15. Magnolia
15
MAGNOLIA
“ A lright,” I said as I followed Garrek out of the tent. “Time to get you sorted.”
“My pack is already sorted.”
“No, not your things. You. We need to take a look at your wounds. And also, while I have your attention, I’d like to make a formal complaint about the fact you never warned me about the tree tarantulas.”
“The what?”
“The idra! You didn’t think I needed to know there were ten-legged demons hanging around in the trees near our camp?”
“You’ll recall that I warned you about the predators. I told you not to go far without me.”
“Well, yeah. But still! I can’t believe we were going to set up camp here with that thing just hanging out up there! You did that whole routine of checking the creek for serpents but we never checked the trees near our camp for killer alien spiders!”
“Idra are not ground hunters,” he explained. “ Normally, an idra would present little danger to a group like ours. They remain high up in trees and typically only attack and eat animals that are careless enough to fly near them. Or, in Killian’s case, climb to them. If he hadn’t gone up there and woken it, we likely would never have even known it was there.”
“That kid,” I said with a sigh and a shake of my head. “Tonight was a lot.”
“Tonight,” Garrek said flatly, “was a rather typical one, so far as Killian is concerned.”
I pursed my lips, then blurted the question that had been burning in me since our first night travelling.
“The fire at your ranch. Did Killian start it?”
Garrek didn’t bother lying or blustering. He just uttered a simple, “Yes.”
“Oh, boy,” I muttered. “Do you know who he, um…”
“Who he killed?”
“Well, yeah.”
“No,” Garrek answered. “I have not asked. If he wants me to know, then he’ll tell me when he’s ready.”
“Alright… But have you at least tried to talk to him about the fire?”
“What is there to talk about?” Garrek said on a growl. “The damage is done.”
“What is there to talk… Garrek! My God, you two! Sometimes I wonder if somebody doesn’t need to smack your heads together! You didn’t think you should talk to Killian about the fact that he could be a budding little arsonist? ”
Seriously. This was taking a macho, I-don’t-talk-about-my-feelings attitude just a touch too far.
“There was enough evidence to tell me that he did not cause all the damage on purpose,” Garrek told me. “Upon inspection, I saw that he’d attempted to make a firepit and there were the burned-out remains of a bucket nearby. Presumably it had had water in it for when he was ready to put the fire out. But the conditions were dry, and there was wind. Things got away from him. He woke me as soon as he realized it was out of control.”
“OK. Well, that’s something, at least.” It sounded like it truly had just been an accident born of some combination of childhood boredom and inexperience.
“He cares for the animals,” Garrek mused suddenly. “He would not have burned their food supply on purpose.” His face was serious. “I believe that. Very deeply.”
“I believe it, too,” I whispered. I’d seen the way Killian looked at and spoke to the animals. The way he murmured softly to the shuldu as he brushed them. The thorough focus with which he inspected their hooves.
“I still can’t believe they dump you guys here with no therapy or mental health resources or anything,” I said wearily. “Although, there is such a thing as equine therapy for humans. Maybe working with the animals is helping him.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, at the very least, I do have some medical stuff I can use on you guys. So, chop chop. Let’s get those wounds cleaned.”
His tail flicked. It felt very dismissive, very nonchalant, like an all-too-cool alien shrug.
“I already washed them.”
“Washed them?” I asked, planting my hands on my hips as he lowered himself into a seated position on the ground. “Where?”
Oh, no.
“Garrek,” I said, my eyebrows and voice rising higher and higher in disbelief. “Tell me that you didn’t go wash your open wounds in the creek.”
“Of course I did,” he said. Maddeningly.
“What? Why?” I moaned. “Who the heck knows what kind of microbes are present in that water! You should have used the sterile water from my cannister!”
He stared at me flatly, as if I were telling him he should only have wrapped his wounds in Terratribe II’s finest rainbow cotton candy before topping them off with a satin bow.
“For someone who was all wound up about Killian having an ear infection,” I snapped, “you seem blithely unaware of the dangers of getting random, murky-ass creek water in your open wounds!”
His mouth quirked on one side. For once it wasn’t a frown or a grimace, but something that might have even hinted at amusement.
“Murky what ?”
“Murky. Ass. Water.”
“And was my ass purported to have been murky before or after I bathed in the creek? Because I did bathe.”
