I grab a towel and wave smoke toward the vent. “Don’t start.”
“I haven’t started. I’m admiring the crime scene.”
“You are not funny.”
“I am extremely funny. You’re just lovesick and carbonizing breakfast.”
I freeze with the towel in my hand. “I am not lovesick.”
Darlene pours coffee into a mug with the calm of a woman lighting a fuse and walking away. “Fine. You’re romantically concussed.”
“I am not romantically anything.”
“Your giant alien boyfriend says otherwise.”
“He is not my boyfriend.”
“Giant alien emotional support catastrophe, then.”
“Still not accurate.”
“Giant alien unpaid employee you keep staring at like he’s made of frosting and bad decisions.”
“That is a hostile workplace statement.”
“This whole workplace became hostile the day you started mooning over a Vakutan built like a religious objection.”
I turn toward her, cheeks hot enough to bake replacement buns. “I do not moon.”
“You burned pastries while thinking about his face.”
“I was thinking about Horus IV.”
Darlene’s expression changes.
The joke drops out of the room. The smoke still drifts beneath the vent, but the air feels suddenly heavier. Darlene sets the coffee pot down and comes closer, her slippers whispering across flour-dusted tile.
“He told you?”
“Some.”
“How much is some?”
I look at the ruined tray because it is easier than looking at her. “Enough.”
Darlene says nothing for a moment. That is rare enough to qualify as weather.
I pick at a fused edge of parchment, then stop because my hand is shaking. “He carried a little girl for kilometers. Her legs were crushed. He promised her he’d get her to the ships. The ships came late.”
“Damn.”
“He still thinks he failed because only four civilians survived.”
Darlene exhales slowly. “War does terrible things to people, and then it has the gall to hand them the bill.”
“I touched his face.”
The confession falls out before I can dress it in sarcasm.
