The other one is on my arm.
She does that in her sleep and has no idea it’s happening. I’ve stopped moving away.
Six moon cycles I’ve been in this apartment. I came here with a canvas bag and slept sitting up on a couch built for a being half my size, with my feet hanging off the end and my back against the arm and my face toward the door, and I did that for eleven diurnals.
And then one night she had a dream about her brother and woke shouting. I was through that door before I was properly awake, and afterward she didn’t ask me to go back out to the couch. She just moved over.
Neither of us has said one word about it since.
I get up and get the food started, because she can’t face a morning without something in her and can’t stand to be near the dispenser while it’s working.
The apartment doesn’t look the same as when I first arrived. Everything’s been moved down—the cups, pans, anything she’d need, all of it is off the high shelves, because a Xylan kitchen is built for beings like me and she’s got no business climbing on a crate at full term. Her due date is next week.
I have lived in a compound my entire life, in a house full of my own blood. And now I live in a small apartment three floors up in employee housing, twelve minutes’ walk from the mine, with a female in it who leaves her tools in exact rows on the table and talks to grid schematics under her breath.
And Hook lives across the hall.
That’s the other thing I didn’t expect. Six moon cycles ago I’d have called it a punishment — the loudest of my brothers within shouting distance, the male who reported my movements to the whole crew for sport. And now he turns up at my door at odd hours with two cups of traq, and we stand out on the corridor balcony where the jungle comes right up against the building, and we don’t talk about anything at all.
I know my brother better now than I did in the twenty rotations we lived in the same house. That’s a strange thing to learn at thirty-one.
And Leah and Mara have become best friends. They’re in and out of each other’s doors constantly.
Argyl comes over and sits on my feet, which I permit.
I still go to the compound. That hasn’t changed. I take Mara out there for every rest day and every courtyard night and she sits in the middle of that family like she was born into it, and then we come home, back here, to this.
Home.I notice myself using the word and I don’t take it back.
“Don’t,”she says from the bedroom doorway. “Don’t say it.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’rethinkingit.” She comes out sideways — she goes through doorways sideways now, which she finds humiliating and I find something I will not name — and lowers herself into the chair in stages. “You’re thinkingyou shouldn’t be up, and I’ll have you know I was up because your child was performing gymnastics on my bladder at oh-five-hundred, so it’s not my fault.”
Your child.
She’s been saying that for months now and I think she’s basically unaware. I have noticed every single time.
“Sit,” I say. “I’ll do your boots.”
“I can do my boots.”
“Mara.”
“Ican,” she says, and then makes a serious attempt at it, and gets about halfway down before her whole body informs her otherwise, and she sits back up with her face red and says, “Fine. Do my boots.”
So I kneel on the floor and use my gloved hands to put on her boots.
Here is my situation.
I’m going to lay it out plainly, because I’ve stopped pretending it’s anything other than what it is. I am in love with Mara Wilson.
I do not know when that started. I’ve tried to find the diurnal and there isn’t one — there’s a gallery on level four hundred where a small human crossed a room to speak to me and didn’t flinch at my face, and there’s everything after, and somewhere in there it happened without my consent or my noticing.
I want her as my bride. Not as a companion, not as a female I live beside. I want to clasp her hand and have it read true and take her into an ancient forest, or a corridor, or this apartment, and claim her for the rest of my life.
But my body is dormant and my scent continues to read negative.
