Page 183 of Every Almost

"Do wefornicate?" Reyna repeated, and the word sounded even more ridiculous in her voice, like she was reading from a medical textbook that had been translated through three languages and lost all its dignity in transit.

"I was trying to be respectful!" Charlie said, her face going red. "I didn't know what terminology you use and I didn't want to assume?—"

"Charlie. Do you mean do we have sex?"

"Oh my god." Charlie put her hands over her face. "I mean... well. Yes. I just, the act of mating without the need for population growth in any way. Is that 'sex' for Kaelari?"

"The act of mating?!" And Reyna lost it again. Charlie dropped her hands while her face tried to figure out what to do with itself. She was blushing, sure, but she also was tired of being laughed at regarding her use of words.

"You need to stop laughing. I didn't know that was a universal conceptout in space! I'm from a non-contact planet, okay?" But Reyna didn't stop laughing, and Charlie suddenly felt giggles moving up her throat. "I'm trying to be respectful, dammit!" She uttered before a laugh broke free from her.

Eventually, Reyna did get control of herself, and Charlie watched her make every attempt to look the Captain again, ready to answer an alien's question.

"Yes, Charlie," she started, trying and failing to keep it professional. "I know the word. Every species in the Coalition knows the word."

"Fantastic."

"Oh, come on. You're right, okay? I have to say that. How would you know? You didn't even know there was a Coalition a few months ago."

"Thank you, o great captain, for highlighting further my voluntold naivety." Reyna barked out another laugh and then smiled a true, genuine smile.

And Charlie's mouth suddenly went dry.

"Okay, okay," Reyna took a steading breath. "Well, it's one of the few concepts that translates perfectly across all known languages and species, actually." Reyna was still smiling, that one Charlie only now noticed she'd been cataloguing since the first time she saw it. And right now, it made Charlie's world a little brighter. "But, Charlie, Jesus, I have to ask what made you choosefornicate?"

"I panicked, Reyna!" Charlie shrieked, attempting to hold onto whatever dignity she may have left. "I was trying to think of the most clinical, least offensive, most species-neutral term I could possibly come up with, and my brain went straight to the word my mother would have used if she'd ever had to describe the concept to a stranger, which she wouldn't have, because Helen Beckman would have just said 'relations' and moved on."

"Relations."

"Don't start."

"I'm not starting anything," Reyna countered, but the lilt in her tone gave her away. Slightly. "I'm simply noting thathumans seem to have an impressive number of euphemisms for something that is, biologically, not complicated."

"Actually, that's valid. You have NO idea. We have hundreds, possibly even thousands. Entire dictionaries worth of ways to avoid saying anything close to the actual word. Or maybe for variety, I don't know."

"Why?"

Charlie sighed. "The truth? Because humans are deeply, profoundly weird about sex and always have been."

"That seems... inefficient. And a bad way to communicate."

"You quite literally just described the entire human race in one sentence, maybe two. And not even just over sex."

"Poor humans," Reyna said, her eyes bright with a humor Charlie rarely got to see, the kind that lived behind the gold and only came out when something genuinely surprised her.

Oh crap, I know that, too.

"To answer your question," Reyna said, interrupting Charlie's thoughts. "Yes. Kaelari have sex. For reproduction, for intimacy, for connection, for all the same reasons most species do. And before you ask the next question, which I can see forming on your face based on our previous discussions of this, no, there are no restrictions on who. Gender, class, race, none of those are categories we apply to attraction. None of them ever have been."

Charlie sat with this, trying to process the concept of an entire species not caring about who you loved and, instead, just celebrated that you did. On Earth, in 1980s California, being a woman who loved women had cost Charlie a family. Sure, it had been a shitty family, but it was still the one she was born into.

Memories surfaced of her father's door and her mother's dismissal. All the years of careful calculation about who to tell and when and how, and the specific, exhausting math of riskassessment that every queer person learned to do before they learned to drive.

And here, on a ship forty light-years from the planet where all of that mattered, the captain was telling her that her entire species had simply... never bothered with the concept.

"On Earth," Charlie said, her tone settling into something sincere and real. "Who you love is a whole thing. Humans have names for it. Categories, slurs, even governmental laws. And the opinions of our fellow human is always a... gamble." Charlie twisted her hands in her lap. "I personally spent years figuring out that it was okay to be me, that I was allowed to be who I am."

"Allowed?" Reyna's eyebrows drew together, and Charlie could see her trying to parse the sentence, trying to find the logic in a system where a person needed permission to love who they loved. "Allowed by whom?"