“Not your literal backside,” I said, momentarily hating his translator for producing an accurate translation of the term. “It’s a human phrase of exaggeration or emphasis. You can attach it to an adjective to amplify the effect. Big-ass, expensive-ass-”
“Murky-ass.”
“Precisely. Murky-ass. As in the water. Water that you, for some mysterious reason, chose to use to rinse your wounds with.”
“At least I used soap.”
“Garrek!” I barely restrained myself from stomping my foot. The audacity of this man, to sit there and make smartass remarks about soap when he’d probably just doomed himself to die of freaking sepsis.
Smartass. Add that to the ass list.
And dumbass, too.
That little quirk in his mouth stretched and stretched until, holy cannoli, it morphed into a legitimate, bonafide, 100% authentic Garrek smile.
I’d never seen it before. I wasn’t even sure the possibility of such a thing existed. It felt like a one-in-a-multi-trillion chance, like I was the only person in the known universe who’d ever witnessed such a thing.
The expression transformed his entire face. His fangs gleamed, his eyes lit with a soft, warm white, and, Jesus Christ on a cracker, did the man have a fucking dimple?! And only one little dimple, on one little side, because his smile was so unfairly crooked and cute ?
He was already good-looking when he was being his usual frowny self.
A smiling Garrek was absolutely lethal.
I stared at him, blinked, and then stared some more. Distantly, I was aware that my mouth was hanging open, doing its most attractive impression of a Terratribe II pond fish.
I finally gathered my wits about me enough to slam my mouth closed. It took effort, though. Garrek’s secret weapon of a smile had absolutely fucking scattered them to the Zabria Prinar One breeze.
“Stay there,” I ordered him. “I’ll be right back.”
I went into my tent and grabbed my med kit. It was right at the top since I’d just put away the antibiotic drops for Killian’s ear. I brought it out and plopped myself down on the ground in front of Garrek.
“What are you doing?” he asked. His smile had faded, replaced with a much more familiar look of skepticism. I leaned into the closed-off safety of a grumpy Garrek, pushing that world-tilting smile as far from my mind as possible.
“I’m getting antibiotic ointment for your wounds. Then, I’m going to check if you need sutures.”
“I don’t need sutures.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, thanks. Considering I’m the trained medical professional here.”
Garrek watched me with heavy-lidded eyes as I disinfected my hands and pulled out a multi-species antibiotic ointment.
God, he must be exhausted.
Not too exhausted to completely throw me off balance, apparently, which he did with his next question.
“Why did you leave?”
“Pardon?” I asked, mid-tube-uncapping.
“Why did you leave your position as a medical professional and come here to marry?” His tired eyes searched my face. “Why choose a Zabrian outcast when you could have had any male you wanted from your homeworld?”
I snorted at that.
“I’m sorry, but have you met a human male?” I asked.
“No.”
“Of course you haven’t. Forget I said that.”
“My question stands. You also said you had siblings. Family. Why did you leave?”
I bit my lip, squeezing antibiotic ointment onto my finger and then beginning to dab it into the ragged wound on Garrek’s chest. It was deep, but miraculously, it appeared to have stopped bleeding some time ago even without sutures. Zabrians had to have had some impressive blood clotting abilities.
“It’s a long story,” I said, hoping he’d leave it at that.
“Well, if you’re going to keep me awake for all this unnecessary wound-tending,” he said dryly, “you could at least entertain me.”
A laugh bubbled out of me, and I shook my head, dabbing more ointment onto his chest. I was very close to him, kneeling between his splayed thighs.
“Fine. Alright. Where to begin…”
“At the beginning. ”
I laughed again.
“OK, what, then? The day I was born? Or maybe the first time I downloaded a romance book onto my comms tablet without my Nan’s permission and stayed up all night reading it when I was way too young? It was an Old-Earth cowboy romance, now that I think about it. Pretty sure it changed my DNA. It certainly changed my outlook on how beautiful a life could be.”
“What’s a romance book?”
“Of course, the guy who doesn’t know about hugs wouldn’t know about romance books,” I tsked. “It’s a type of novel. Fiction. It focuses on the romantic relationship of the protagonists. A love story, basically.”
I expected Garrek to laugh at me, or tease me, or do the Zabrian version of rolling his eyes, whatever that was. But he didn’t. He just listened to me, and then quietly said, “It must have been nice to have had that when you were young.”
