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I eyed her. She wasn’t attracted to me anymore, was she? Why should she be? I was a failure and I couldn’t fuck her. I didn’t even have a cock anymore. She said she’d be okay with me taking that injection getting it to retract, but she was dissatisfied. And if it really was all about chemicals, if I hadn’t been actually in love with her but just affected by some cocktail of brain chemistry that made me want to make a baby with her and keep her safe until she bore my offspring, then… well, I couldn’t blame her. I grimaced.
She was talking again. “You know it’s done. Webothknow.”
I sighed. I fiddled with the tip of one of my antlers. “I guess so.”
“Well—well, good.” She drew herself up. “I knew it was done, too, and I was blaming it on other things, but maybe it’s just… maybe we were just…” She never finished the sentence.
I watched her, trying to think of what to say to her, trying to decide how to proceed. Eventually, I said, “So, uh, what happens now?”
She went over to the lower bunk and sat down. “What do you think happens?”
“I think I leave,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
Silence fell between us, and I hated it. I missed her. She was right there, but I missed her. I wanted… I needed…
“Look, it’s not you,” I said in a low voice. “It’s this. The resistance. This place. Everything about it is artificial and built-up. It’s all metal and blinking lights, and I miss the sky and the air and the trees and I can’tbreathe.”
“Well, that’s why you leave,” she said. “So you can go back to all of that.”
“But shei, I…” Now, it was me who couldn’t finish the sentence. I got up from my chair and I went to her. I sat down next to her on the bunk bed and put my arm around her. “I do love you. It’s not chemicals. Maybe it’s different now, less about sex or something, but I never loved you because of sex.”
She snorted, but she lay her head on my shoulder. “Why did you love me?”
“I loved you because you were brave and determined and because you were willing to take risks for the things that mattered to you.”
She snuggled into me. “I loved you because you were strong and capable and confident. Because you made me feel safe and because you thrilled me in some way that I couldn’t even explain. But do you notice how we’re both talking in past tense?”
I cringed. “I still love you, Cypra.”
“Do you really?”
I let out a long, low breath.
I was gone by the next evening, on a ship to a spaceport on Kalion where I could board another ship to Ohkk. Within three gesuns, I was back at home, in my huge, empty house, that I’d made so large for no good reason.
Why had I made this thing so big?
I couldn’t be there.
I went out to that bar where I’d met her, and I got very, very drunk.
I stayed that way for a while.
cypra
Then he was gone.
Better,I told myself.It’s better this way.
He had been miserable. I had been miserable. Our relationship was never going to work, and it was cleaner this way. It was easier this way. It was better.
With him gone, I could focus entirely on ignoring the fact that I was practically throwing up in the mornings and sometimes at other times of the day, too.
I guessed that was why I didn’t care so much that he was gone?
If you’d told me a gemoon and a half ago that this relationship I was in was going to blow up in six fogemoons, I would have been devastated. I would have cried.
