Chapter 65 Compromise
As she tried to get around him, she slipped on a small trail of mud. Her left foot went out first, pulling the rest of her body with it and gravity did the rest because she almost fell down. She would have fallen into the water if he did not grab her by the back of her shirt and lift her up.
While he did save her, Scarlet was not a fun of the way he was lifting her up. It was similar to a small kitten being carried in the mouth of it's mother. Adler too had carried her this way once. Why did they keep lifting her up in the air with one arm as if she weighed nothing?
"Be careful." Esong told her.
"Hehe," she laughed, "Can you put me down now?" she asked him.
She closed her eyes in anticipation of being tossed onto the ground like garbage. However, she felt herself gently being placed down and she opened her eyes. She looked up at him with surprise in her eyes.
"You did not drop me this time." she said.
"I did not intend to do so the first time either." he answered.
His eyes were no longer on her, they were on the clear flowing water. It was so transparent that the little pebbles beneath were visible.
She looked down into the water and wondered if this river had any fish or water creatures. To satisfy her curiosity she squatted down and run her hands through it, suddenly slapping the water in the hopes of attracting the attention of anything.
"What are you doing?" he asked her.
She looked up and replied, "Looking for fish. It's this creature that is shaped like this and it has a tail at the back. It only has two eyes which are usually white and black and it dies pretty quickly when you take it out of the water. Have you ever come across anything like that?"
He was the general that led one of the fiercest armies to fight mutated beasts across the land and the seas. It was not far off for her to ask him if he had seen fish before.
"I have seen that weighs about this much and it's this long in the Lankan Ocean." he spread his arms out to estimate the size and height of the creature he had seen. "It had the strongest teeth I had ever seen on any creature that lives in the water and it crashed a mecha into two pieces with it's bare teeth."
"That could be a shark." she said. "Those ones are deadly even if they have not mutated because they eat anything that bleeds. They are excellent hunters and fast swimmers. If you ever come across one, do your best to escape, as long as they cannot walk on the dry ground then we are all safe."
The Blue star also had oceans and she was keeping her fingers closed that these sharks which could crush mechas with their teeth did not mutate to the extent of walking on land or they were all dead.
She looked down into the water and run a few droplets through her fingers, noticing that it was warm but sadly there were no fish. Did she have to buy them from someone on the forum and dump them in the water herself?
"You can contact the center for marine life if you want to inquire about creatures that live in the water. They will have more information than I do." she heard Esong offering some good advise.
"Oh, I will do that." she replied with a smile. "Thank you."
For some reason in the back of her mind she was wondering how they had gone from shouting and being angry to becoming calmer. She wondered if she would ruin this slightly harmonious environment by reintroducing the previous topic.
'Just let it go.' her inner thoughts made it clear. But how could she let it go if his every visit was going to be accompanied by tension and unease. Why couldn't they find a way to be as calm and still as this river?
Perhaps Esong was thinking along the same line as her because he suddenly sat down on the ground beside her and asked, "What kind of compromise are you looking for?"
She had been squatting but when he sat, she found herself copying his action and she sat down too.
"I...." she said and paused, "I am not quite sure." she finished her sentence with a vulnerable look of worry, fear and helplessness on her face. "All I know is that I do not want my life to implode because of whatever we decide to do." she looked at him and she said, "Our lives, we are in this together after all."
"And what if I don't want to compromise?" he asked her.
She lay down on the ground and looked up at the sky. It was so glaring and it caused her to switch to her grim reaper vision. Things were brighter but she could control the light when she was using it.
When Esong looked down at her, he saw that same gold rim around the pupils of her eyes. He found himself raising his hand just like before, and he almost touched her face before pulling his hand back and clenching it into a fist.
"Your eyes glow with shades of gold sometimes." he said to her.
She turned her head to the side to the look at him. Was that a compliment? she wondered.
"Thank you." she replied with a shy smile.
"Why do they do that? I have never seen anything like that before." he asked her.
Blue eyes, green eyes, black, grey, red, he had seen eyes of so many shades but never gold. And it wasn't complete gold, it was a partial gold.
"I don't know, nature." she answered. "I could be the beloved daughter of the Gods, sent to this world to stop it from self destructing." It was a mixture of truth and lies but he would never know.
"Whatever you are, I still intend to have you more than once." he leaned over and his face hovered hers as he said this suddenly. "I will compromise on whatever you want, but that one intention stays true. Come to my room tonight and we will discuss those compromises you want."