ANNE
It was late when we got back from the Butchers.
No, the farm. I refused to think of them by that awful name.
But butchery had certainly been done to Hesk. He’d been hiding a knife wound for a week and, shocker, it had gone sour. The growing kit I had from Otho had some antibiotics, but Rauf had instructions to drag Hesk into town kicking and screaming if things took a turn.
I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t supposed to be treating infections. But it was the only help I could offer. After more than a month, I still didn’t have any real clients to speak of, and Nezara had told me, gently but seriously, that a review was coming.
Soon.
I slumped on my couch and wished the pillows would swallow me. Everything was going wrong now. My job was a mess. My love life was a disaster in a new and interesting and even more self-destructive way than usual.
The thing between Remmen and me had to stop. But I didn’t even pretend to lie to myself about stopping it. I’d tried that and it hadn’t taken. And if I was going to be sent away soon, why accept more suffering?
Because your future career depends on a good reference.
Oh, right. Yeah, that.
The Alien Matchmaking Agency sending me away from Ceres-9 didn’t mean they were firing me. They ran programs on dozens of planets and probably needed counselors elsewhere. I could be inviting orcs to sit on my couch and cry about their heartache by the end of the month.
And I’d never see Remmen again. Fuck!
I knew he was there the second before he knocked. I’d started being able to do that lately, sense him a beat before he arrived, and I’d decided a while ago not to examine what it meant. It was late and people talked, so I opened the door and waved him inside without a greeting.
“What are you doing here?” I sounded harsh, accusatory. I wanted to throw myself into his arms and never let go.
He had one hand behind his back like he was hiding something, and he wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. Was he… nervous?
“What have you got?”
“Nothing.”
He was a terrible liar. I’d dated a man who lied for a living, so I knew the difference, and Remmen didn’t have it in him. I went for the hand. He turned with me, easy, and kept it out behind his back, which cost him nothing since his arm was longer than I was tall.
“Remmen.”
“Anne.” He was enjoying himself.
“Keep your voice down.” I pointed at the wall over the couch. Chelsea lived on the other side of it, and the walls in these units were less wall than polite suggestion. “She can hear me chew. I heard her sneeze last week and say bless you to herself.”
“Then she has heard worse than this.” But he quit dodging, which wasn’t fair, doing that to me while I was working up a decent mad. He brought the hand around.
A box. Plain brown cardboard, taped up, dented on one corner, the kind of thing that had come a long way in the back of a hauler.
“Open it,” he said.
I sat down with it on my knees. Standing had gotten to be more than my legs wanted to do around him.
I peeled the tape back and dug through a nest of wood shavings until my fingers hit glass, and I pulled it out.
There was a cylinder with a plunger and a little handle.
Underneath it, wrapped twice in wax paper, sat a bag the size of my head.
I knew the smell before the paper was even open. Dark and bitter and green at the edges, and my eyes stung so fast I had to blink hard and swallow it down.
Coffee.
A press, and enough coffee that if I was stingy with it, it would last me months.
I’d complained about the coffee since my first morning on this planet. Loudly, to anyone who’d hold still for it. The boiled root they drank here tasted like wet dog, and I’d said so more than once, including to Remmen. I’d never once thought he was actually listening.
But he had, the whole time. He’d heard me be loud and miserable about something as small as coffee, and he’d made no show of fixing it.
No audience, nobody to be impressed, nothing he wanted back.
He’d just heard one small unlovely thing I wanted and spent god knows how much quietly getting it for me.
My eyes threatened to water. I tipped my head back and waited for the tears to pass. One got loose, and I wiped it off my jaw with the heel of my hand and pretended that hadn’t happened.
Oh, no.
I was in love with him.
When had that even happened? Maybe with the kiss we shouldn’t have kissed, or Charter Day, or a dumb dented box. Whenever it was, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
I’d signed the contract with the Agency and barely looked at the don’t fall in love with anyone clause. My heart had been so battered and bruised and my psyche needed a quiet place to heal that I had never considered the possibility, not once.
Served me right to not consider all the possibilities.
I kept my eyes on the wax paper and folded it and unfolded it. I did not look up because if I looked up I was going to say it, all of it, out loud, and you couldn’t take a thing like that back once it was in the room. I kept it behind my teeth. I had no idea how long it could stay there.
“How did you even get this?” My voice came out rough and I cleared it. “There’s no coffee on this whole planet. I asked. I practically begged the man at the commissary. He looked at me like I’d asked him for snow in July.”
