Page 10 of Jarran

Jarran looked up from his plants. He stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, “Morning.”

Fruit was waiting for her on the edge of the planting bed. Two pieces, deep purple, carefully selected. He’d set aside the grain clusters, too, arranged in a neat row beside her usual spot.

He was the same as every other morning. Steady, quiet, present. Either he’d moved past it or he genuinely didn’t understand what had happened in his own body yesterday. She suspected the latter, and the thought made her chest ache. Best not to examine that too much.

She was the one carrying the weight of what had happened. He felt something and didn’t know what it was. She felt something and knew exactly what it was, and she needed to stop feeling it immediately. Or quit. And oh, what a resignation letter that would be: I’m submitting my resignation because I’m aroused by my amnesiac patient who is also an intergalactic criminal. Yup. That’d be a career ender, right there.

“Morning.” She set her bag down and sat in the dirt beside the planting bed. Normal. Everything normal. “How are we today?”

“Good.” He settled cross-legged across from her. “New growth on the back row. Three plants.”

“Your experiments are working, then.”

He nodded. The almost-smile pulled at his mouth. “Supervisor is impressed.”

“You’re going to put yourself out of a job. They’ll promote you to running this whole bay.”

He considered that. “Would be okay. Like it here.” He glanced around the bay, then back at her. “Like it more when you come.”

Her heart rate increased but she ignored it and covered it up with a too-bright smile. “Well, you’re stuck with me. Coalition contract, remember? You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

“Not trying.” He held her gaze.

She busied herself pulling the scanner from her bag. “Right. Okay. Ready?”

They fell into the routine. She ran the standard cognitive exercises, showed him image sequences, noted his responses. His neural patterns were consistent with the previous sessions. Procedural memory intact, emotional memory active and unresolvable, conscious recall fragmented. She kept her voice even and her notes thorough and didn’t think about his eyes or the fact that her pulse would not settle to its normal rate.

But she was doing fine. She was being professional. This was fine.

An hour in, she shivered. The bay was warm, but she’d been sitting still on the ground for a long time, and the damp soil had leached the heat from her legs. She absently rubbed her arms and kept talking, running through the next set of images, ignoring the chill.

Jarran stopped responding to the exercise. He reached behind him and pulled out a folded blanket. Coarse, gray thermal fabric. Standard Baylan issue. He opened it up, leaned forward, and draped it over her shoulders.

Carefully. Both hands, adjusting the edges so it sat evenly, just as he did when handling seedlings. Then he sat back and looked at the scanner screen, waiting for the next image.

Evie stared at him. “Where did this come from?”

“My quarters.”

“You brought a blanket from your quarters?”

He nodded. “You were cold yesterday. Noticed you rubbing…” He mimed her actions with his hands. “Brought it this morning.”

She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. It was warm and smelled clean, like the soap from the ship’s laundry, but underneath that, it was a hard to describe, but impossibly sexy scent, of soil and plants and him. His kindness wasn’t making this easier. That he’d noticed she was cold yesterday and brought a blanket from his quarters in case she needed it showed high-level awareness. That he’d planned ahead because he wanted her to be comfortable meant Jarran Bando possessed empathy and concern for others.

It also meant he was more intelligent than it would seem considering he could barely assemble a full sentence and didn’t remember his own name. He couldn’t connect the image of his home planet to a single conscious memory, yet he’d spent his morning making sure she wouldn’t be cold.

Something cracked inside her chest. A fissure in the clinical wall she’d built between herself and every patient she’d ever worked with. Except this male.

“Thank you.” Her voice came out rough. She cleared her throat. “That was really thoughtful.”

“You are welcome.” He looked at her briefly, then back at the scanner. “Next image?”

She finished the session. She took the fruit he offered, and forgot to return the blanket to him, so she found herself standing on the lift with it. It would be strange to bring it back now, so she held the blanket against her chest and stared at the numbers above the doors. She breathed through her nose until the tightness in her throat eased.

In her quarters, she folded the blanket and set it on the desk beside the purple fruit. Then she sat on the bed and thought about what she knew and what she didn’t know, and the gaping chasm between the two.

She knew the file. She’d memorized every crime, every date, every documented atrocity. She knew what Pella Rin had done and what he’d built and how many lives he’d destroyed. That was real. That was fact.