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Maybe it didn’t make sense.
Maybe I was allowed to be irrational right now.
Maybe…
Whatever, I had other things to think about. I had to talk to the people in the resistance about my pregnancy, and we had to discuss my level of comfortability with missions at this juncture, how and when I wanted to transition into a different position, what I could do and where I could do it.
I had vitamins to take and alotof sleeping to do and an array of remedies to try to see if any of them actually settled my stomach.
I had the future to think about, all manner of baby gadgets to acquire by begging, borrowing, and buying, and I had to figure out how and where I was going to deliver, because a half-donen, half-human baby would not be the same as a human baby.
So, I didn’t tell him.
And gemoons passed, and my belly swelled, and the pregnancy progressed.
One day, I had to go off planet to go see a midwife in the Balanccs system who knew about half-donen babies and could examine me and tell me what kind of birth plan I was going to need to put into place.
I needed a ride, and Caspe and Sienne were on the station, so I thought I’d ask if they could take me. But Sienne didn’t respond when I sent a message to her bracelet. Instead, Caspe came and sought me out where I was working on parsing intelligence we’d intercepted from the Toth military. It was mostly drudge work, reading through transcripts, listening to recordings.
I didn’t mind it, however, I was finding. It wasn’t dangerous like an in-person mission, but it was really important, and I was willing to experience the tedium if it meant that I had the chance of helping the cause.
“I can take you today for your appointment,” he said.
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Just you?”
“Yeah, Sienne’s busy with some debriefing stuff, but I can do it,” he said.
“Great,” I said.
Later, we were on the ship together, and I was strapped into the bridge for takeoff, but we’d cleared that and we were now in space, course set, and he was unstrapping and stretching out his tentacles.
I unstrapped too. “Um, Sienne couldn’t tell me that she was busy herself?”
He glanced at me. “You noticed that she’s avoiding you. She said you would. I said you wouldn’t. She was right.” He was tall and bald and black, his tentacles squirming around, and he wore a navpatch over one eye, a tool that space pirates used to hack navigational systems on ships. He would have been intimidating, but I knew him now, and he wasn’t the least bit intimidating.
“She’s avoiding me?” I was hurt.
“It’s because she heard you were pregnant,” he said. “She, um, she…” He shook his head. “I think she’s jealous.”
I drew back. “Oh. I didn’t know you guys were, like, trying?”
“We are not,” he said, and then he swept out of the bridge, leaving me alone and confused.
I got up and followed him out.
But he wasn’t anywhere in sight.
I moved through the ship until I found him in a room that was set up like an office. He had a desk in there and he was seated at it, squinting at a holoscreen.
He looked up at me. “You want to keep talking about Sienne, don’t you?”
“Well, that’s really confusing,” I said.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I think it’s her passive-aggressive way of telling me she wants babiesnow, right? But when I ask her point blank about it? She’s always like, ‘Not yet.’”
“Did she say she was jealous?”
“No, not in, like, words,” he said.
