Chapter 14 Lualhati
LUALHATI
“Could you please sled me over to the saloon after dinner?” I asked Warden Hallum. We were both seated at the little table in his kitchen. He cast a meaningful glance at the plate I’d just scraped clean with my fork.
“It looks like ‘after dinner’ is now,” he observed coolly. “What do you need at the saloon so late?”
“Shiloh just sent me a message.” I held up my comms tablet, as if he required proof. “They’re throwing an impromptu little party tonight. To say goodbye to Tasha and Warden Tenn for now. There’s going to be drinks and music and dancing.”
“Party,” Warden Hallum repeated. He stood and carried my plate to the sink. “Dancing.”
He made it sound like I’d just suggested going skinny-dipping in the frozen pond for fun.
“Yes, dancing,” I told his big, hard back as he faced the sink and washed our plates. “You don’t have to dance. You don’t even have to stay, if you don’t want to. You could just drop me off. I’m sure Rivven could get me home later. Or Warden Tenn could bring me on his slicer.”
“I certainly will not drop you off and leave you there,” he scoffed. He sounded shocked, or maybe even offended, that I’d suggested it. “And I won’t have you coming home on Warden Tenn’s slicer.”
He said something to himself then. It sounded a lot like an angrily muttered “purple” followed by “dildo,” but since that made exactly zero sense, I ignored it.
“I’m just saying.” I rose from my chair, snatching up a dish towel to dry the dishes once he was finished with them.
“You are just saying what, exactly? That I am no longer invited to this party?”
“No! Of course not!” I rubbed the towel vigorously over the pristine plate he passed to me.
I’d dried a lot of dishes washed by Warden Hallum by that point, and not a single one of them had ever had a smear or crumb left behind.
“I’m just…I’m getting the sense that a party at the saloon is the last place you want to be. ”
“It is not the last place I want to be.”
“OK. Second-last.”
“No.”
“Third?”
“No.”
“Alright. Fourth-last, then. I guess I can think of three places less appealing to you than a party.”
“Not even fourth,” he said, turning off the tap. “No place that has you in it could even be on the list.”
He took the towel from me to dry his hands. I let him have it without a fight. My fingers felt weirdly numb all of a sudden.
“If you are going,” he said, “then I will escort you. And I will remain there until it comes time to then escort you back home.”
“How chivalrous of you!”
He hung up the towel, smoothing it of all wrinkles before saying, “This word does not translate.”
“Oh! I guess it is a fairly specific Old-Earth thing. It means, like, heroic. Courteous. Gallant. Like you’d save a lady from her death and then give her a flower for the trouble.”
“A flower?”
“It sounds stupid when you say it like that!” I laughed. I wished I had the towel back. I would have swatted him with it.
“I cannot say that I have ever felt the need to bestow a flower upon someone I have saved from danger,” he said dryly. “No. I do not believe that this word applies to me at all. But chivalrous or not, I am your warden. So I will take you to your party.”
“Yay! Thank you!” Excited, I launched myself at him without thinking, squishing my front against his, throwing my arms around his back.
The next breath he took sounded like a saw grating over metal.
Oops.
He really was not a hugger. Not like me. He’d made that comment about practising them with me, but then neither of us had spoken of it again.
I was about to pull away and apologize when two arms clamped tightly around me.
Warden Hallum was hugging me back.
He’d done so before, back when we’d first met. But this hug was night and day to that one. Our first embrace had been incredibly stiff. He’d stood there, awkward and still, like a big lump of stone.
This time, his arms felt breathlessly alive around me. His chest throbbed against mine in time with his breathing.
“OK, this is like, the best hug ever,” I said. “Have you been practising with someone else behind my back?”
“I believe I told you that I have no interest in hugging any other humans.”
“Fine. You must’ve been practicing with Xennet and Dorn, then.”
His chest shook slightly, and a huff stirred strands of my hair.
Holy fucking cannoli. Jesus fucking Christ. Did I just make Warden Hallum, King of the Stoic Tight-Asses, laugh?!
“No,” he said after a moment. “I have not been practising human hugs with Xennet and Dorn.”
“Could have fooled me.” I could hear the smile in my own voice. “Because their hugs are also top tier.”
“But not as good as this one.”
“Right.”
He didn’t seem like he was about to release me, so I let my eyes close, breathing in his scent. Basking in that intense, physical warmth that had always seemed like such a contrast to his cool composure.
It felt good. Too good.
So good that I forced myself to make some shaky excuse about getting ready so that I could pull away from him. He let his arms drop at once, but not before a quick contraction in his biceps. Like, just for the tiniest of seconds, his body was rebelling against what his brain was telling it to do.
Or maybe I was just delusional. Trying to trick my brain into believing that he might actually…
Return my feelings.
Feelings which included what was turning out to be the biggest, most inconvenient crush of my entire goddamn life.
I doubted Warden Hallum even did crushes. That he was capable of them. I couldn’t imagine him getting all spooled up inside the way I was right now as I entered my room and shut the door.
“Get your shit together!” I whispered, frantically fanning my face.
Fanning wasn’t enough. I gave each cheek a hard slap.