“Well. Yes, actually. It was. I still read them. Loads of them. I’ve got thousands of them on my tablet. If you ever want to read one, just say the word. I’m pretty sure Zabrian is one of the available languages in my reading software’s translation tab.”
“Alright,” he said. “So, you read this book about a cowboy and thought you’d like to go marry one yourself?”
“It wasn’t that simple, no. Like I said, I read that book when I was really young. And it was only one of many. I was just living my life, mostly. Reading and studying and taking care of my grandparents and my siblings and then working as a nurse. ”
“So what changed?”
“It wasn’t exactly what changed, but rather who changed things.”
Garrek waited patiently, even as the seconds stretched by. I tried to gather my thoughts. I hadn’t talked about Nelson in so long.
“I had a patient,” I finally said. I focused on tending to Garrek’s wound. It made hauling up all that history a little easier while my hands were busy. “I started out working in emergency departments. I was damn good at my job, but it was a hell of a lot of trauma, you know? I was only a few years into my career and I was on the verge of burnout. So when a private nursing position for an elderly man came up close to where I lived, I jumped at the chance.”
I still remembered the moment I saw the advert for that job. It had felt like a lifeline.
The same way the advert for the Zabrian bride program had felt less than a year later.
“So that’s how I met Nelson.” I expected it to hurt to say his name, but for some reason, it didn’t. It actually felt good to talk to Garrek about something that had hurt me once. Garrek was a surprisingly good listener, waiting and watching me, making sure I was OK until I was ready to continue.
“He was this old guy. He had some health concerns and needed help with all that. But still sharp as a tack, you know? Just so smart. And kind. He reminded me so much of my grandfather who’d died a few years before. My parents work on Elora Station, but they wanted my siblings and me to grow up planet-side, with grass and trees and things, so we lived with our grandparents on Terratribe II most of the time. Anyway, the first time I saw Nelson, it was like seeing my Pa again. It felt like coming home.”
I sighed, glancing up at his face.
“Have you ever felt that way before?” I asked him. “The first time you meet somebody new, and you suddenly just feel like, ‘yes, I know you. You’re somebody special.’ You just feel like you were meant to meet? And that everything’s about to change?”
Garrek’s throat contracted on a swallow. When he answered, his voice sounded oddly thick.
“Yes,” he rasped. “Only once.”
I wondered who it was.
I didn’t ask.
“So you know, then,” I said instead. “How special it is to meet somebody like that. Nelson and I were like peanut butter and jelly. OK, you don’t know what that means. It’s fine. I just mean… It’s like we were meant to be best friends. The only problem is, you’re not really supposed to be best friends with your patients. There are guidelines and ethics to adhere to. You can be warm and friendly, but you still have to maintain professional distance.
“That was always something I struggled with. Caring too much. Getting too involved with my patients. It was always so hard for me to leave the work at work. But in the hospital setting, it never really mattered too much, because the patients were never there long enough for me to get too attached. But with Nelson, I was with him all day, almost every day. We ate together, we read to each other. I used to summarize the romance books I was reading for him, and he’d do these dramatic gasps, just the most over the top reactions. He said what, now? And he didn’t even grovel? That sort of thing. He talked about the characters like they were real because they were real to me and that was all that mattered.
“He taught me about his hobbies, too. He made the most beautiful little ships in bottles. Human ships,” I clarified. “And not space ones, but ancient seafaring ones. I’d watch him as he put together these intricate vessels with nothing but tweezers and then I’d just sit there and marvel at the final result. And then we’d talk about how Old-Earth humans actually went out on the treacherous oceans in those vessels, putting so much faith in the wood and the wind and themselves that they were willing to risk their lives. Just to see what was out there.”
I paused then. Because the next part was hard and I wasn’t sure I was ready. But Garrek waited. He gave me the impression he’d wait as long as it took.
“And then he just… He just died.” I was still pissed about that, about the suddenness of it, how it had felt so much like something had been ripped unfairly away. It came out in my voice, harsh and bitter. “One night, when I wasn’t there and the other nurse was on duty. He was sleeping. And he just never woke back up. There was no warning. He’d been completely fine the day before.” I sniffed hard and wiped at moisture on my cheeks. Garrek sat up straighter, extra alert and maybe even alarmed, but I waved him off .
“It’s fine. I’m fine. Well, not really. But mostly. Close enough.” I gave a shaky laugh that Garrek did not return.
