Chapter 62: No More Pretending
Chapter 62: No More Pretending
She didn’t answer, and I didn’t push, and we did ordinary things for a while instead.
There was a basin and a jug in the corner and I filled both from the tap in the yard, and we cleaned up in turns with the lamp turned low — chalk dust out of my hair, a long smear of Bramble-Hulk off her forearm, a graze on her shoulder from the bank that she claimed not to have noticed until I pointed at it. I put antiseptic on it. She complained about the sting continuously and did not move once.
We ate. Not much: dried meat and the last of the flatbread and water, sitting on the floor with our backs against the bed like a pair of squatters, which we effectively were.
I stripped and oiled the rifle because my hands wanted a job. She sharpened both knives on the whetstone from my pack and did it badly on purpose, watching to see whether I’d correct her, and when I didn’t she snorted and did it properly.
Somewhere in there the room stopped being a room with two people in it and became something quieter.
"Ask me again," she said, out of nothing.
I put the rifle down. "What aren’t you saying?"
"It’s stupid."
"Alright."
"It’s genuinely stupid and I’d like it on record that I know that before I say it." She was looking at the lamp. Her tail had gone still against the boards. "Tell me about the rabbit again. The frightened one. Did she—"
"Liora."
"—because I’d have thought you’d want somebody like that, honestly, somebody who does what you—"
"You’re doing the thing."
"I am not doing a thing."
"You’re doing the thing where you say something else very fast."
Her ears went flat. Then, slowly, they came back up, and she made a small disgusted noise at herself and put her forehead against her own knees.
"I went home," she said, into her knees. "That’s it. That’s the whole of it. I went home mid-step in a training yard with your hand still on my head, and no time had gone by. My brother was still finishing the same sentence about my footwork."
I waited.
"And then I stood there." Her voice was very level. "In my own yard. In my own world, which I have lived in for twenty-three years, and I thought — that’s it. That’s finished. There is no message I can send. There is no place I can go and no person I can ask. I don’t know the name of your world. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know if the thing that pulls me even remembers I exist." She lifted her head. "You told me it was a small bias. You were very honest about it, which at the time I found admirable and later found extremely annoying."
"How long?"
"Nine days." A pause. "Nine days of not knowing whether I would ever see you again, and no way on this earth to do anything about it, and the worst part—" she stopped.
"Say the worst part."
"The worst part is that it’s your hand on the door," Liora said. "Not mine. I don’t get to decide. I don’t get to try harder, or travel further, or fight something, or earn it. I just wait, in a world you’ve never seen, for a coin you flip." Her mouth twisted. "And I have never in my life been the one who waits."
She said it the way she says everything, flat and dry with the edges filed down, and her ears were low and her hands had closed on her own shins and she wouldn’t look at me.
I didn’t have a speech. I’ve thought since about what a better man would have said and I’ve never come up with anything that wouldn’t have been worse.
"I missed you," I said. "Every day. Not in a general way — specifically you. I’d do something and think about what you’d say about it, and it was always something rude, and it always helped." My throat had gone tight and I pushed the rest out anyway. "I can’t control the Call. That’s true and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I wasn’t hoping for a summon. I was hoping for you, and when the grade came up D I thought I’d lost the last piece of luck I had, and then it was you, and I’ve been trying not to look at the clock since the second you arrived."
Liora went completely still.
Then she was moving — up onto her knees, and across the space between us, and she took my face in both hands and kissed me.
It was not the first kiss I’d ever had. It was the first one that had been offered, and that difference turned out to be enormous.
Her mouth was warm and she tasted faintly of the flatbread and the water and she wasn’t gentle about it, not at first — she kissed me the way she does everything, arriving all at once with her whole weight behind it, one hand sliding back into my hair and the other flat against my chest where she could feel what my heart was doing. Which it was doing very obviously.
She broke off about an inch and stayed there.
"You’re shaking," she said.
"Yes."
"Have you ever—"
"No."
"Not once?"
"I spent my adolescence on the internet and my adulthood in an apocalypse."
Liora laughed. It came out low and slightly unsteady and she pressed it into the corner of my jaw, and then into my throat, and her tail came round my waist and pulled.
"Then I’m going to be very smug about this later," she said. "Tell me if you want to stop. Any point. I’ll be insufferable about it but I’ll stop."
"I know."
"Say it anyway."
"I’ll tell you."
"Good."
She took over after that, and I let her, because I had no idea what I was doing and she very clearly did.
She got my shirt off first and made an appreciative noise that I’d like framed. Then she just — looked, for a moment, with her hands flat on my chest, and there was nothing teasing in her face at all, and I had absolutely nowhere to put that so I reached up and pulled her mouth back down to mine.
Her leathers took longer, and were funnier, because there are more buckles on a Night-Tail scout than on a piece of agricultural machinery and I got two of them wrong. She let me struggle with the second one for a while before taking pity.
Underneath she was warm and compact and scarred in about nine places, and the long pale line down her outer thigh where a freezer frame had opened her up eleven days and one apocalypse ago was the first thing I put my hand on.
"That’s healed badly," I said.
"That is the worst possible—"
"You could have died."
"Adrian." She took my wrist and moved it deliberately upward, off the scar. "I am extremely naked and you are talking about wound care."
"Sorry."
"You’re not. Your ears have gone red." She said it against my collarbone. "They do that. It’s the most useful thing about you."
She was slower after that, and better at this than I had any right to receive.
She kept her mouth near my ear and narrated things, half of it filthy and half of it instruction, and she paid an unreasonable amount of attention to how I reacted to everything — cataloguing me, the way she catalogues a room, and taking obvious pleasure in every discovery. When I did something clumsy she didn’t laugh at me; she moved my hand and said there, and then, when I got it right, made a sound that suggested I should keep doing exactly that.
Her ears gave her away constantly. They’d go forward, or flatten, or twitch hard when I found something, and after the third time I worked out I could read her off them she caught me watching and buried her face in my shoulder.
"Stop that."
"You’ve been reading me all night."
"That’s different, I’m—" Her breath broke in the middle of the sentence and she gave up on it entirely.
Her tail wrapped my thigh and tightened.
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