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“You can talk to me about it.”
“He just doesn’t get it.” I shook my head. “But never mind that. Tell me about you. Tell me about you and Holston.”
“Uh, he’s great,” she said. “Like I said, he’s the proudest papa in the history of the galaxy. He’s all about making sure that he takes good care of us, and he…” A big grin slid over her face. “I mean, I love him. He loves me. It’s, um, it’s… I’m lucky, I think.”
I grinned back. “Yeah.”
“And you and Caspe are lucky.”
“So lucky,” I said. “We have a connection like nothing else in the universe, really. That’s why it’s so annoying that he doesn’t get it.”
She just eyed me.
I groaned. “What?”
“So, Sienne, if you haven’t been jealous, why haven’t you contacted me until now?”
I ran a hand through my short hair, sighing. “I’m sorry about that.”
She waited.
“Okay, maybe I am jealous,” I said in a low voice, shaking my head. “But… but I think it’s just that it happened accidentally. If I was accidentally pregnant, it would be fine. It would be something I had to deal with, and I would deal with it. But if I have to choose it…”
“I get that,” she said, nodding. “But seriously, Sienne, if you’re jealous of people accidentally getting pregnant, don’t you think that means you want to be pregnant on purpose?”
“It’s only that everyone I run into, in the entire galaxy, ends up married and pregnant and happy, right?”
“Everyone?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It doesn’t even make any sense. Like how could that be real? It’s ridiculous. Not everyone gets a happily ever after.”
She considered. “Maybe it depends on how you, um, look at it? Because if I told you that my baby was only two gemoons old and that her father had been out on overnight hunting trips—just one night—at least five times since she was born, and left me all alone, you might think that didn’t sound entirely like happily ever after, and you might not believe that I liked it when he wasn’t around sometimes, because… too much.” She made a face.
I laughed. “No, I get that. Men, right? Needy.”
“So needy,” she said, shaking her head. “What is that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Some kind of compensation for the ability to open hatch door cranks one handed? Like, nature is like, ‘We will make them physically stronger and, as a balance, deep down vulnerable.’”
“Maybe,” she said, laughing. “Anyway, I’m just saying, it’smyhappily ever after. We all have the ability to tell ourselves our own stories. Sometimes, we have to give ourselves permission to want what we want without feeling ashamed of it.” She shrugged.
“That’s true,” I said. I knew exactly what she meant. For a long time, I couldn’t allow myself to admit that I wanted Caspe, because I felt like I shouldn’t want him.
Was the baby thing similar at all?
Several hihors later, after I’d ended the communication with Cypra, and we’d made plans to meet up once she was back in the field, and I’d cooed over how cute her sweet little girl was, I found Caspe in his tank of water. He had to soak in it for a certain amount of time every day. Sometimes I joined him there.
Sometimes, he put his tentacles in all kinds of naughty places while I joined him.
But this time, I didn’t want to be distracted, so I just leaned on the lip and peered in at him. “I made up with Cypra today. I saw her baby.”
“Oh?” he said. “We doing this now, then?”
“Doing what now?”
“The showdown,” he said. “Where our little argument about this stops being polite?”
I straightened. “You’re angry with me?”
