Page 182 of Every Almost

She registered that directly in her spine.

"Charlie?" Reyna asked, looking over.

"Hmm?" Charlie responded, about two octaves higher than her normal vocal register.

Smooth, Wickett. Real smooth.

"Is everything okay?"

"Fine!" Charlie screeched.

Reyna raised her eyebrows.

Charlie's face didn't move for almost three whole seconds. But she finally just relaxed, looked over at Reyna directly, and told her the truth. Or, at least a version of it.

"I've just got a lot on my mind," she said, the honesty of the statement showcasing her sincerity.

Reyna's face softened. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Charlie wanted to tell her 'yes,' but then she wouldn't know what to say. She wanted to talk about her discovery over Reyna with Reyna, because this was what they did. They talked about things, or they stayed quiet, but it was always easy, and it was always based on what each of them needed at 0300 in a room full of stars.

"I do," Charlie said, wanting to stay as honest as possible. "But, I don't know if I even know what to say." Charlie laughed softly and saw Reyna do the same.

"I understand."

"You do?"

Reyna nodded. "Sometimes the thoughts that we want to share and figure out are the ones we don't know how to explain."

Charlie stared at her. "Yeah, that's it exactly," she said, a little bewildered.

"Kaelari have that a lot," Reyna added, accentuating the last words. "Especially in relationships."

Charlie froze, but it didn't seem as though Reyna caught her sudden change in demeanor.

"Relationships overall are a mystery to everyone, even those in them. But trying to talk about something you don't really understand yourself with someone who has the same shortcomings?" Reyna shook her head as she smiled. "Recipe for utter disaster."

Charlie almost laughed. Because her brain, her traitorous, engineer-wired, problem-solving brain, was already doing the thing it always did. Reyna had said "relationships" and Charlie's mind had immediately started building a schematic. How do Kaelari relationships work? What do they look like? Are they similar to human ones? And once the schematic started, it kept going, the way a build can do, past the parts she was comfortable examining and straight into the parts she absolutely should not be thinking about while sitting this close to the Captain of the Emberkind.

But the question was already formed. And Charlie had never been good at leaving a question unasked.

"Can I ask you something?" Charlie said.

Reyna looked at her. "I'm going to say 'yes' but, because of your explicit curiosity after I talked about the relationship shortcomings of the Kaelari species, I will add that it comes with the stipulation of 'it depends on what it is.'"

"Okay, fair," Charlie said. "And it does have to do with the Kaelari species. But, culturally."

Reyna raised an eyebrow. "That narrows it down to approximately four thousand years of Kaelari civilization. You're going to have to be a bit more specific."

Charlie took a breath. She was trying to figure out the right word. Arespectfulword. Not necessarily scientific, but something that would acknowledge she was a human from planet Earth asking an alien about something... intimate.

"Do Kaelari...'fornicate'?"

The word landed in the room and sat there like a brick someone had placed very carefully on a glass table.

Reyna stared at her.

And then she laughed. Loudly. Not controlled at all. The same laugh Charlie'd heard in Borran's kitchen, short and bright and completely startled out of her. It was the kind of sound that happened when someone's composure was ambushed by genuine delight.