“I know a few traders. Freight comes through the far port twice a season.” He rolled one shoulder. “I called in some favors.” Then, lower: “Do you like it?”
He sounded almost shy. This male who could pick up my whole apartment and carry it off under one arm, in the middle of my too-small living room, not sure whether he’d gotten it right.
“It’s the best thing anyone’s ever given me.”
He looked young, and glad, and caught out.
I set the press down on the couch, careful with it, and crossed the two steps between us. He met me halfway, folding all that height down to me, one big hand coming up warm at the back of my head. I quit fighting it and kissed him.
For a while I let myself believe we had the night, and the planet, and all the time in the world.
I woke up because the light was wrong.
It came through the gap in the curtains in a flat white slab, and it took me a second to place it. Midmorning. Not the gray hour I usually dragged myself up in. Late.
Something heavy lay over my waist. A lot of something. The mattress had sunk hard toward the middle, under a weight no human body could account for. An arm the size of my leg lay across me. And I remembered all of it at once.
Remmen. In my bed. In the daylight.
The warmth from overnight vanished. Panic took its place.
“Get up.” I shoved at the arm. It was like shoving the side of a building. “Remmen. Get up. It’s late. The sun’s up. You have to go.”
He made a low, pleased sound and pulled me back into him, and for one weak second I wanted to stay right there.
Then I remembered the street outside. The whole town was up by now.
Everyone got out of bed with the sun here and stood around drinking that terrible not-coffee root drink, and every last one of them would notice a minotaur letting himself out of the human counselor’s door at this hour.
I twisted around to face him. His eyes opened, gold and warm, and he smiled at me, slow and easy. He had all morning. I didn’t. I had to get him out before the whole street watched him go.
“You have to leave. Now. Right now.” I got both feet on the floor and hauled on his arm and moved him roughly none at all.
“Mm.” He caught the hand that was shoving at him, turned it over, and put his mouth to the middle of my palm, which was fighting dirty. “You’re not even going to give me a cup of coffee?”
“No. That’s mine. You don’t even like it.” Despite the forlorn realization of love last night, I wasn’t about to do something crazy like share my coffee. “There are people on the street, Remmen. You have to go.”
He sighed, long-suffering, and finally started to lever himself upright.
Somebody knocked.
I’d never moved so fast in my life. I put a hand flat on his chest and shoved him back down and threw the purple quilt over all seven feet of him, and I went for the door dragging my pajama top down over a bra that was still hanging off one tit.
I opened it about eight inches.
Chelsea was on my step with two mugs of the terrible boiled root, one of them held out for me. She looked at my thrown-on pajamas. She looked at my hair, which was almost certainly sex-tousled. A little line came up between her eyebrows.
“Weren’t we going to get breakfast?”
We were. Two days ago I’d promised her breakfast, and it had gone clean out of my head under an avalanche of coffee and minotaur.
“Oh, shit, I forgot.” The lie came in smooth, right behind the truth. “I slept in. I’m sorry. Raincheck?”
I was one wrong word from a full-blown panic and I knew it. I kept my face friendly and my body square in the gap and did not so much as glance toward the bedroom.
“Is everything all right?” She tipped her head and tried to see past me into the dark of the apartment. I moved with her, easy, and kept myself in the way.
“I was out at the farm late last night. I’m just tired.” Not a word of it a lie.
Her face relaxed. She believed me because it was true.
“You know,” she said, and went gentle on me, which was so much worse than suspicious, “you should include what you’re doing out there when we report to Nezara.
The house calls, the dressings. It’s real work, even if it’s not on the intake sheet.
” She glanced down the row of doors. “It may keep us employed.”
“Good idea.” I was sure she could see my pulse in my throat. “I’ll write it up.”
From the bedroom, muffled under a quilt and not muffled anywhere near enough, came a low, deep cough.
Some part of me left my body and went to stand in the corner. On the outside I held the smile and did not blink. “I really need a shower. I’ll see you in the office, okay?”
Chelsea looked at me for one more second, and I decided I didn’t want to know what was in it. “I guess. Yeah.” She stepped back. “Bye.”
I was already closing the door. I got it shut as softly as I could manage, put my back against it, and made myself breathe like I hadn’t just run the length of the settlement.
Remmen hadn’t moved. He wasn’t going to, not on his own, and not while I couldn’t make myself quit looking at him.
He had to go. I’d known it before he knocked last night, and I’d let him in anyway.
Now I had to get seven feet of minotaur out of my apartment in broad daylight without a soul on that street seeing him.
And god help me, I didn’t want him to go.