Chapter 30
LYN
I find out the way I find out everything important: second-hand, too late, and in the middle of trying to eat lunch.
Riley sets his tray down across from me, and before he even sits, he says, "Have you talked to Rhyss today?"
Something in his voice makes me put down my fork.
"Not since this morning," I say. "Why?”
He sits. He has the look he gets when he's trying to figure out whether to say the thing, which means he's already going to say the thing, just slowly. I hate it when he does that. "There's a thing going around," he starts. "About the committee meeting."
"He had it this morning," I say. "He said it would be fine."
"Uh-huh," Riley says. He pokes at his food. "So you haven't heard."
I put both hands flat on the table. "Riley."
"He's on administrative leave," he says. "Effective today."
I sit with that for a second.
Just a second.
Then I push back from the table and leave my lunch exactly where it is.
Rhyss finds me before I find him, which is annoying, because I had a whole walk worked out.
A whole furious, preparing-my-argument, talking-to-myself-under-my-breath walk through Mythara Village.
I get approximately one block into it before he's just…
there. Coming around the corner from the direction of the university, satchel over one shoulder, looking like a man who has just done something he has no intention of apologizing for.
I stop walking.
He stops walking.
We look at each other.
"Administrative leave," I say.
"Yes."
"As of today."
"Yes."
"Because you—" I press my fingers to my mouth for a second, because the specific shape of what I want to say is still assembling itself and I need it to come out in the right order. "You walked out of the committee meeting."
"I did."
"After telling them off."
A beat. "That's one characterization of events."
"Kaelion."
He doesn't look particularly sorry. That's the thing.
He's standing there in the middle of the street looking like a man who would absolutely do it again, and something about that makes the sharp, panicked edge of my anger go sideways into something messier and more complicated that I don't have a name for yet.
"You said it would be fine," I say. "You said—you literally said, this morning, in your bed—"
"I know what I said."
"So what happened?"
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he tilts his head down the street, toward the little park at the end of it, the one with the tiered fountains.
"Walk with me," he says.
I want to say no just to be difficult.
But I walk with him.
He tells me about Dresh. About Veth. About the specific shape of the argument—the way they kept circling back to human researcher like it was a complete sentence, like it explained something that didn't need further examination.
I listen.
I don't say anything.
I listen all the way to the fountain, and I sit down on the bench next to it, and I listen until he's done, and then there's a silence that goes on for a little too long.
"Lyn," he says.
"I'm thinking," I say. "I'm thinking about the most efficient way to say what I'm about to say."
"That sounds ominous."
"It's a little ominous," I agree. I look at my hands.
"You told me—you specifically told me, multiple times, that you had a plan.
That you knew how to handle this. That I was not going to take a hit to my project, my funding, or my standing, because you were going to be transparent and above-board and it was all going to be fine. "
"Your project—"
"Is not the point right now," I say. "You. You are the point. You just got put on leave because you lost your temper defending me to a room full of people, and you didn't even call me. I had to hear it from Riley, of all people, and he sounded fucking giddy over it.”
“I…have not been very charitable to McRae,” he mutters.
“That is absolutely not the point.”
He takes a seat next to me with a sigh. Doesn’t say anything else.
"I know what they said," I tell him. "I know what human researcher means when people say it like that.
I've been hearing it my whole career, okay?
I know. And I—" I stop. Swallow. "I am angry on my own behalf about that, and I'm going to deal with it, and if Dresh wants a conversation about the documented research record of humans in advanced xenobiological study she can absolutely have it.
" I look at him. "But you do not get to take that hit for me without telling me first. You don't get to walk into a room, blow up fifteen years of professional goodwill, and then just…
come find me around the corner like nothing happened. "
"I was coming to tell you—"
"After the fact."
"Lyn—"
"You told me I wasn't a secret," I say, and my voice does the thing I didn't want it to do, the thing where it goes quieter instead of louder when I'm really upset.
"You said you were doing this above board because I wasn't a secret and it wasn't a mistake.
And that's great, that's—I believe you, okay, I'm not—I'm not questioning that.
But above board goes both ways." I press my hands together between my knees.
"I didn't get to be in there. I didn't get to say anything.
You just…decided, by yourself, that this was worth blowing up over, and now you're on leave and I still have my project and my funding and that's a great outcome for me, professionally, except that it feels absolutely terrible. "
He's very quiet.
