11. Anne
ANNE
I liked town festivals. I’d grown up in a place that marked Pine Day every November to honor the first pioneer who cut down a pine tree in Bender’s Grove. Was it an auspicious reason to celebrate? No, not really, but after three hundred years the town needed some bit of history to cling to.
Charter Day was a new celebration, and I didn’t need to read the sign proclaiming “Third Annual Festival” to know.
The traditions hadn’t settled yet. So far, it was a crush of minotaurs and their handful of human brides, drinking cider and listening to the band on the newly constructed stage in the middle of town.
I was surprised to see Rauf and another one of the Butchers whose name I didn’t know milling around the edge of the festivities.
I was even more surprised when Rauf nodded to me in greeting, but I recovered quickly and nodded back.
I shouldn’t put him and his cohort into a box just because everyone else had. They deserved a chance.
The air around me seemed to change when Remmen joined in.
I didn’t have to see him to know where he was.
That was the problem. All night there’d been a line drawn from under my ribs to wherever he stood, drawn tight when he crossed the square and gone loose when he came near and never, not once, letting me forget where he was.
I could stand with my back to the whole crowd, laughing at something Chloe said, and point to him with my eyes shut.
I’d done that to myself. I’d climbed into his lap in a truck with the rain coming down and I’d handed myself this.
Some nights, in my narrow bed over the office, I almost wished I hadn’t, because before I knew what his hands felt like I could at least pretend I had the wanting handled instead of the other way round.
Almost. On the bad nights the memory of him was the only warmth in the room, and I reached for it more than I should have.
Of course I’d done this. Crossed a galaxy to start clean, and fallen for the one male on the whole planet who could end my career with a rumor.
I’d tried the safe version once, the sensible one.
I’d bet everything I had on it being real, and come in a very distant second. You’d think a person would learn.
Maisie and Chloe had staked out the end of a bench near the snack table, and they watched me drift into their orbit with the look of two women who’d already made up their minds and were just waiting for me to catch up.
“There she is,” Chloe said. “Our very neutral counselor.”
“Extremely neutral.”
The band shifted into something with a beat, and the square turned into a dance floor by common agreement, boards laid over the churned mud, couples finding each other under the strung lanterns. Briar was already welded to hers.
Kazan found me first. He bowed like I was somebody fancy and walked me through something that was less a dance than him keeping three hundred pounds of celebrating minotaur from stepping on me.
“Maisie says the buggy’s yours as long as you want it,” he told me, dead serious.
“She also says if the mayor keeps looking at you the way he’s looking at you, she wants to be told first. Before the town. She was very clear on the order.”
“Your Maisie is a troublemaker,” I said, and he laughed like I’d confirmed something.
Lorkin took the next one. His horns were filed to blunt stubs for the forge and there was a spark in his eye I didn’t trust. “Chloe has a list of questions I’m supposed to be asking you,” he said.
“Are you going to?”
“No.” Lorkin shook his head. “If she wants to know, I think she should ask you herself.”
Across the square, at the ragged edge of the lanternlight, Zarcal stood holding a cup he wasn’t drinking from.
He’d come to my office the day before, sat down in the chair by the window, hands loose on his knees, while I did paperwork and waited.
At the end he’d stood, thanked me, his voice all gravel, and booked another hour for the next week.
I had no idea what it was I was doing for him, only that it seemed to be something. When he caught my eye now he dipped his head, once, and I gave it back, and neither of us made it into more than that.
I needed a minute where nobody was watching my face, so I carried two cups of cider to the dark edge of the square, where Rauf stood apart from all of it, watching the bright loud middle with no intention of joining it.
“You’re not dancing,” I said, and held one out.
He looked at the cup like it might be a trick. Then he took it. “Butchers don’t dance.”
“How are Mestyn’s stitches faring?”
Rauf’s mouth pulled crooked. “Ripped one hauling feed. He swore up and down it was you who told him not to.” He drank. “He listens to about half of what you say. That’s more than he gives anyone else.”
“Half’s a start.” I tapped my cup against his, and he let me, and for a moment we both stood at the edge and watched the town be warm without us. Then I slipped back into the light before anyone came looking for me, and he took his cider off into the dark.
Back in the thick of it Maisie pressed a fresh cup into my hand and Briar’s husband told a long, winding story about a goat that turned out, somehow, to be a story about his wife, and for a little while I just let myself be a person at a party on a planet that had felt impossibly remote a season ago.
These could be my people, if I let myself want it enough.
I hadn’t planned on that. I’d planned on a job and a locked door and my own quiet company, and instead I had a bride who lent me her buggy and a doctor who trusted my hands and a whole square of enormous men who nodded to me now like I was one of the fixtures.
And then Remmen planted himself in front of me, his hand out, and three hundred people watched the mayor ask the counselor to dance.
“The mayor should dance with everyone,” he said, loud and official, pitched to be nothing. “Good for morale.”
Refusing him in front of the whole square would have been the strange thing. If that was a lie, I used it anyway. I put my hand in his and made my face do bored and professional and prayed it held.
He brought me in against him and I fit against the bottom of his ribs, one of his hands closing around both of mine, the other spread warm and enormous across my back.
I felt every eye in the square on us. What they saw was a giant being careful with a woman half his height, and they went soft over it.
From the outside that was all it was. They couldn’t see the live wire running up my arm from where our hands met, or that I was holding myself back from closing the last inch.
I kept my face pleasant and hoped it held.
You are in the middle of the entire town, I told myself. One wrong look and it’s a shuttle off this planet with no reference to speak of. My body heard me and leaned toward his anyway.
The mayor could dance with anyone once on Charter Day.
But the song ended and he didn’t let go of my hand, and the band slid into the next slow thing.
I didn’t pull free. I just wanted three more seconds.
Then three more, his jaw tight over my head.
One more turn and we’d be what this town talked about for a year, and that kind of talk got a counselor sent home.
Step back, Anne. Right now.
It took everything I had. I stepped back before the song was over, put on a bright, empty smile, and hunted down a cider I didn’t want. I did not dance with him again. I felt him at my back the rest of the night, and I couldn’t shake how close that had been.
The lanterns burned down. Eventually, the band packed up. Brides rode home half-asleep over enormous shoulders, and the square emptied out as the night wore late.
Remmen’s end of the settlement lay in the same direction as mine. So we walked it. Two polite feet of cold night air between us, our footsteps not quite in time.
I had meant to say good night back at the square. I’d meant it. But he slowed his steps to mine and I didn’t speed up, and we walked the dark road home together, the cider still warm in me, and every sensible reason I had sat lined up in my head and not one of them stopped me.
We came to the place where the path bent off toward my apartment.
This was where the mayor said good night to his counselor and they went their separate, sensible ways.
Remmen stopped. He reached out and closed his hand around my wrist, the whole of it, gentle, and didn’t pull. Just held on, and waited, and left the next part entirely to me.
This was the part where a woman with any survival instinct left said good night and walked to her own door.
I turned toward his house and followed him inside.