Chapter 639: Not Helping

Grey continued walking without any particular destination in mind, letting the Palace pass around him while his thoughts went somewhere much farther away. Maybe he was being stubborn about all of this, and the more he thought about it, the less certain he was that he even understood what he was being stubborn about in the first place.

He had never really had a girlfriend, not in any sense that mattered, so how the hell was he supposed to know what he wanted without trying any of it first? Something about promising himself to a single person made him hesitate almost instinctively, yet when he tried to pin down exactly what that something was, all he found was a mess of half-formed thoughts and the uncomfortable possibility that maybe he was just a fickle asshole.

Then again, it wasn’t his fault there were so many hot women walking around.

Grey could practically imagine some female professor tearing into him for that one, explaining in increasingly academic terms why he should probably choose a wife based on more than whether he wanted to stare at her ass. She would probably be right too, but Grey had always found the personality side of things a lot less useful than people liked pretending.

Most people seemed to fall into one of two categories around him. They either loved him almost immediately, or they hated his fucking guts and slowly warmed up to him after realizing that ninety percent of the things coming out of his mouth were only half serious.

Grey could get along with almost anybody eventually, which was exactly the problem.

Where was the line between a good friend and a girlfriend supposed to be? If he thought a woman was hot, enjoyed being around her, could argue with her without getting bored, and trusted her not to stab him in his sleep unless he really deserved it, wasn’t that basically wifey material?

That category was way too fucking crowded.

People talked about finding "the one" as though some cosmic spotlight came down from the heavens and illuminated a woman while angels started singing behind her. How could anyone actually know that this one person was the best possible partner for them unless they’d somehow tested every other option first?

Were they omniscient?

Probably not.

Grey was half convinced most people who ended up with one person either didn’t have many other options, were too afraid of losing what they already had to look around, or eventually convinced themselves that the person beside them was the best. At some point, there had to be a leap of faith in there somewhere, some random belief pulled straight out of thin air and accepted as truth.

Grey didn’t want to be alone, that much he knew without needing to think about it. He hated loneliness more than almost anything, and the beginning of the Genesis Games had hammered that home when everyone seemed to hate him without knowing him, enemies were crawling out of every hole imaginable, and he couldn’t even find somebody to sit around with and talk shit until his sides hurt from laughing.

He had seen what being alone looked like on his gramps too. Grey didn’t want to grow old in some giant empty house with nobody around unless the neighborhood kids decided to visit. He wanted family, friends, probably enough children running around that he could start a small militia if things ever got boring, but wanting that eventually didn’t mean he needed to decide everything right now.

With the way Genesis was changing his body, he might live longer than anyone on Earth had ever imagined possible, so what exactly was forcing him to pick a woman now and decide she would be the only one he ever touched for however many centuries he might end up living?

Grey’s thoughts inevitably wandered toward Sabrina, and a quiet chuckle escaped him.

He had said plenty of times that he preferred taller women with fuller curves and a boastful sort of presence, but pretending that preference had appeared out of nowhere would be bullshit. Sabrina was probably 5’10", gorgeous in a way that had no business appearing in their little rural corner of the country, and until Amunet came along, she might have been the only person Grey knew who could consistently stop him from bulldozing an argument through sheer shamelessness.

She was exactly his type. In fact, she was probably the reason he had a type.

Sabrina was the sort of gorgeous that should’ve gotten her scouted in a train station by some pervy agent promising to make her famous before shipping her off to Dubai to potentially take a shit on some billionaire’s chest. Instead, she had somehow ended up growing up beside Grey in the middle of nowhere.

Logically, the two of them were probably supposed to end up together.

They would graduate high school, get married like rural kids apparently enjoyed doing before their brains had fully developed, take over the farm, pump out seven babies, then spend the next few decades watching those babies repeat the cycle. Every month some neighbor would make the exact same joke about how the high school belle somehow ended up marrying the village jokester, Sabrina would laugh politely, and Grey would slowly wonder when the fuck his life had become so predictable.

He had never really put it into words before. Maybe that was why he’d said no.

It wasn’t that Sabrina wasn’t enough, and it definitely wasn’t that he couldn’t imagine himself being happy with her. Maybe some part of him had simply looked at that perfectly laid-out future and hated the idea of knowing exactly what the rest of his life would look like before he’d even figured out who the hell he wanted to become.

Grey had always wanted more.

The problem was that back then he hadn’t known what "more" meant, especially when he was a lazy fucker who couldn’t even motivate himself to go to university for engineering despite having more than enough talent to do it. He’d known there had to be something beyond the farm and the same people he’d known since preschool, but knowing you wanted something different wasn’t the same as knowing what that difference was supposed to look like.

Then the Genesis Games happened.

Grey eventually wandered out into an open courtyard, the warmth of the sun falling across his face as he tilted his head back and stared directly into it without any concern for what that probably did to normal people’s eyes.

’Well, you have more now. What are you gonna do about it?’

Grey chuckled softly to himself. Unfortunately asking philosophical questions to the sun wasn’t enough to make answers drop out of the sky.

"You look quite lost in thought."

Grey flinched slightly at the unexpected voice and lowered his head, only to find Elowen watching him from nearby.

Of course.

Another hot woman.

This really wasn’t helping.