Meelo
Day 45

“I hate just sitting here and waiting,” Eirok groaned.

Seq and I both nodded.
I looked down at the bones and pelts of the two rabbits that the three of us had just finished eating. Seq and I had gone on an early hunt that morning and caught them ourselves. At first, he felt like going alone, but I insisted on going with him. I got a strange look when I kept pressing him to let me come along, even after he said it would be fine if I didn’t. When we were walking in the woods, I kept looking around for any sign of danger. He noticed my skittishness and asked me if I was all right. I lied and told him I was.
The dream I had of Taiya from a few nights before was still fresh in my memory. Why did I have to lose Seq? What good could possibly have come out of that? When Seq had told me he was going hunting alone, I immediately became afraid that the Kreq would find him. The thought still made me cringe when we were hunting. Taiya said there was no other way to stop all the fighting, but did she even try? Fine. If Taiya wasn’t going to even try to save Seq, I would stay with him day and night to make sure he was safe.
“What else can we do?” Seq told Eirok, snapping me out of my thought.
Eirok leaned back, placing both of his hands on the ground behind him and holding himself up. “Fucked if I know, but anything’s better than this. What do you think, Meelo?”
Seq glanced over at me and I could feel his gaze burn my side like fire.
I grunted and tried to act like Seq staring at me wasn’t troubling. “Really, all we can do is wait. We’ve already looked everywhere they could easily hide themselves,”
Eirok didn’t seem to like my answer, but he didn’t completely disagree with it, either. “I just feel so useless waiting here, especially with Callix and Isabel out there, having Taiya knows what done to them,”
Stretching his hands up towards the sky, Seq moaned in relief. “Don’t we all?”
Then, my fox rose and picked up what remained of the rabbits we had just eaten. After getting all of the bones and pelts, Seq held them closely to his stomach with both of his hands. “I’m gonna go give all this stuff to Rye. See you guys later,”
“See ya,” Eirok told him with a small wave of his left hand, just before putting it back on the snow behind him.
Seq had only taken two steps before I stood up and brushed the snow off my butt. Once my trousers were snow-free, I followed behind him. “I’ll come with,”
Ahead of me, I saw Seq’s tail bristle a little. Was he pissed at me, or did I just spook him a bit when I called after him?
I didn’t have to wait long to find out. As soon as we were far away from Eirok and were in front of Rye’s hut, Seq turned to glare up at me while still holding the pelts and bones. His nostrils flared and even his ears flicked. Yep. Definitely pissed.
“Do you mind telling me why you’ve been so weird today?” he asked me, in a tone that implied I had no choice.
After deciding to play it stupid, I drew back my head and wrinkled my forehead. “What do you mean?”
Seq’s eyes narrowed and his paw began to tap on the ground. “You know what I mean. This whole following me around thing you have going on is really annoying,”
With a scratch of my head, I shrugged. “I just like spending time with you,”
A sigh of white air left Seq’s mouth and floated past me. “Meelo?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t lie to me,”
His voice had no emotion in it, which made it all the more unsettling. I looked down at the ground, yet I could still feel his gaze holding onto me.
“Meelo,” Seq spoke again. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Slowly, I looked back up at my impatient boyfriend, but remained silent.
His eyes widened and his nose twitched. “You think I’m cheating? Is that it? Do you think I’m going behind your back and sucking any dick I can get?”
My ears rose and I stared back at him, completely surprised that he could even think that. “What? No!”
“Then what? Why else would you be following me around everywhere I go?”
I hung my head and sighed. How could I tell him? Shit, how could he even believe me if I did? “I…”
He turned and walked towards Rye’s door again. “Save your breath. I don’t want to hear it,”
Quickly, I caught up to him and placed my hand on his shoulder. “Wait,”
Seq jolted at the feeling of my touch and broke away from my hand. “Don’t bother. You know, I thought you would be better than this, Meelo. Rye, sure, he thinks with his penis, so of course he thought I was cheating on him. You, on the other hand, have no reason to think I’m whoring around,”
“I had a dream the other night,”
Stopping in his tracks, Seq turned around with a questioning look on his face. “And?”
“And,” I said, clearing my throat before continuing, “it involved you,”
“So you dreamed that I slept with somebody else and now you think it’s true?”
Taiya, what could I say? If I tried lying again, he would just get pissed off at me and he probably wouldn’t want to see me ever again. But if I told him about Taiya, he’d probably say I was crazy for thinking that the goddess had visited me, especially since he didn’t believe in her anyways. There wasn’t any way out.
I licked the insides of my drying mouth. “I had a dream that you…died,”
His gaze softened and he waited for me to keep going.
“Even when I woke up and realized it was just a dream, I still felt worried that you might die someday. Seq…if that ever happened I don’t know what I would do. Without you, I’d still be the quiet snow leopard I was when I first came here. You’ve done so much for me. I can’t think about waking up without you next to me in the morning, much less about you dying! I’m so scared of losing you, Seq, and I just want to make sure that, at the end of each day, I can go to sleep holding you, knowing that you’re safe,”
Seq’s eyes were now soft while his mouth hung open. He stared up at me, now at a lost for words. “Oh… Meelo. I’m sorry,”
“No, it’s okay. You didn’t know,”
He shook his head. “That’s no excuse,”
The fox walked up to me until the bones and pelts he was holding pressed up against my chest. He kept his eyes focused only on me and didn’t even seem to notice how unusually close he was to me. “I’m sorry for being an ass,”
I smiled to let him know that I was all right. “It’s fine,”
He kept gazing up at me, only now he spoke in more hush tone. “I don’t plan on going anywhere,”
“I know,” I told him. “It’s just that the chance of that happening to you still bothers me,”
“You can’t follow me everywhere, though, Meelo,”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m scared,”
After rising on his tiptoes, Seq lightly kissed the bottom of my chin. He then lowered himself back down. “Love you,”
“I love you, too,”
“Don’t worry,” Seq told me, just before turning back around and walking to Rye’s door. “Everything will work out,”
“I hope so,” I said.
Seq opened Rye’s door and closed it right behind him.
I turned and walked away.
Lying to Seq really bothered me. Sure, it wasn’t a complete lie, which was the only reason he didn’t call me on it, but it still wasn’t the whole truth. The goddesses’ words still troubled me, as well. Why did she think that Seq had to die? What did he do to deserve this? It just wasn’t fair.