11. Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
Rhazgar
I close my door and stand in the dark, not reaching for the light.
She knows something is wrong. The warning was clear, I’m a librarian, I research things. I don’t blame her. For almost a week, I’ve been feeding her courtship meals while she thought I was healing her ankle.
The stone mortar is still on the counter from this morning. I put it away with more care than it requires.
I don’t know how long I stand there before my phone chimes. Grulk.
I know you’re in there. I can smell your misery.
I consider not responding, but he won’t leave now, he’s got me cornered.
Come in, door’s unlocked.
He lets himself in a moment later, looks at me once, and goes to my kitchen. I hear him filling the kettle. This is not a HammerFall behavior, tea is WarmHearth, but he learned it somewhere in the last eight years.
He sets two cups on the table and sits. He waits.
“I kissed her,” I say. “With the silver thistle. She offered it to me and I…” I stop. “It was not calculated. But it happened.”
“And she doesn’t know what it means.”
“She doesn’t know what any of it means. Not the meals. Not the thistle.” I sit. “In WarmHearth tradition, we are already something to each other. She has no idea.”
“She accepted the courtship meals.”
“Without knowing they were courtship meals.”
“Yes,” he says simply. “That is the problem.” He wraps his hands around his cup. “So tell her.”
“I know I need to tell her.”
I owe her not just honesty about what I did. I owe her the acknowledgment that choosing not to tell her was a choice. That it was not care. That I treated her like someone who needed to be managed, and I knew better, and I did it anyway because the alternative required courage I had not yet found.
“Then why haven’t you?”
I pick up my cup. Put it down. Outside, the building eases into its evening sounds: footsteps above us, a door closing down the hall, the ordinary sounds of lives proceeding normally.
“How old were you,” I say finally, “when you first courted someone?”
Grulk looks at me for a long moment. “Seventeen.”
“I was twenty when my grandmother began teaching me the full courtship preparations. She said I would need them soon.” I look at my hands. “The portal opened four years after that, and then there was the integration, the adaptation, the preservation work.”
Grulk is very still.
“I have never courted anyone,” I say. “Not here. Not properly on our world either. I was young, there was always going to be more time.” The words feel strange in my mouth, too plain, too revealing.
“I know every traditional preparation. Every stage of the progression. I have the knowledge my grandmother gave me and I have used almost none of it as it was meant to be used, not until her.” I look up.
“And the first time I take it beyond the meals, I do it without her knowledge or consent, with a human woman who doesn’t understand our ways, and then I kiss her with silver thistle and she kisses me back and I still cannot find the words to tell her what is happening. ”
Grulk is quiet for long enough that I begin to regret speaking.
Then he sets down his cup.
“You have been waiting,” he says slowly, “to have an experience you were never going to get any other way.”
“Yes.”
“There is no version of this where you already know how to do it.”
“No.”
“So you have been standing at the edge waiting to feel ready.” He looks at me steadily. “Rhazgar. You are not going to feel ready. That is not how this works. That has never been how this works.”
I know he is right. Knowing it has not helped.
“What stops me,” I say, “is not telling her I have feelings for her. I could do that. It would be terrifying, but I could do it.” I press my palm flat against the table.
“What stops me is the rest of it. The meals. Over a week. Sitting across from her every morning and every evening while she thanked me and asked questions about my culture and had no idea what she was accepting.” I look at him.
“I have to tell her that, too. All of it. And I don’t know how to say I did something wrong to someone I… ”
I stop.
Grulk’s expression does something complicated. “Someone you what?”
I don’t answer. I don’t need to. He’s known me long enough to hear what I don’t say.
“Then that is what you tell her,” he says quietly.
“Not just the courtship meals. Not just the tradition. You tell her that you are a man who has never done this before, who did it badly, who knew he was doing it badly, and who is asking her to understand why.” He pauses.
“That is not a small thing to offer someone. That is the truth.”
“And if she cannot forgive it?”
