“Yes?”
“Please look at me.” She took her time, but her eyes met mine. “I don’t have a mate.”
She blinked. “But the bonding marks?”
“Like you, I was in a formal promise-contract, but not a bonding. It was a commitment that was made and then unmade before most of my military life, actually. I don’t mourn a mate. There is no mate to mourn. There has been no one in my life outside of Pip for a long time.”
“Oh,” Dani said.
I looked at her then. She had been keeping distance because she thought I was grieving. She had assumed an obstacle that did not exist and had shaped the past week around it. We could have resolved all of this drama by talking to each other. We wasted a week.
We stared at each other over the top of Pip’s head, and I knew I owed her an apology. “I’m sorry for looking at the contract and not asking you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For disappearing and not,” she paused. “I drew a conclusion.”
“As did I.”
“Ours were both wrong.”
“Yes.”
Pip made a small, satisfied sound and tucked herself more firmly between us. She had stopped making noises of distress, which told me she was feeling better.
I looked at Dani.
“Dani,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, her voice a whisper. “Yes.”
I opened my mouth.
Pip sneezed into the space between us, and looked unrepentant. The emotional moment fractured into something more ordinary, Dani laughing despite herself and reaching for the cloth she kept in her pocket, and I watched her face with the laugh in it. “Tomorrow?” I said.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.
Chapter 13
Andrek
Ihadnotwantedtotalk about my past life for a long time. I never considered silence on personal matters to be a deficiency requiring correction. My crew had understood this about me within the first year of my promotion to captain. Rethis, who had known me longest, stopped attempting to extract personal information through direct inquiry. Instead, he developed a system of oblique comments delivered at irregular intervals, which I found considerably more manageable and had never told him was effective.
But I watched Dani’s face in the corridor while Pip settled between us and saw her relief when I said I had no mate to mourn. While it was the truth, I owed her the full background.
That evening, after Pip had eaten and read to and had conducted her usual prolonged negotiation about the arrangement of her sleeping blankets before conceding to sleep,I found Dani in the common room. “I’d like to explain about the bonding marks.”
She looked up from the book she’d been holding but not reading. She set it aside without pretense. “You don’t have to,” she said.
“I know.” I looked at my hands. The discoloration on my wrists was faint now, years faded, visible because I knew where to look. “But, I’d like to.”
She tucked one leg beneath her on the seat and turned toward me. “Whenever you’re ready. I won’t push.”
“Her name was Ereth,” I said. “We went to school together as children and served together in my second year of commission. We were compatible in superficial ways.”
“Did you love her?” Dani asked.
I considered her question. “I believed so, but I was young and had nothing to compare my feelings to.” I looked out the window. “Among my people, bonding happens early. It’s cultural. We’re oriented toward partnership, toward the building of a unit. There’s no shame in waiting, but there’s a considerable ambient expectation. By the time I was twenty-three and hadn’t formed a bond, my family had developed opinions.”
“Opinions,” Dani repeated. “Yeah, I get it.”