"Because you took a consequence that should have been shared," I say, "and you made it yours. And I know—I know you were trying to protect me. But I didn't ask you to protect me like that."
The fountain does its thing. Water over stone.
"No," he says finally. "You didn't."
"So." I exhale. "What actually happens now?"
He turns to look at me, and there's something in his face I haven't seen before—not the controlled version of him, not the professor or the dad or the man who navigates every interaction like he's already mapped the exits.
Just him. A little tired. A little undone.
"I've been thinking about taking a sabbatical," he says.
"It's been…a long time since I've had one. "
I blink. "A sabbatical."
"Shahar and Wulfric are getting married," he says. "They might want time—just the two of them, to start. I would hate for Solvi to fall by the wayside while they’re newly mated.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
"You're going to take a year," I say slowly, "to be a dad.”
"I'm going to take a year," he says, "to be with Solvi. And to do some writing I've been putting off. And to—" he pauses. His tendrils shift faintly. "To see what this looks like. When I'm not your supervisor. When I'm just…a person. In your life."
Something happens in my chest.
It's not new, exactly. It's been building for a while now—since the noodle shop, since the closet, since he looked at that committee and said not once have I opposed your work. Since this morning when he kissed me like it cost him something and said it has always been easy to care.
But it lands differently now, out here in the open, next to a fountain, after I've just finished yelling at him about it.
I think I've been in love with him since before I knew what to call it.
Since I read one of his papers in a library on Earth.
Since I started using his rubrics as the metric I measured myself against, since I got angry on behalf of his research when other people dismissed it, since I decided that his opinion of my work mattered more than anyone else's and told myself that was just professional respect.
You're an idiot, Lyn.
The fondest kind, some other part of me says back.
"For the record," I say, "you're still in trouble."
"I know," he says.
"I'm serious. You don't get to go noble on me without a heads-up."
"Understood."
"And if you ever—"
"Lyn." He reaches over and takes my hand, threading his fingers through mine the way he did this morning, easy and deliberate, like it's already a habit. Like we've been doing this for years. "I know."
I look at our hands. His turquoise knuckles against my brown ones, his thumb tracing a slow line across the back of my hand.
"I love you," I say.
Just like that. Surprising both of us.
He goes very still.
"I know that's fast," I say immediately, the words tripping over themselves.
"And I know I've been a disaster about this whole thing, and I'm not—you don't have to—I'm not saying it so you'll say it back, I'm just saying it because it's been sitting in my throat for approximately two weeks and I almost said it in bed this morning and then didn't, and I just yelled at you for not telling me things, so—"
"Lyn," he says.
"—it seemed hypocritical not to—"
"Lyn."
I stop talking.
He's looking at me with that expression—the one I didn't understand for months because I kept reading it as irritation, or impatience, or professional disapproval. I understand it now. I understand it completely.
"I know," he says, very quietly. "I've known for a while."
I stare at him. "You—what?"
"I told you." The corner of his mouth moves. "It has always been easy."
I want to say something. Several somethings. Instead I lean forward and press my face into his shoulder and feel him wrap his arm around me, and I just—stay there. In the middle of a public park. Like a person who is in love and has decided, finally, to stop acting like that's a problem.
"You're still in trouble," I say into his jacket.
"I know," he says, and I can hear the smile in it.
"A heads-up next time."
"You have my word."
I tilt my face up to look at him. He's watching me with the kind of attention that used to make me want to argue with something just to redirect it, because I didn't know what to do when someone looked at me like I was a thing worth looking at.
I'm learning.
"So," I say. "A sabbatical."
"A sabbatical," he confirms.
"And Solvi."
"And Solvi."
"In your apartment."
"In my apartment, yes."
I consider that. The three of us, rattling around Mythara for a year. Solvi's drawings on the walls and Flicker shredding things she shouldn't and Kaelion making coffee in the morning and probably correcting my syntax even when I'm not writing anything.
It sounds, frankly, like the best possible problem to have.
The fountain keeps going. The moons are out early, faint and green-blue at the edge of the sky, and the village is doing its afternoon thing all around us—unhurried, unconcerned, entirely indifferent to the fact that something just shifted in me that I don't think is going to shift back.
That's fine.
I don't want it to.