“That is her right.” He stands, collects both cups, and takes them to my sink. “But she kissed you back, Rhazgar. With the silver thistle on your tongue, knowing it meant something she didn’t yet understand, she kissed you back.” He turns. “That is also information.”
He moves toward the door.
“You cannot practice being honest with her,” he says, hand on the frame. “You can only be honest with her. The rest…” he shrugs, HammerFall practicality distilled into a single gesture, “the rest is just waiting to feel ready for something you will never feel ready for.”
He leaves.
I sit in the quiet for a long time.
He is right. He is entirely right. And I am still sitting here, the stone mortar put away with excessive care, the silver thistle gone, the condo holding the faint trace of her presence like a question I don’t yet know how to answer.
But I know what the answer has to be.
I will tell her what I have done, and what I feel, and what I am: a male who is thirty-two years old and doing this for the first time and who has no excuse except that grief is very good at consuming the years when you should have been learning how to want something.
It is not a good excuse.
But it is the true one.
I open my laptop.
I am not sure what I’m looking for exactly. Some human framework for what I need to do tomorrow. Some cultural protocol I have missed. I type, “How to tell someone you withheld important information in a relationship.”
The first result is from something called Cosmopolitan magazine.
“Oops, You Messed Up: 10 Steps to the Perfect Apology (Step 3 Will Surprise You!)”
I click on it. Step 3 is “bring snacks.” I close it.
I try a different search: “how to apologize sincerely when you have done something genuinely wrong.”
“We Asked 5 Relationship Experts: Can You REALLY Come Back From a Big Lie? (Spoiler: It Depends on His Zodiac)”
I do not know what a Zodiac is. I click anyway. The article informs me that as a Scorpio, he would need to demonstrate “radical vulnerability” while avoiding “trauma dumping.” I am not a Scorpio. Not certain what a Scorpio is. I close the tab.
“Quiz: Is He Withholding or Just Mysterious? There’s a Difference, Babe”
I stare at this headline for a long moment. Then I take the quiz. It tells me I am withholding. I am aware of this.
“He Said WHAT? 7 Signs He’s Just Not Emotionally Available”
I read this one in full. I recognize myself in signs two, four, five, and seven. Sign six is, “He forgets your birthday.” I do not know when Julia’s birthday is. I add this to the list of things I need to correct.
I close the laptop.
I sit in the dark kitchen for a while longer; the condo is very quiet.
The articles have not helped. I did not expect them to help.
I think I was hoping that somewhere in the accumulated wisdom of human relationship advice there would be a sentence that said, “Here is how you tell someone that you fed them courtship meals without their knowledge because you were afraid and inexperienced and have never done this before and you are genuinely sorry and also you have feelings for her that you do not yet have words for.”
There is no such sentence.
I will have to find my own words.
I go to the drawer where I keep the things I brought through the portal.
Some seeds that never sprouted. Some minerals.
A few silver thistle seeds I’m saving in case the entire crop dies and I need to plant new.
And at the back, wrapped in a square of cloth that has not been unfolded since my grandmother died, is her hair comb.
Carved bone, worked into an intricate pattern committed to memory as a child while she cooked, some of the carvings worn smooth from decades of daily use.
She wore it every day. I don’t remember a single morning when her hair wasn’t fastened up with it, the bone warm from her skin, smelling faintly of herbs even now if I hold it close.
She brought it through the portal in her gray hair. I have been keeping it because I could not think of what else to do with it. Because giving it away felt like a finality I was not ready for.
I hold it for a moment.
Then I set it on the counter where I will see it in the morning.
I write out her healing broth recipe by hand: the full version, with the native language on the left and the translation on the right, every measurement and timing and intention exactly as she taught me.
It takes an hour. I have never written it down before.
It has always lived only in my hands and my memory, the way grandmother intended.
I fold it solemnly and set it beside the hair comb.
Tomorrow evening. After the day is done and the condo is quiet. I will bring the broth, and the hair comb, and the recipe, not as an apology, but as an answer. This is what I am. This is what I am offering. She will know everything, and then she will choose.
That is not cowardice. That is consideration.
I almost believe it.