Chapter Six
Kamau and Nessa bustled in with trays piled high. “Your feast awaits!” Kamau proclaimed.
“I just wanted to have a chance to talk with him, especially since he wasn’t the original Felid I thought I would be, um, working with,” Sasha cried, her voice fading away at the end. “You didn’t need to do anything fancy!”
Nessa put down a tray on the table and shook her head. “Sweetie, you can’t tell this Felid that you want dinner for two without him turning it into a ceremonial banquet.”
“I have all the foods of love,” Kamau boasted, lifting metal covers off of tureens and bowls, waving his paw in the steam to waft the aromas around. “Red rice balls. Razortusk filet. Sumptuous bisque of silverfin. Plumcotta wine.”
“They smell amazing, but I’m not sure the love thing is going to work. This is business, and I’m a human. I never even heard of silverfin or razortusk before I came here,” Sasha cautioned.
“All food that Kamau makes is the food of love,” Nessa said loyally, putting her head on his chest. “I hope you made enough rice balls for baby. He’s hungry.”
“She. It is a little Queen, like her mother,” Kamau purred, nuzzling Nessa’s dark curls.
Sasha didn’t ask them any other questions, just let them trail out of the room, kissing and nuzzling in a way that was adorable—and worrisome.
She wasn’t supposed to start picturing her and Gideon like that.
Wasn’t supposed to picture her and Gideon escaping to some faraway land, some distant planet where humans and Felids were free to do what they wanted, where they both had good money from this contract and all the luxuries that came with it.
Definitely don’t think about how it would feel if he did more than shake your hand.
Why not? He’s going to. He’s going to do so much more.
Her eyes closed, and she let herself give in to a fantasy of slow caresses and touches in just the right spots, things she’d long ago sickened of.
“Snap out of it!” Sasha scolded herself and hurried to put her beautiful new mithrium tree on the table as a centerpiece.
“May I come in?”
Sasha whirled and found Gideon hovering a few steps outside of her doorway. “It was open,” he explained.
Holy crap, he looks amazing with a shirt on, too. “Come in!” she exclaimed, hoping she wasn’t staring.
Gideon flowed into the room, silent and graceful despite his size. He wore the matching shirt that went with his cream-colored trousers, something white, slit way down the chest, with little blue threads running up the sides and around the cuffs.
“Your outfits are amazing. They look so comfy.”
“Oh. My uniforms. This is what a secretary-slash-servant wears at home. Out in the city, I wear a suit in the same colors.”
“You must look amazing.” Sasha clapped her hands over her mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I—I don’t know. I think it’s rude?”
“To give compliments?” Well, I don’t! I’ve never been given as many in my life as I have since meeting you,” he chuckled. “Is it wrong to tell a Queen how beautiful she is on Sapien-Three?”
“Uh, no. It’s context. A man can tell his partner that, or a friend can tell you that, and it’s all good.
Where I lived, I didn’t have friends or a partner, not anymore.
Men would still call out all kinds of ‘compliments’ every time I left the house.
Saying exactly how I looked and exactly what they’d like to do to me for looking this way. ”
Gideon looked horrified, then angry. His lips curled back, revealing long, sharp fangs. “That’s no way to treat a Queen.”
“There aren’t Queens where I come from.”
“Then you must not go back there, Sasha, because you are a Queen, as plain as plain can be,” he said earnestly, patting her hand.
His simple, gentle touch made her insides bunch into a knot. A hot, tense knot. Instead of pulling her hand away, she gently brushed her fingers over the long digits of his paw, feeling their suede-like texture blending into the thickest, plushest fur. “Do you mind if I do that?” she whispered.
“Not at all. I wish you to do anything that makes you comfortable with me.”
“It’s just so soft. There aren’t soft things where I come from, either.”
Gideon hesitated before his other paw reached out and brushed against her cheek, then fluffed her long brunette waves. “There is softness here. So light and soft, not like fur.”
His touch startled her, but not in a negative way. She let herself stand there, let him stroke across her cheek, let his paw flick through her hair like turning pages in a sacred text. “Only on the outside. We have to be hard on the inside to survive.”
“I’m sorry. I know that trick very well, indeed. But perhaps, just in these rooms, we can be soft together?”
Her eyes closed, and her head tilted. Sasha let her cheek burrow into his paw, realizing that it was roughly the size of her face, that Gideon’s paw could cup her from chin to forehead if he wanted.
