Page 9 of Ward

Chapter 4

Tisha

The morning after you get engaged-adjacent to a stranger in front of your entire dinner service, the correct move is to make cinnamon rolls.

This was not superstition.

It was crowd control.

Tisha had the first trays out by second bell, and the smell did what the smell always did — turned every conversation in the hall soft at the edges — and by the time the breakfast rush hit its stride, the station’s collective interest in her romantic paperwork had been successfully redirected into its collective interest in getting a center roll before they were gone.

People could only gossip about one miracle at a time.

She’d learned that at fourteen, on a base in Okinawa, the week two lieutenants got caught slow-dancing in the motor pool: the only story better than romance was frosting.

“You could also just talk about it,” Renn observed, sliding the second tray into the case. “That’s a thing beings do.”

“Talk about what?”

“You got matched. By the agency. To the terrifying one.”

“I got a data card with conversation topics on it. Re-lee writes them herself.” She’d read them last night, feet up on her tiny counter, cackling.

Topic four was ‘What is a smell that means comfort to you?’ — her own answer from that birthday form two years ago, served back to her by the machinery of fate. Onions in butter. She’d laughed so hard she’d scared the plant.

“Nothing happened, Renn. A man I’ve fed for six days found out my name at volume.”

“He rejected the match in front of the whole hall.”

“He tried to. Turns out love has a returns policy.” She checked the braise coming up for midday — deeper on the smoke today, she was chasing something — and clocked the room over the pass.

Exits. Friendlies.

And there it was, seventh-bell man at the second bell, corner table, tray of breakfast he was eating like a court-martial.

Her match, allegedly, all knife-straight posture and white hair and a scowl aimed at the middle distance where presumably his honor lived.

He’d come back. Twelve hours after the single most public romantic humiliation the commons level had ever hosted, he had walked back into her dining hall and sat down at his table, because it was his table now, and eaten his breakfast like a man daring the room to have an opinion about it.

She respected it enormously.

Not that she planned to tell him so.

Here was the thing she’d worked out overnight, lying in her bunk listening to the station tick: he’d said no before he knew anything at all.

It hadn’t been personal — a man who’d never spoken to her couldn’t reject anything but a concept.

Probably carried a whole planetary system of them, given the way he’d announced his refusal like a man reading his own eulogy, formal and braced and careful to say no disrespect while looking at absolutely nobody.

He was also here on orders, with a thirty-day departure built in before they had met. Tisha knew better than most people how solid an order could be.

You did not tug on it.

You learned the calendar, made the days good, and kept your wanting light enough that nobody had to pack it.

Tisha had met men like that before. Bases were full of them. Men who'd decided somewhere along the way that wanting things was a weakness, and built their whole lives around never letting it show.

There'd been one in her dad's unit. A sergeant — legendary, granite, the kind of man new recruits told stories about. Her mother fed him every Sunday for a year and a half. No comment, no campaign, just an extra portion set out like it had always been his.