The Quiet Sea
ERAVIC
The sea was quiet tonight.
He had learned not to trust quiet seas.
He stood at the bow with his hands on the rail and looked out at the dark water and tried not to think about the three days. He had made a decision about the three days which was that he was not going to think about them. So far he had kept to it.
The resolve held.
It was the only thing holding.
He had told her his ship was always open to her.
He had meant it and he had also known, even as he said it, that she would not come.
The offer was the kind of offer that sounded generous but functioned more like a courtesy.
The way someone eating a very large steak might gesture at the plate and say help yourself, knowing full well the other person understood they did not actually mean it.
He had thought about that metaphor more than he should have since returning to his ship.
He had pushed it further, the way he pushed most things further when left alone with them long enough. If Colsar was the one eating the steak, and Asharin was the steak, then where exactly did that leave him?
He was not in the dinner at all.
He wished he could explain that he did mean it. That she could eat as much of his meal as she liked. That the offer was not courtesy. That there was no plate large enough that he would not push the whole thing toward her without a second thought.
He realized then that he did not have the type of mind that wandered so far that somehow remembering an offer he made about his ship became a mediocre metaphor that he had now continued in his mind for several minutes.
That was not his normal. But then again, the more he had been around her the less normal everything felt.
He briefly wondered if she even liked steak.
He wished they could have one more night on the shoreline.
She would grimace at the treatment vial.
He would lose at cards in a way he chose not to examine too closely.
And somewhere between the cards and her incessant questions he could simply ask her: do you eat steak, and if so, how do you like it cooked?
He suspected medium. Dangerous but sensible. Although some would argue the most sensible thing was to go by taste alone, in which case rare won, in his opinion.
He laughed quietly thinking about how she would debate him on that. She would be wrong, but she would be convinced she was right, which was a quality he had come to find unreasonably endearing.
He thought of how small she had looked in that chair by the hearth. How long her hair had gotten in the weeks since she arrived in Morrath. How those white eyes had flashed at him when—
He pushed the thought out of his mind.
He heard footsteps on the dock below. Not his crew. He knew his crew by sound without looking.
He looked down anyway.
A figure was walking toward the ship. A cloak, dark, hood pulled against the cold. The wind came off the water and caught the edges of the hood.
Golden hair.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he put both hands back on the rail and looked out at the dark water and waited to find out what kind of quiet this was.