“Anyway, his death just kind of… broke me for a while. I stopped working. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t know how to help people, to care for them the way I’d care for my own family, and not get so attached. And then, not long after Nelson’s death, I was contacted by his lawyer. Turned out Nelson was very, very wealthy. You’d never know it from the house he lived in – it was modest. Normal. But he left every credit in his name – and there were millions of them – to me.”
“This was a good thing,” Garrek ventured when I didn’t speak for a long moment.
“No,” I replied sadly. “It was a terrible thing. It kicked off the absolute worst period of my life. I was grieving, I was unemployed, and now I had Nelson’s long-lost acquaintances and estranged family members coming out of the woodwork and pointing fingers at me. Multiple parties contested the will. And horrible things were said about me, Garrek. Even by people I’d once considered my friends. People said I took advantage of an old man, that he wasn’t right in the head and I coerced him or manipulated him or seduced him. My reputation was in tatters. I was staring down the barrel of never being able to return to the career I’d worked so hard for. I had the ethics board breathing down my neck on one side, and about a dozen lawyers on the other.”
“And this is when you left? ”
There was no judgment in his gaze. Just something that resembled a grave sort of sympathy.
“Not quite, but soon after, yeah,” I told him. “I had to stick around to resolve all the legal stuff. Nelson’s will was ironclad. He’d even put aside a specific fund to pay his lawyer to settle any problems or lawsuits that might crop up. He thought of everything.”
“So you received the credits.”
“I received the credits,” I said wanly. “Didn’t spend a single one of them on myself, mind you. I put some of the money aside to fund my siblings’ education and then I donated the rest. A few days after that, I saw the advert for the bride program. And it just… It just felt like the first glimmer of hope in way too long. All I could think about were all those little ships in bottles, just like the real ships people had sent out on the sea, sink or swim. Live or die. You’d have to be so brave to do something like that. And I guess I wanted to think that I could be brave, too. I wanted to reach for happiness with both hands. Nelson had always told me to do that.”
The moment stretched, taut and heavy. I felt bad for dumping all of this on Garrek when he had his own problems to deal with, so I tried to lighten it.
“And since I hadn’t had much luck with dating the idiotic human men on Terratribe II, I figured that this could be my chance.”
“Your chance to start again?”
“My chance to find love.”
“Love. Here.” Garrek raised a sardonic brow. “ Among the convicted murderers of the Zabrian Empire.”
I laughed, and it was genuine. I didn’t think it would have been possible to laugh after talking about Nelson for the first time in so long. But somehow, Garrek had made it so. I swiped a few more tears from my eyes, then plastered an adhesive bandage onto Garrek’s chest wound.
“In my defense,” I said, grinning at him, “I was lured here under false pretences. I didn’t actually know any of you were convicted felons until I arrived.”
Garrek looked surprised by this.
“Truly?”
“Truly. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know what happened there. Take it up with the warden, I guess.” I shrugged. “Pass me your tail, would you?”
Garrek dutifully draped the wounded end of his tail across my outstretched hands. I got to work dabbing more antibiotic ointment on him. Neither of us spoke for a bit, and I thought that the conversation might have run its course. I didn’t typically like silence. I found it awkward, and usually succumbed to the need to fill it, just like I had before on the shuldu with him.
But this time, I didn’t. It felt strangely comfortable to sit here in the quiet night with Garrek. Safe.
Without warning, Garrek broke the lulling peace of that silence.
“Oaken is not a murderer.”
“What?” I jerked my head up. It was unsettling, bordering on alarming, how hearing my groom’s name felt a bit like being splashed with cold water .
I hadn’t thought about Oaken even once tonight.
“Oaken is not a murderer,” Garrek repeated.
“What do you mean? I thought everyone here was-”
“Convicted, yes.”
“So…”
“So he was convicted. That does not mean he did it. He is likely the only male in this world, besides perhaps the wardens, who has not actually killed someone.” His voice roughened. “He is likely the only one of us who might actually deserve you.”
I put away the ointment and bandaged Garrek’s tail, absorbing this new information but having no real clue what to do with it.
“How do you know this?” I finally asked, gingerly setting down Garrek’s tail.
“Because he is my cousin. And the man he was convicted of killing was my father.”
“Your cousin,” I repeated, my mind scrambling to catch up “killed your father?”
“No. That is what I am trying to tell you. Oaken did not kill my father.” Garrek stared grimly down at me. “I did.”