REMMEN
I wasn’t sure what purpose the blanket that Anne had thrown over me was supposed to serve. Anyone who looked into her bedroom would see a minotaur-shaped lump lying in her bed, decorated by a purple quilt.
But she had put it there and I didn’t push it off.
I heard only the whisper of voices as she talked to the person at the door. I should have felt nervous, like a fiend caught in the act. Instead, I wanted to march into the front room and drape my arm over Anne’s shoulders and declare her mine for all who could see.
It was the last thing I could do. It would see her sent packing before the day was out.
Unless…
Would she agree to bind herself to me? To marry me without Agency interference and stay by my side?
I didn’t dare ask. Anne was here as a counselor. That was her job, her passion. She lived to help people and if we stepped together into the light, she would have to abandon that path. I couldn’t do that to her.
The outer door shut. I heard the latch, and Chelsea’s steps going down the stairs, and then the little apartment went quiet.
I waited for her. I knew what was coming. I’d faced down men with knives and felt steadier than I did lying there under her purple quilt, waiting for a small human woman to come back and tell me what a mistake I was.
She came in white around the mouth.
I was on my feet before I thought about it, my hands on her shoulders. She was shaking.
“Anne.”
She shoved me. Both hands on my chest, all of her weight, and I didn’t move, and my not moving was the wrong thing. She stepped back on her own.
“Don’t.” Her voice was low and shaking. “Don’t be gentle with me right now.”
“She’s gone. She didn’t see anything.”
“She heard you cough.” Anne wrapped her arms around herself. “From under a blanket. In my bed. In the morning.” Every word came out clipped. “Why did you stay? The whole night, Remmen. We don’t do that. We can’t do that; we can’t do any of this, and you stayed.”
She wasn’t only angry. Under it she was scared, and there was nothing I could do about that.
I tried to find a reason and came up empty.
“I slept,” I said.
She stared at me.
“I slept.” It sounded stupid, so I gave her the rest. She deserved the truth and it was all I had. “I lay down after. I meant to go. Then it was morning.” I looked at my hands. “I sleep hard next to you. I haven’t slept a whole night through since before this town was mine. I didn’t know I would.”
Most nights I woke in the dark with my hands up and the pit all around me, and I’d lie there until the walls came back and my heart slowed down.
Next to her that didn’t happen. I went under and stayed under and woke up with her hair in my mouth, and I hadn’t reached for the door.
I hadn’t even thought of it. It was the best sleep I’d had since I was a boy, and I’d stolen it in her bed with the whole town a wall away, and I would do it again that night if she let me.
Her arms came loose a little. Then she caught it and folded them tighter.
“That’s not a reason.” She pushed her hair off her face. Her hand wasn’t steady. “You have to go. And maybe…” She made herself say it. “Maybe you shouldn’t come back.”
“No.”
It came out flat and fast, the same no I’d snapped at Korfas the night Mestyn almost bled out. I had no right to it. She was being the smart one for both of us and I knew it and I said no anyway. Something I’d been sitting on for weeks was standing up in me, and it was getting hard to hold down.
“Get dressed,” she said, and left the room.
I got my trousers off the floor and put them on.
In the front room I heard her fill the kettle.
The press scraped on the counter. She was making coffee.
She would never know the cost of the favors I’d called in to get her those beans, and now she was making it with her back to me because she couldn’t look at me and couldn’t throw it out either.
I came out and kept to the wall, back from the window, so no one on the street could see me. A grown male hiding in a woman’s kitchen from his own town. It should have been funny. My lips weren’t twitching.
She stood at the counter with her cup cradled in both hands and didn’t turn around.
Her hair was still a mess from the bed. Even now, even like this, I wanted to cross the room and put my mouth on the back of her neck.
I stayed where I was. It was about the only thing left I could do for her, and it was hard.
“Have you heard of Dromuni?” I asked. I needed to fill the silence because I feared if I didn’t she’d send me away. This was not the question I’d meant to ask, though.
“Person, place or thing?”
“A planet. Out at the edge of the Protos Empire. There’s almost nobody on it. Jungle and rivers. Open land, for anyone who wants it.”
She turned around, the cup still at her mouth. “Remmen…”
I forced my lips to twitch up. “You don’t want to go and forge a life there, just the two of us?”
I said it like a joke. But I could see the whole thing while I said it. A river. A house I’d build with my own hands. No Agency, no rules, nobody watching for a light in the window. Anne in a doorway that was ours, and me allowed to stand in it.
She didn’t laugh. She looked at me over the cup, then drank. My coffee, out of the press I’d hauled to her, and I couldn’t tell if that meant she wasn’t done with me or if she just wanted the coffee that badly. I wanted it to be the first one. I made myself not decide.
“That was too close with Chelsea,” she said.
“I won’t stay so late.”
“You shouldn’t stay at all.”
“Anne.”
“No. Let me.” She put the cup down and picked it right back up.
“It’s not that I don’t…” She didn’t finish it.
“We are breaking the rules. This is completely foolish. I could lose my job, the roof over my head, and there’s nothing for me to go back to.
We both fucking know that and yet we’re still…
” She made a gesture with one hand, careful not to spill her drink.
“I know what it costs,” I said.
“Do you?”
She said it quiet. Not mean. Just true.
Nothing inside me was willing to walk out that door. Take away my title, the bride program, burn down every house in this damned town, I didn’t care. I just wanted her.
“Anne. Listen—”
“Don’t make this harder. Please. I’ve thought about it every way there is and there’s no version where—”
“You’re my mate.” It tore out of me. It was the impulse I’d been fighting since I first saw her at the dock, when I’d been so certain I could claim her and keep her. Mine. I hadn’t truly believed it was real. I’d thought it was a poor sap’s metaphor.
Now we both knew the truth.
She stood there with the cup halfway down, not drinking, not moving. My heart was slamming. I’d finally said it, and I waited to feel lighter.
I didn’t. It only got worse.
“What does that mean?”
“You know what it means.” I couldn’t put it into words for her.
I didn’t have the words. How could you define something that ran in your blood?
It came out of me low and helpless. She was mine.
She’d been mine since the first breath of her hit me on that dock, before I knew her name, or anything except the certainty that we belonged together.
The bond had knocked me flat on that dock and it had never once let up. And if anyone spotted us together, it would still be the end.
Anne backed up a step, until the counter stopped her. She looked at me like I’d shut a door on her. And I couldn’t even blame her for it.
“Nothing in my contract says this is okay if fate says it’s okay, Remmen.
” She was very careful now. Her knuckles were white on the cup.
“I don’t even…” She stopped. Took a breath, long and unsteady, and set the cup down with both hands, like it might spill.
“I don’t hear anyone outside right now. I think you should go. ”
She didn’t say don’t come back.
I held onto that. It was the only thing in the room left to hold.