Well. That didn’t really work either. Now I was just freaking out with a stinging face
“No. I’m not freaking out,” I said aloud. Like that might make it true. But then I remembered that fantabulous Zabrian hearing, and I lowered my voice further. “I am just experiencing a minor attraction to somebody. That’s it.”
Minor. Yeah. I could handle that.
It didn’t matter that we were living together, our bodies in such close proximity that I sometimes felt like I might internally combust. And that the only way to stop that combustion was for him to take his pants off.
Soon enough, I wouldn’t even have to be his roommate anymore. The snow would melt. The hospital would be finished. And I’d hopefully get to regain a tiny little slice of my sanity.
That should have been a relief. But it wasn’t. Thinking about the hospital’s completion and my subsequent moving out left me a bit like a deflated balloon. Maybe a deflated balloon animal with a sad and droopy face for extra pathetic points.
Lordy.
“Get your shit together,” I said again. I was going to my first Zabria Prinar One party, to hang out with people I really liked. This dopey, mopey shit was decidedly not the vibe.
Using my comms tablet, I put on some energetic music and started getting ready so enthusiastically it was almost aggressive.
I reapplied my favourite red lipstick, and put on some eyeshadow, too, doing a dark smoky eye with silver shimmer on the lids and in the corners.
Deciding to be really, truly, vigorously festive, I also dusted some of the shimmer along my cheekbones, as well as a little dab at the cupid’s bow of my lips.
My hair I left as-is. It was down, and was behaving quite nicely.
I did change my outfit, though. I’d been wearing a pair of sweatpants from med school and a ratty old pink T-shirt. I chucked them away, humming loudly to the song vibrating out of my comms tablet as I surveyed the options in the closet.
Some of my clothing was still in boxes, as the closet was small and my wardrobe wasn’t. Most of the stuff hanging up and available was either farm-life-practical or office-professional. Neither of which was the look I was going for tonight.
Abandoning the closet, I started hunting through my boxes of clothes. My fingers closed around silky black fabric.
Perfect.
I shimmied into the party dress, tugging the straps and skirt into place. It was stretchy but tight in all the best ways, with a faint shimmer at the front that drew attention to the low neckline. Not that the shimmer was necessary. My boobs probably drew enough attention as it was.
I gave the skirt another adjustment. It was a bit shorter than I remembered, the hem falling mid-thigh instead of closer to my knee. I completed the look with my knee-high boots. After one last check in my mirror, I felt ready to emerge, like some kind of hot, vampy butterfly.
When I opened the door and returned to the kitchen, I found Warden Hallum standing in the same place I’d left him. Like he was some kind of robot who’d simply powered down when I’d left the room, and now was booting back up again.
Although…
Maybe not quite booting back up.
Because now, he simply stared at me in frozen silence. Like his brain was buffering.
“I’m ready,” I said when he didn’t speak.
“You are not,” he said, all raspy and weird, like someone had just punched him in the larynx. “You have forgotten your pants!”
“I haven’t forgotten them,” I replied, frowning. “I’ve purposely left them off. This is a dress.”
He didn’t seem interested in my explanation.
He didn’t even seem to want to look at me anymore.
He shut his eyes tightly and pressed hard on his eyelids with the tips of his fingers, the way someone might if they’d gotten some dust in there.
Or the sun was shining too brightly at them, and now they were all overstimulated.
“Is something bothering your eyes?”
“No,” he grunted. He lowered his hands and swiftly turned away, marching towards my bedroom.
“Where are you going?” I asked, hustling in my heels to keep up with him. They made little clackety-clack sounds on the floorboards as I went, which provided a nearly comical contrast with the precisely measured and heavy boot-falls of the warden.
“I am going to find you some pants.”
“Pants really are not part of this outfit,” I informed him. “Are you going to tell me what I can and cannot wear to the party?”
“No.”
Good lord, he said that word a lot.
“But I am telling you,” he growled, planting himself in front of my closet, “what you can and cannot wear on the ride there.” He snatched a pair of pants from their place.
My frumpy, waterproof trackpants. The kind you’d wear on a long winter hike.
Or if you really wanted to make sure nobody knew you had nice legs under there.
Or legs at all, really. They were that shapeless. “Put these on.”
“Those ones are ugly, though.”
“I do not care,” he said in clipped tones. “They are warm and waterproof.”
With a long-suffering sigh, I took the pants, knowing he was probably right. I’d just have to shuck them off before all the dancing and whatnot.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m keeping these boots on, even though I know you think they’re ridiculous.”
His eyes dropped to my boots. Then began a slow crawl upwards from them, to the bare stretch at my thighs. My whole being prickled with awareness. Including the place between my legs.
He shut his eyes like they were hurting him again.
“I will be outside.”
He made it all the way to the kitchen and then out the front door without cracking those pretty grey peepers open once. Not that such a thing should have surprised me. He could probably walk every inch of this property in his sleep, counting the measured paces like sheep as he went.
What a weirdo.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t judge him. Because, more than likely, I was incurably weird, too.
Smiling to myself, I put on the pants.