Page 28 of Remmen

Rauf’s mouth pulled crooked. “Ripped one hauling feed. He swore up and down it was you who told him not to.” He drank. “He listens to about half of what you say. That’s more than he gives anyone else.”

“Half’s a start.” I tapped my cup against his, and he let me, and for a moment we both stood at the edge and watched the town be warm without us. Then I slipped back into the light before anyone came looking for me, and he took his cider off into the dark.

Back in the thick of it Maisie pressed a fresh cup into my hand and Briar’s husband told a long, winding story about a goat that turned out, somehow, to be a story about his wife, and for a little while I just let myself be a person at a party on a planet that had felt impossibly remote a season ago.

These could be my people, if I let myself want it enough.

I hadn’t planned on that. I’d planned on a job and a locked door and my own quiet company, and instead I had a bride who lent me her buggy and a doctor who trusted my hands and a whole square of enormous men who nodded to me now like I was one of the fixtures.

And then Remmen planted himself in front of me, his hand out, and three hundred people watched the mayor ask the counselor to dance.

“The mayor should dance with everyone,” he said, loud and official, pitched to be nothing. “Good for morale.”

Refusing him in front of the whole square would have been the strange thing. If that was a lie, I used it anyway. I put my hand in his and made my face do bored and professional and prayed it held.

He brought me in against him and I fit against the bottom of his ribs, one of his hands closing around both of mine, the other spread warm and enormous across my back.

I felt every eye in the square on us. What they saw was a giant being careful with a woman half his height, and they went soft over it. From the outside that was all it was. They couldn’t see the live wire running up my arm from where our hands met, or that I was holding myself back from closing the last inch. I kept my face pleasant and hoped it held.

You are in the middle of the entire town, I told myself. One wrong look and it’s a shuttle off this planet with no reference to speak of. My body heard me and leaned toward his anyway.

The mayor could dance with anyone once on Charter Day. But the song ended and he didn’t let go of my hand, and the band slid into the next slow thing. I didn’t pull free. I just wanted three more seconds. Then three more, his jaw tight over my head. One more turn and we’d be what this town talked about for a year, and that kind of talk got a counselor sent home.

Step back, Anne. Right now.

It took everything I had. I stepped back before the song was over, put on a bright, empty smile, and hunted down a cider I didn’t want. I did not dance with him again. I felt him at my back the rest of the night, and I couldn’t shake how close that had been.

The lanterns burned down. Eventually, the band packed up. Brides rode home half-asleep over enormous shoulders, and the square emptied out as the night wore late.

Remmen’s end of the settlement lay in the same direction as mine. So we walked it. Two polite feet of cold night air between us, our footsteps not quite in time.

I had meant to say good night back at the square. I’d meant it. But he slowed his steps to mine and I didn’t speed up, and we walked the dark road home together, the cider still warm in me, and every sensible reason I had sat lined up in my head and not one of them stopped me.

We came to the place where the path bent off toward my apartment.

This was where the mayor said good night to his counselor and they went their separate, sensible ways.

Remmen stopped. He reached out and closed his hand around my wrist, the whole of it, gentle, and didn’t pull. Just held on, and waited, and left the next part entirely to me.

This was the part where a woman with any survival instinct left said good night and walked to her own door.

I turned toward his house and followed him inside.

CHAPTER 12

ANNE

Remmen’s house was dark and warm and it smelled like woodsmoke and cold ash and the clean warm heat of a body that took up most of a room. He’d built the place himself, every careful line of it, and there was nothing inside that said anyone really lived there. One chair. A bed I couldn’t see yet and was already thinking about.

He didn’t turn on the lamp. He stood in the middle of his own front room, this enormous male who could have picked me up in one hand, and he held still and waited, and did not reach for me.

Like I might change my mind, and he’d let me, and never say a word about it.

I took my clothes off.

I did it plainly, and I did it fast, because I knew myself. Give the thinking part of me one second and it would start in about my contract and the last good posting I had left, and I’d be doing my buttons back up before he could blink.

I didn’t give my brain the second it needed to catch on. Jacket, then shirt, then everything else, folded into a neat square stack on the arm of his one chair. When I straightened up, bare in the dark, his breath had gone rough and his eyes had lit, and he still hadn’t moved.