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“Most readers would probably be thrilled to leave Earth behind. But I always read to escape my life, and being dragged here forced me to live again. Which probably sounds like a good thing, and maybe it is. But it hasn’tfeltlike a good thing. I was happy enough on Earth, because I didn’t have to deal with my mind as much. When I got stressed, I grabbed a book. When I got sad, I buried my nose in a story. It made my head easier to live in. Without that crutch, everything is harder. The anxiety, the fear, the pain… it’s just bigger, now.”
“So books were your buffer.”
“Yep.” I focused on my food while he considered our conversation.
“Would you go back to Earth right now, if you could?” Quake—Odin—finally asked me.
My first instinct was to say yes. To say that I’d go back in a heartbeat.
But when I thought about my apartment back on Earth, about my library…
I grimaced.
Maybe I didn’t hate Bluhm as much as I’d thought.
Maybe some part of me was glad I’d finally been forced to grab life by the balls and really live it.
“I don’t know,” I told him, though I was pretty sure I did know.
Was I ready to admit the truth, though?
No, I was not.
“You’re lying to me, Margo,” Quake said. “I can hear it in your voice.”
I changed the subject abruptly, without thinking it through. “Do you want me to call you by your real name? I’m trying to decide how to think of you. Since we’re, you know, stuck together.”
“Permanently mated.” Quake rephrased my sentence, and my face heated.
“Right. That.”
“You know that in my culture, the names mates call each other carries great meaning. It’s different in your culture, so I’ve started respecting your request for me to call you by your given name. But if it were up to me alone? You would call me Odin, and I would call you Velvet. Or another name, if you truly didn’t like that one.”
“Alright, I’ll call you by your real name.” I paused, biting my lip for a moment before I added quickly, “And you can call me Velvet.”
The words poured out of my mouth so fast I wasn’t even sure he’d had time to hear them.
But when his lips curved upward, I knew he’d understood.
Rather than commenting on it, he simply took a bite of his food. My eyes followed his movements, and I tried not to stare. I tried not to watch his lips, as they wrapped around that spoon. And I tried not to let my eyes follow the movement of his throat as he swallowed.
I forced myself to take another bite of my own pasta, so he wouldn’t hear silence and realize I was just staring at him like an absolute stalker.
“What kind of books did you like to read on Earth?” Quake—Odin—asked me.
“Some of everything,” I admitted. “Mainly indie stuff.”
“What does that mean?”
I loved the way he asked questions. Not with annoyance, or pride, or self-consciousness. He asked them because he was curious, and because he trusted me to answer. Or at least hoped I would answer.
“It’s kind of hard to explain. On Earth, some people would write books and another company would sell them—other people would sell their own books, online.”
“On the same internet as your social media?”
“For the most part.” I nodded. It was close enough, anyway. “The books in stores were also online, but they weren’t usually part of the programs that let you read a lot of books for a smaller price—and I read alotof books. Indie books also have different tropes, and styles, from traditional ones.”
“What are tropes and book styles?”
