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“What?” he asks when he sits back, and the three charcoal dots above his silver eyebrows twitch upwards as he lifts them. They look like they’re raised from his skin, and I wonder if they feel smooth or rough.
Then I shake my head slightly and refocus.
“Mr. Tzelik,” I say, then pause, even as his eyebrows lift further. He’s right, we’re on a date…I really should use his first name. I clear my throat and try again.
“Vahadr” —and doesn’t that just feel sinful on my tongue— “you never click your fingers at Kyrin or Asili, or even at me.”
“No,” he says slowly, “I suppose I don’t.”
Someone swoops around on my left, laying a crisp white napkin over my lap with a flourish before moving on to Vahadr. “Why not?”
His expression turns flat. “Why is this important?”
I lift my chin. “Oh, I guess it’s not.” And then I lift my hand, and without breaking eye contact, I snap my fingers under his nose. “Could you pour me some water, please?”
His brows lower, and then keep on lowering as his eyes turn down to look at my hovering arm. And because I feel like I’ll never reasonably get this opportunity again and I want to milk it, I snap my fingers a couple more times. “Come on. I’m thirsty.”
He opens his mouth, closes it, and then in a swift movement, catches my hand in his and lays it flat against the table. “Alright, you’ve made your point.”
And without removing his hand from mine, he stretches across the table to snag at a silver jug of water and pours me a glass.
In fact, not only does he not move his hand, he actually curls his fingers around to rest against my palm, and he remains like this for almost the entire evening.
***
It’s odd. During our date, Vahadr—and it still feels odd to even think about him with his first name—did not act any differently. He didn’t suddenly become a gushy male lead from one of the romances I like to watch with my sisters, didn’t shower me with complements or feed me dessert or pull me into his arms and take me dancing by the glittering droplets of the waterfall. He was his usual haughty self, made his usual annoying remarks, and we had the regular sort of interesting conversations that I’d expect from a man with his mind. But he kept his fingers on my hand the whole time, and his eyes lingered over me a little more than usual, and it just…felt different. Within no time at all, all of my nerves and fear about the date melted away, and I’m glad I said yes now, glad that I didn’t cancel.
But I don’t understand why he didn’t kiss me.
Not by the waterfall when he showed me the brightly colored fish in the pond, not outside under the two moons with the stars reflecting off the glass dome of the greenhouse, and not even now as we stop at the top of the sweeping staircase near our rooms.
“Well, Analina, I hope you’ve had a good night,” he says quietly, and he lifts a hand to tuck a stray curl behind my ear.
“You might as well call me Ana,” I murmur, “since we’re dropping the formalities.”
“Ana, then.” He smiles faintly down at me, and I find myself staring at his lips again.
Maybe I should just…
“Father? Where have you been?”
I only just manage to suppress a twitch at the appearance of a sleepy Asili as we both turn to face him, and an odd expression flickers against the edges of Vahadr’s expression. Part affection, part annoyance.
“Asili, what are you doing out of bed?”
But it’s Asili’s expression which hits me. A certain squinty-eyed, puffy-faced look that appears almost like a glare, except that I know it’s just his attempt to keep his eyes open and focused.
And I know this because it’s the same look that Elena gets whenever she’s woken abruptly from a deep sleep.
***
I should have just gone to bed. I shouldn’t have opened up that damned surrogacy website again, but I can’t sleep when I get something lodged in my brain like this, and I thought I’d quickly relieve my fears by proving to myself once and for all that I’m just making connections where there are none.
I opened up Asili’s confidential files once more, and everything looked normal.
Biological Mother: Nkina Tzelik (now Nkina Petrz) of Zvezden
Biological Father: Vahadr Tzelik of Zvezden
Non-biological Surrogate: Elena Martin of Earth-station Beta 012
Everything looked normal, and I’d almost shut my holo-note at that point, but something drove me to keep looking this time, and I clicked into Vahadr’s file. Everything remained nice and normal and official, and I threw open his DNA sheet in a separate tab for all the good it would do me, since I have very little knowledge of biology. Still, it would make me feel better to compare them all.
But when I tried to do the same for Nkina and Asili, both files were missing, with a simple 515 Error: Page Not Found message, and my whole body went cold with dread.
Three hours later and I find myself deep in the company’s servers, behind layers and layers of security, tracing a deleted pathway that leads me to a file showing very clearly that Elena, not Nkina, is the biological mother of Asili.