“Well, seeing as we’re doing some pretty life-changing stuff, I don’t see why not,” she sighed.
“It’s been a long, long time since I tried being soft with anyone.
That’s why I know I might be able to give someone a child, but I don’t think I should raise one.
A mom should be able to be soft. Loving. ”
Gideon said nothing, just slowly let his digits stroke through her hair and up and down her cheek. “I’m sorry it’s been so hard. Tell me why?”
“You don’t need to know all that.”
“Well, maybe I’d like to. Maybe I’d like to know lots of things about a person, not just what I’m ‘permitted’ to know as a servant on the outside, never in the inner circle, despite handling all the problems my employer creates.”
Sasha looked up at him. “When you put it that way... Sit down. I’m suddenly starving.”
HIS SASHA HAD NOT HAD even a tenth of the good experiences he’d had.
Her mother had placed her with her grandmother to raise, then disappeared.
She knew no one as family except for the dear, sweet, strict Abuela who had died all too young and all too recently.
The pain stuck out of his Sasha like knives in her back.
And yes, he knew that thinking of her as “his Sasha” would hurt like hell later, but it was the sweetest form of make-believe tonight, to sit and hold her hand over wine and delicious food, talk about her sorrows first, and then share some of his.
“It’s sort of an intersystemic grief. You ask everyone, anyone, from the richest to the poorest, who they lost during the Queen Fever, and they’ll rattle off so many names.
I lost both parents and my sisters to the virus—yes, even my father, who contracted it after two bouts of back-to-back nursing of my mother and sisters.
They all had simple funerals. They’re buried at the cemetery at the foot of Imazi Hills.
Farhet and Memhet, my employer and his brother, lost their sisters and mother, too.
They had a year of mourning, and there is a shrine dedicated to them behind the Temple of Bastet in the district.
We carry on. But servants carry on more quietly, lest our trouble interfere with the troubles of someone better than us. ”
Sasha moved her chair closer to him. “That’s not the way it is everywhere in the Felix Orbus Galaxy, right?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why stay?”
“Well, until the virus hit, my family was there. Until about three years ago, everything was still closed off. Quarantines were in place. Even now, rolling quarantines hit without warning, blocking off some planets, shutting down interplanetary travel. And it was familiar. It was irritating, but safe.”
And now she leaned against him, holding her glass. “That’s why I never left the slums where I grew up. Safe, but irritating. Only, no, it was never safe, but I knew those dangers. We have a saying on my planet— ‘better the devil you know.’”
“Wise. But then why come here? These dangers are new.”
Sasha’s hand was on his arm, her head resting on his bicep. She seemed drowsy. Peaceful. He let his eyes close, still listening.
“I got tired of my contracts getting bought by sleazy people. I’d get hired to work as a medical assistant—I had a year of training before my abuela died.
I never finished the training, but... Well, I’d get hired to work at an elder care facility and suddenly find myself pushed into a closet with some handsy guy.
I’d hit him with a tablet and leave. I had no fear of fighting back.
I just got tired of so many things. When I heard about this through a friend of my roommate, I thought I might look into it.
She failed, too unreliable to return the communications on time, but I passed.
Felid credits are worth three times as much as Sapien-Three credits, too.
Once I got paid the first fee for the medical screening and initial survey, I was hooked.
Funny, but it was safer. It all felt so much safer, at least until I was actually aboard the ship heading to the Milky Way Intergalactic Port,” Sasha sighed.
“And now?”
She hesitated, then snuggled into his side. “It’s much, much safer.”
SASHA WOKE UP TO SOMETHING hulking and dark leaning over her. Placing her on her bed. “Stop!” she let out one hoarse command, fear tearing through her.
“Shhh, my Queen, my Sasha. You fell asleep,” Gideon soothed. “You’re safe, in your own quarters.”
She said nothing, realizing that she was now being tucked in. That Gideon had paused to pat her head and let his paw linger, stroking back her hair from where it had fallen over the side of her face.
She realized that she was shivering without his warmth, the warmth she’d fallen asleep on, cuddled into his strong body that seemed so much hotter than hers. She reached out and snagged his sleeve. “Are you tired?”
“A little. It’s the hypersleep. It doesn’t wear off completely for about a week, or so I hear.”
“You could sleep here. Next to me. If you want.”
“That is a very tempting offer. But—”
“But?”
“You would think less of me, because I would want to curl myself around you. There, that’s me being honest.”