Page 36 of Remmen

“No.”

It came out flat and fast, the same no I’d snapped at Korfas the night Mestyn almost bled out. I had no right to it. She was being the smart one for both of us and I knew it and I said no anyway. Something I’d been sitting on for weeks was standing up in me, and it was getting hard to hold down.

“Get dressed,” she said, and left the room.

I got my trousers off the floor and put them on. In the front room I heard her fill the kettle. The press scraped on the counter. She was making coffee. She would never know the cost of the favors I’d called in to get her those beans, and now she was making it with her back to me because she couldn’t look at me and couldn’t throw it out either.

I came out and kept to the wall, back from the window, so no one on the street could see me. A grown male hiding in a woman’s kitchen from his own town. It should have been funny. My lips weren’t twitching.

She stood at the counter with her cup cradled in both hands and didn’t turn around. Her hair was still a mess from the bed. Even now, even like this, I wanted to cross the room and put my mouth on the back of her neck. I stayed where I was. It was about the only thing left I could do for her, and it was hard.

“Have you heard of Dromuni?” I asked. I needed to fill the silence because I feared if I didn’t she’d send me away. This was not the question I’d meant to ask, though.

“Person, place or thing?”

“A planet. Out at the edge of the Protos Empire. There’s almost nobody on it. Jungle and rivers. Open land, for anyone who wants it.”

She turned around, the cup still at her mouth. “Remmen…”

I forced my lips to twitch up. “You don’t want to go and forge a life there, just the two of us?”

I said it like a joke. But I could see the whole thing while I said it. A river. A house I’d build with my own hands. No Agency, no rules, nobody watching for a light in the window. Anne in a doorway that was ours, and me allowed to stand in it.

She didn’t laugh. She looked at me over the cup, then drank. My coffee, out of the press I’d hauled to her, and I couldn’t tell if that meant she wasn’t done with me or if she just wanted the coffee that badly. I wanted it to be the first one. I made myself not decide.

“That was too close with Chelsea,” she said.

“I won’t stay so late.”

“You shouldn’t stay at all.”

“Anne.”

“No. Let me.” She put the cup down and picked it right back up. “It’s not that I don’t…” She didn’t finish it. “We are breaking the rules. This is completely foolish. I could lose my job, the roof over my head, and there’s nothing for me to go back to. We both fucking know that and yet we’re still…” She made a gesture with one hand, careful not to spill her drink.

“I know what it costs,” I said.

“Do you?”

She said it quiet. Not mean. Just true.

Nothing inside me was willing to walk out that door. Take away my title, the bride program, burn down every house in this damned town, I didn’t care. I just wanted her.

“Anne. Listen⁠—”

“Don’t make this harder. Please. I’ve thought about it every way there is and there’s no version where⁠—”

“You’re my mate.” It tore out of me. It was the impulse I’d been fighting since I first saw her at the dock, when I’d been so certain I could claim her and keep her. Mine. I hadn’t truly believed it was real. I’d thought it was a poor sap’s metaphor.

Now we both knew the truth.

She stood there with the cup halfway down, not drinking, not moving. My heart was slamming. I’d finally said it, and I waited to feel lighter.

I didn’t. It only got worse.

“What does that mean?”

“You know what it means.” I couldn’t put it into words for her. I didn’t have the words. How could you define something that ran in your blood? It came out of me low and helpless. She was mine. She’d been mine since the first breath of her hit me on that dock, before I knew her name, or anything except the certainty that we belonged together.