by H. E. Trent
“Am I not welcome, Brother?”
“Of course you’re welcome. In spite of your incessant and aggressive derision about the company I choose to keep, you’re welcome in this space for as long as you respect the inhabitants.”
Esteben opened his eyes and ground his teeth to temper his words. “They all come here to dine?” he forced out. “Why are there so many?”
“They all live and work for us on the farm, but choose to gather and eat here. We enjoy the company during this part of the day. I do not believe that is so unusual. Even if we’re less typical than most of our Jekhan brethren, we’re used to having noisy homes. You should expect that people would gather here.”
“I’ve gotten so I prefer the quiet. The hospital was always…so loud. The hallways…”
“I see.” Murk squeezed Esteben’s shoulder. He tracked his gaze down to the bottom of the sunken rows of seats to Erin. “I suppose you’ll simply have to get used to the noise once again. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll check on the meal.”
He walked away, and Esteben kept his vigil by the door, standing and staring. He considered leaving, and had talked himself into doing exactly that when Courtney called over, “Esteben, come settle a debate for us.”
“A debate?”
“Yep.”
“Over what?”
Courtney waved him over, fearless as always, in spite of the sour expression he likely had on his face. “Come on. You’ll see.”
“As you wish.” He stiffened his spine and acknowledged the strangers in the room with a tight smile as he descended to the lower level. He sat on the cushioned bench beside Courtney where she indicated, and met Erin’s curious stare.
Her expression halted at some halfway point between a grin and a grimace, and whether that was over the debate she was having with her sister or Esteben’s presence, he couldn’t guess.
“The debate is over likelihood,” Courtney said.
“Explain,” he said, shifting his gaze to Madam Beshni’s more friendly countenance.
“Both Murk and Trigrian believe that the chances are astronomically low that the child I’m carrying is female. They say that Kerry was a fluke.”
“For the most part, I’d agree.”
She sighed. “But the doctor said that the probability of either being conceived should be half and half, just like it is on Earth, but that viability is less certain with females. Erin insists that me being human makes a difference and that I’m having another girl. She also reminded me that Trig had a bunch of sisters. Maybe he’s got the magic, too.”
Esteben hated to side with his brother’s male on anything at all, but Trigrian would have probably had as much common sense knowledge as the local doctor. Still, he abstained from agreeing. “What is your debate?”
Courtney hooked her thumb toward her sister. “Erin insists that she can tell what I’m having based on how my nose looks right now—and don’t get me wrong, I’m going to find out as soon as the doctor is back in Little Gitano—and so the debate is…what color should the yarn in the baby blanket be?”
Esteben stared, silently looking from one woman to the other and trying to discern signs of jest, but he could never tell with that particular pair of sisters. And as always, Erin was looking away. She studied what was left of her fingernails. She’d complained to Owen that most had broken off during the sensor installations.
Look at me, woman.
Briefly, as if she could hear the mental demand, her gaze flitted upward.
“Well?” Courtney said.
Erin looked away.
He grunted. “The baby’s blanket?” he asked, wondering if he’d missed the meat of the question.
“Uh-huh,” Courtney said. “I need to let my mother know in the next COM conference call so she can sneak some stuff onto a transport for us. The shipment will take seven months to get here, so she needs to get started now. Kid’ll probably be on solid foods by the time the cargo arrives and one of the guys can get into Buinet to yank the stuff out of the ship it’s on.”
“You’re exaggerating.” Brenna nudged her eyeglasses up her nose and peeked out from under the heavy blanket she half buried herself beneath. “What are you, four months?”
“I think. I haven’t had a period to go by. I was still nursing Kerry on demand when quickening happened.” She pulled Kerry close and blew a raspberry atop her mop of mahogany curls. “My poor little booger tried to wean herself. Didn’t like my milk anymore and stopped nursing for a while. Took a lot of effort to get her to start back up.”
