you. But I told you once already, they tried to … mute me. And it was awful.”
“I can’t imagine how. Look how much pain this causes you. I see what you have to endure, just to be near someone. And you say it hurt to be without feeling?”
He shook his head and paced around the room. This woman was turning his brain to mush.
Her mouth twisted. “Imagine if someone took your magic from you.” Folding her arms, Summer regarded Loki. “That is how essential it is to me to feel. In this pain, I know I am alive.” She couldn’t help but frown, dark brows drawing together over green eyes. “Why is this so important to you? To push away emotion. Sentiment.”
“Alive…” he tasted the word as he stopped to look out the window again. Always that need to see a way out. ”I do not feel it unless I know power. Perhaps because of the lack of it all my life until…recently.” His gaze rested momentarily on the remains of the bifrost out the window. ”I care not. But sentiment will never satisfy.”
He turned then and fixed his eyes on hers intensely.
“Do you not understand what feeling does to a man like me? How distracting…it is a weakness. I have tasted weakness, Summer. I do not intend to again.” He wildly hoped she could not see the feeling that stirred inside him even then, but of course she did. She always would. Maybe she would at least have the decency not to point it out.
Summer’s mouth quirked downward. “You see me as weak.” Blindly, she walked backward until the edge of the bed hit the backs of her knees. She crumpled onto it. “Something to be used.” Without really being aware of it, the hurt she was feeling slid into the projection.
“Like your brother.”
Why did it even matter, she asked herself. This was Loki, who destroyed, who killed, raped minds. There was probably no saving him. And even if there was, it was stupid to delude herself into thinking she could do it.
It took every ounce of control Summer had ever learned in thirty-some-odd years to stand up again, to pull her jeans on, and walk toward the door, without allowing the tears in her eyes to spill down her face. She couldn’t find it in her to unlock the tight muscles around her mouth, but her spine was straight and her head high.
Loki felt himself freeze at her words, ice spreading through his veins. He had destroyed another connection, proven himself cruel and unworthy yet again. He could not move as she poured her hurt over him; he drowned in it.
Your brother.
“My brother,” he hissed, snapping back to reality. He stepped to block the door. ”My brother was a fool, driven by petty whim and shallow connections.” Her hurt and his desperation were pooling together and he could hardly see straight through it all. ”You are not these things Summer. Why must we pull at each other like this? Can we claim power over others and who they are?” No, of course not, there was no hope for him. But at the sight of those eyes of fire, he softened.
“You are anything but weak, my Summer. You endure.”
The endearment, small though it was, cracked her control. Shattered it. Summer lost the projection, blinked, and tears slid down her cheeks. A sob wracked her body. Hastily she shook her hair forward, hiding her face. “I’m sorry,” she managed through a tight throat. “I shouldn’t’ve said those things. You are .. who you are, and I’ve no right to … change you.”