Chapter Twelve #2
His mouth moved to her jaw, her throat. She tipped her head back and let him.
His hands were careful and thorough and entirely without the hesitation she might have expected, and she thought distantly, in the part of her brain that refused to stop working even in circumstances like these, that of course he was — he was Fraluma, he did nothing by halves, he had been trained since childhood to give complete attention to whatever he was doing and he was doing this now completely, thoroughly, with the same quality he gave everything that mattered.
She decided she approved of this particular application of his training.
His hands had found the hem of her shirt. His palms flat against her ribs, her skin, and she arched into it because the warmth of them was startling and good and she wanted more of it. His forehead dropped to hers.
He pulled back just enough to look at her — the blue-green eyes close and unfocused and completely unguarded in a way she had not seen before, not once in all the days of careful management.
"There is something I have not told you," he said.
The words landed in the space between them.
She felt the quality of them — not what he said, not yet, but the register he said it in. Not the voice he used when he was choosing not to tell her something. Not careful. Not managed. This was the voice of someone who had decided that not saying a thing was no longer something he could do.
She pulled back slightly. Not far. Just enough.
"Tell me now," she said.
"Among my people —" He stopped. Started again.
"I have a consort. Predestined. Assigned before I was old enough to understand what the word meant.
We have not yet taken formal bond, but the arrangement exists.
It has always existed. I did not —" Another stop.
"I did not think it would be relevant to anything I felt. "
The silence that followed was very careful on her part.
She took a small step back. Not far. Just enough.
"Is it relevant?" she said. Her voice was level. She was proud of that.
"It does not change —"
"I'm not asking what it changes." She looked at him steadily. "I'm asking whether it's relevant. Whether it's real to you. Whether she is."
He held her gaze. He didn't look away, which she appreciated, because it would have been easier for him to look away.
"I do not know her," he said. "I have met her twice.
She is — she is Fraluma, and she is what the program intended her to be, and I have known my entire life that she was waiting.
But I have not —" He seemed to be searching for precision the way he always searched for it, not to soften but to be accurate.
"I have not thought of her the way I find myself thinking of you.
That is the truth. I did not expect it to be a truth that mattered and now I find that it does. "
Coreni nodded slowly. She took another half step back and turned to look at the window, because she needed somewhere to put her eyes that wasn't his face.
Outside, the dock district was quiet now. The twin moons of Trevort had risen, one large and pale, one small and amber, and the water caught them both.
She stood there for a moment and let herself feel it, because she was not going to get to feel it later and she was not the kind of person who paid for that kind of accounting error.
Not complicated, what she felt. Just the particular weight of a thing that had been possible until thirty seconds ago and wasn't anymore — or was different now, was conditional in a way it hadn't been, was something she was going to have to decide what to do with instead of simply being allowed to have it.
She was aware of him behind her. Still. Waiting. Letting her have the window for as long as she needed it.
She thought about the breeding program. The assignment of it — partners chosen before they were old enough to understand the word, matched for traits, for purpose, for what the Collective needed rather than what any one person might want.
She had read the clinical language of it in the compliance files and had felt the wrongness of it the way she felt all institutional wrongness — as a fact, held at professional distance.
It didn't feel like professional distance right now.
She thought about a woman she didn't know, who was Fraluma, who was what the program intended her to be, who had been waiting her entire life for something she hadn't chosen either.
That was the part she kept arriving at. The woman hadn't chosen it any more than he had.
She was carrying her half of an arrangement neither of them had made, and she was somewhere in an underwater city or a government post or a life Coreni knew nothing about, and she was waiting.
Coreni pressed her fingertips against the cool glass of the window and breathed.
This was, she thought, the kind of thing that didn't have a clean answer.
She had spent her career looking for clean answers and finding instead the complicated truth underneath, and the complicated truth here was that she had feelings she hadn't asked for about a person who had an obligation she hadn't known about, and there was no version of that which resolved neatly.
What there was, instead, was a choice about what to do with it.
She was good at choices. She made them for a living.
She made this one.
She turned back.
"Thank you for telling me," she said.
"Coreni —"
"I mean it." She turned back. "I do. You could have said nothing. You've been saying nothing for days about things that were harder than this." She met his eyes. "I would rather know."
He looked at her with that unguarded quality still in his face, which was almost worse now than it would have been if he'd closed it off again.
"What do we do," he said, "with this."
It wasn't quite a question.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "I think we keep going. I think there are larger things happening than either of us and we deal with those first and we — figure out the rest later."
"Later," he repeated.
"Later," she confirmed. "When there is one."
She meant it as simple practicality. The way his expression shifted told her he heard the other thing in it too — the acknowledgment that later was not guaranteed, that later was the thing they were both working toward and neither of them could promise.
"Then we keep going," he said.
"Yes."
He nodded. He didn't move toward her again and she didn't move toward him and the kitchen was very quiet around them and the moons moved slowly over the water outside her window.
It was enough, she told herself.
For now, it was enough.