ten #2
Sulim rethought that. Except marry him. “Never saw myself as a mother. I don’t get on with kids. I want nothing to do with the whole process.”
“Me neither.”
“My mother-in-law doesn’t know this,” Sulim confessed, succumbing deeper to Mira’s easygoing way of loosening threads, “but I had a procedure done before I got married. I don’t want to take chances.”
“Does your husband know?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t marry him unless he made some concessions.”
“Ah, like agreeing to not have kids with you.”
“Not with me, no.”
Mira raised her eyebrows again.
“We’re…” Sulim sighed, incapable of believing that she was confessing this to a near-stranger.
But she’s a julah. She used to be a priestess.
It’s okay, right? “We’re monogamous right now, but eventually, we might not be. If in ten years he wants kids that badly, we’ll find someone who will do it for me.”
“Ha! What about you, huh? Do you get a boyfriend on the side while he cavorts with other women?”
“I’m not interested.”
“In what? Other men?”
Sulim couldn’t look at her. “Any man, if I’m honest with myself.”
She expected Mira to express her condolences for such a situation. Instead, the other woman leaned across the table, her shoulder brushing against Sulim’s and creating a delicate jolt of scintillating electricity.
“Me neither,” she purred.
Even though Sulim knew that Mira was like that, it still made her stomach jump to hear it directly in her ear.
Mira did not pull away, after all, and Sulim only had to slightly turn her head to brush her nose against the other woman’s cheek.
Despite the smoke from earlier, Mira’s breath had no smell.
The only scent on her was a light perfume that may have been baked into her tunic.
“I am the bane of every House’s existence,” Mira continued, her voice still dramatically low. “A hashka for an heir. And a female one to boot.”
“I’m guessing that means…”
“A queer. A homosexual. A deviant. Depends on who’s translating.”
Mira finally backed away, shrugging. “I prefer the company of women, it’s true. I daresay not once in my five centuries has a man caught my eye like that, and when your parents are Nerilis and Joiya Dunsman, I have my pick. Drives my father crazy.”
Sulim tried to imagine it: the devilishly handsome High Priest who was always the pinnacle of Temple propriety, chastising his rebellious daughter for whom she slept with.
I always thought julah were egalitarian about sex.
There was plenty of queer literature, even for women.
Same-sex experimentation was almost expected among the youth.
But Sulim supposed she had never heard of any couples who weren’t the bog-standard man and woman like Mira’s parents.
It’s not even legal to marry someone of the same sex on Yahzen, is it?
Something unheard of in the Federation, where Sulim could marry a woman tomorrow if she wasn’t already legally bound to someone else.
“But he can’t say anything,” Mira said with a sniff. “’Cause he’s queer, too. I get it from him. Practically genetic.”
Sulim’s mouth dropped.
“Oh, he swings both ways! Come on, my mom is like the love of his life. They’re always at it. Absolutely embarrassing. But as their daughter, I’m obligated to say it.”
I don’t think any of the older couples in my life have been like that.
Sulim never had that kind of representation in her life—a couple who were still enamored with each other decades later, if they ever had been at all.
Not her aunt and uncle. Certainly not Lord and Lady Gardiah.
I wonder if my parents would have fallen out of favor with each other. She would never know.
“Well,” Sulim said, “at least you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant.”
“It’s not really a thing among julah, anyway. You have to do a ritual to get pregnant.”
“You mean besides sex?”
“Yes, besides sex! It’s like one in a hundred women who can get pregnant the human way. Also, that’s my mom. So maybe that’s genetic, too, and I shouldn’t chance it, anyway.”
“Stop…” Sulim was about to crack up, and she might not stop laughing. “A ritual?”
Mira laughed with her. “Yes! You have to go to an altar to the Void and pray to ‘open your womb,’ or however you say it in Basic. In Julah, it’s lakah im perin ma doh. Very poetic. Very hard to translate. Something like ‘invite the mother into the body.’ See? Doesn’t work.”
“And then you can get pregnant?”
“Well, yeah, if you have sex. With a man, obviously.”
That was it. That was what broke Sulim until she was red in the face and laughing against the top of her table.
“So there are a few steps for me to get pregnant. And I don’t partake in any of them.”
Sulim was still laughing at Mira’s candid way of speaking.
Who knew sorcerers could be so funny? Sulim’s limited experience with julah was confined to the Temple, where Mira and Joiya were technically from, but run-of-the-mill priests like Hannu and the people on Terra III were stuffy, serious, or woefully na?ve about human humor.
