“You just offered to spend your entire life’s savings on me just so I could run off and start a new life without you!” I said with a teary laugh. “You really think you need to tell me that you love me after that?”
“I do,” he replied solemnly. “I’ll tell you every day. Every moment.”
“Sounds perfect,” I sighed. “I’ll look forward to that. When I’m your wife.”
I led him towards the door. “So why don’t we go downstairs and make that happen, Rivven? Because the rest of our life is waiting for us. And I want it to start right now.”
21
RIVVEN
Idid not fully relax into our marriage until the trial period of two human weeks was over. If Shiloh knew this, I was certain she would not have been happy about it. But I could not help it. Being married to her felt like I’d trapped some kind of lucky magic that I would never actually be able to keep. I trusted her. But I did not trust this new happy turn in my life. Surely, like everything else, it would all come to naught.
But we got married. Warden Tenn and Tasha left the property. And we spent fourteen glorious days living together. And when those fourteen days were up, she said nothing at all about it.
Perhaps she had not even noticed.
Seventeen days after our wedding, we received a visit from Warden Tenn and Tasha. The warden’s wife and mine embraced affectionately, wrapping their arms around each other and smiling broadly.
“Came to bring you something,” Warden Tenn said. “That Elora Station order you put through Warden Hallum arrived with some supplies for the men in my province. I’ve got it on my slicer.”
I glanced at Shiloh, but she was deep in conversation with Tasha, leading her towards the kitchen.
“I want you to have a sip of this latest batch of drinks Rivven made,” she was saying with excitement. “It’s so good. It almost reminds me of something like a crémas because it’s so creamy. That’s an Old-Earth traditional Haitian drink. No matter how tight money got, Daddy and I always managed to scrounge some up around the holidays.”
Shiloh said that I had made the batch, but she had helped. She was interested in all facets of my work here, and had thrown herself eagerly into learning about how I fermented the drinks for the saloon. She’d begun advising now, too, offering ideas on flavour profiles and ingredients. She was just as brilliant at this as she was at her painting. Creativity seemed to positively glow within her, but it was like sunshine in a cup. It overflowed out of her, shining and reflecting. Illuminating everything it touched. Including me. And the drinks.
She never drank much of it, though. The first time she’d tried, she’d taken a small sip then glanced at me with a shocked look on her face.
“What is it?” I’d asked, fearing something was wrong with it.
“Nothing! It’s absolutely delicious,” she said. “But holy…Tasha was right. This is very boozy! How the heck do you drink so much of it?” She indicated the large cup I’d poured for her, the same size as my own cup. I had filled it the same way I’d fill a cup with water. Just about to the top.
That was the day I learned what human drunkenness was. Apparently, humans metabolized alcohol differently than Zabrians, and if they drank too much of it, they’d be slurring and stumbling and could even be entirely incapacitated. They’d have to recover afterwards in what Shiloh described as a “hangover,” which sounded very much like the symptoms of her migraines tome. So I was glad that she was careful and did not accidentally drink too much.
Seventeen days here, and she had not caught another migraine.
It would happen eventually. I knew it would. But I would be here to take care of her when it did.
“Come on,” Warden Tenn said. “I’ll show you.”
Leaving our wives (our wives! I had a wife!) inside, the warden and I went together to his slicer. He opened its storage compartment and pulled out the items I had ordered. Brand new tubes of paint, multiples of every colour. New paintbrushes. Two more books with thick paper like the one Shiloh had brought with her, but bigger. And several canvases or varying sizes. I had already built her a wooden easel. It was currently stationed near the window of the dining room.
“The paint did not freeze, did it?” I asked.
Shiloh had mentioned a desire to paint outside more than once. The phrase she used for this was odd, and did not translate well. She had told me that she wanted to paint “in the full air.” But the full air, at least right now, was still very cold. And she worried that her paint – which she did not currently have much of – would freeze outside, along with the water she used for her brushes.
“Engine provides some heat to the storage,” Warden Tenn replied as I gathered it all up into my arms. “Everything should be in order.” He closed the lid.
“Good.”
After Tasha and the warden left, I showed Shiloh her gifts. She gasped when she saw it all, her face lighting up almost as if she had Zabrian eyes. She put a human hug on me, all while thanking me enthusiastically. I still found her gratitude somewhat uncomfortable to bear. This seemed like such a smallthing to do for her, and I always wanted to do so much more. But she acted as if it meant the world.
“Look at all this paint!Cerulean Blue, Deep Cyan Blue, Phthalo Blue. I can’t remember when I last had all three of those at the same time!” She ran her elegant fingers along the tubes in their boxes, then turned to the other items. “And the canvases!”
She picked up one of the smaller ones, and then offered it to me.
“Would you like to do one?”