Yet here was Mira, practically goofy.
“You have a gorgeous smile.”
The irony was obvious: Sulim stopped laughing when that compliment hit her ears. Let alone the way she’s looking at me… Was it out of bounds for Sulim to line up the reveal that Mira was helplessly queer with this compliment? Is she flirting with me?
The thought wiped her memory of everything that had happened in the past two years. She barely knew what planet she was on, let alone that she was legally married. To a man.
Because there was only a fetching woman beside her, one hit Sulim right in her biggest weakness. Self-confidence. Sulim was helpless around women who knew themselves so well that they fought tooth and nail for the rest of their lives to tell the universe.
“What?” she whispered.
Mira did not back away. Instead, she propped her chin up on her hand, a girlish grin illuminating her face. “I’ve never seen you laugh like this, and I’ve been in your orbit for over a week. Where have you been hiding this smile?”
Sulim didn’t want to be the type to immediately stop her mirthful attitude the moment it was pointed out, but what was she supposed to do?
I’m self-conscious. No wonder she was attracted to confidence.
Even her husband was more confident than her half the time.
He’s got to be, if he volunteers to be the buffer between his family and me.
“I usually only laugh like this late at night. When I’m tired and a little silly.”
Sulim pursed her lips into a forced smile as she pressed her hands together on the table and stared at a tiny scratch between her fingers.
“Watching broadcasts or reading a dumb book. Sometimes, I look at funny images on the internet. Anything to make me laugh around here.”
“On the planet of nitrous storms?”
“The thing about a nitrous storm is that it makes my in-laws unclench, but not a lot.”
“Does he make you laugh?”
Sulim didn’t have to ask who Mira meant. “Yes. I wouldn’t have married him otherwise.”
“Why did you marry him, exactly? If you’re not attracted to him.”
Something about that question rankled her. Was it the assumption? The prodding? I don’t know anymore. “I never said I wasn’t attracted to him. I’m just… more attracted to women.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Did you just compare me to the High Priest?”
“To me, he’s just my dad.” Mira pulled out her pipe but had the courtesy not to smoke it inside.
Instead, she traced the curving stem. Only then did Sulim notice the craftsmanship, from the polish to the intricate carvings nestled just beneath the surface of the wood.
“But yes. I told you he was queer, but honestly, I’ve only known him to have one male lover his whole life. But they’ve been together for millennia at this point.”
“And your mom knows?”
“Of course. The other guy was there first, after all.”
Sulim laughed in disbelief once more. “I always heard julah were conservative compared to us. And, to be honest, your father comes off so…”
“Rigid?”
“Sure. That’s the word.”
“Because he is. He’s got that Dunsman stick up his ass. I once got in so much trouble because I told him it’s dangerous for him to sit down with that thing stuck in his sphincter.”
“I would’ve been flailed alive for talking to anyone in my family like that.”
“Well, it is a way my mom says she knows I’m my father’s daughter. We’re both stubborn with caustic tongues when we want them.”
“Was there a chance that you were someone else’s daughter?”
“With my mother? Sure.”
“My God, who else’s daughter could you have been?”
“Remember that guy with my father? Him.”
“You’re kidding…”
“In the words of my mother: ‘I love love!’”
Sulim was sent back down to her table again, this time with tears bubbling at the corners of her eyes.
Now I understand why their fiction is so melodramatic.
She had read more than a few tomes penned by julah hands, and the one thing they all had in common, regardless of genre or tone, was a flair for the “you’re kidding me, right?”
“Ah…” Mira waited for Sulim to regather her bearings, staring out the window as the rain let up. “This is exactly what I needed. No offense to the family you married into, but they put the stuffiness of mine to shame.”
“How do you think I feel? I used to have all the freedom in the world. I almost went to university on Terra III. I was going to study security. Maybe even contract with the Forces.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I decided to become the next Lady Gardiah, instead.”
The question still lurked behind Mira’s dark eyes. She at least had the fortitude not to repeat herself.
“The thing you have to understand about my marriage,” Sulim said, averting her gaze so she didn’t suffocate beneath the weight of Mira’s gaze, “is that we go back. We already knew each other’s traumas and fears before he asked me to marry him. I adored his sister. I didn’t think… well,
I had never visited Arrah when he asked. But I didn’t think it could be worse than the life I had alternately planned.”
“Sounds like you weren’t even a couple when he proposed.”
“We weren’t. We were good friends.”
“Interesting.”