“Who even are you anymore?” Erin asked, shaking her head at her sister. “A year ago you were a cop who carried two guns and a chocolate bar wherever you went. Now you’re going to be carrying two kids and a burp rag.”
“You’re just jealous that you were wrong and that I actually found a man who could tolerate me enough to get the job done.” Courtney smiled behind Kerry’s curls. “Two, actually.”
Esteben passed his hand across his smiling lips and tried to stay quiet. Fertility wasn’t generally a topic discussed by Jekhan women in male company, but the majority of the women in the room weren’t Jekhan. Amy was nowhere to be found. Fastida was sitting cross-legged in front of the low table near the McGarry sisters, painting decorative Gitanan clay tiles, but her mother was absent as well. Fastida didn’t appear to be particularly scandalized by the mixed company, either.
Odd women, these.
“So, what do you think?” Erin asked, looking pointedly at his shoulder.
Do I repulse her?
That didn’t make sense. She’d let him eat fruit from her palm.
“I still think pink’s a safe bet.”
“I say you tell your mother to do blue or green,” Brenna said from under her blanket. “Or both. She could do, like, an Earth motif.”
“You should do red,” Fastida said. “Red dye is so hard to get here. Tell her to send extra yarn, too. You could make a little money selling it.”
“Esteben?” Erin asked. “We hoped you’d be the tiebreaker, but apparently our teams aren’t as evenly divided as I thought.”
For a question that likely had no right answer, Esteben still wanted to say the right words. Of course, he didn’t want to offend Courtney. She’d given him a niece, and he was very blessed that his brother’s firstborn had been a girl, but they were talking about a blanket for a child that was likely Trigrian’s. Anything Esteben said could have been construed as hostile, given their contentious relationship in the past. But that was simply the way things worked on Jekh. Murki and Trigrian were inextricable. Their children would be siblings and Esteben had to accept that. He needed to use some diplomacy, but he was woefully out of practice.
He cleared his throat, crossed his legs in the other direction, and lifted his chin toward Courtney. “What color is Kerry’s blanket?”
“Ugh. You had to go there, huh?”
“Seemed a reasonable starting point in formulating an opinion of my own.”
“Kerry’s blanket is plain undyed fiber. Right off the shelf. We were kinda in transition at the time and hadn’t connected with anyone else around here yet. We weren’t in a position, really, to do anything custom. Even that was a luxury I shouldn’t have splurged on, but I wanted her to have something that was just hers.”
“Has your mother also agreed to make something for Kerry?”
“I’m sure she would,” Erin said. She gave her sister a sidelong glance. “You know how she is.”
“Yeah, I know how Mom is, but I also know she’s worried about getting sidelined by arthritis like Mimi did, so I don’t want her up all night every night for weeks slinging yarn around.”
“She might do part of it in the knitting machine. The middle, anyway, and then hand knit the edges.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad.” Courtney rubbed her chin contemplatively. “That’d be just a couple of days of work rather than weeks?”
“Yep.”
“I dunno…”
> “Do it,” Erin said. “Decide now what the colors will be before you change your mind and decide you don’t want to burden her.”
“It is a burden.”
“So is having three of your children on a distant planet without any hope of ever seeing at least two of them in the flesh again.”
The weak smile Courtney had been wearing vanished altogether.
Erin sighed and hugged her sister over the top of Kerry’s head. “I feel like I have to remind you of that every now and then, Sissy. Let her do what she can from where she is. I think she’d tell you that her aching wrists were a small price to pay for being able to do something for you.”
“Why does Earth have to be so far?” Courtney’s voice was very nearly a whisper, and Esteben felt, given the intimacy of the sisters’ conversation, that he was intruding.
But the women quickly straightened up, wiped away the moisture that had been collecting at the corners of their eyes, and cleared their respective throats.
“Hormones?” Brenna asked from under the blanket.
“That’s only an excuse for one of us,” Courtney said. “Erin just sucks.”
Erin rolled her eyes, but didn’t disagree with her sister.
He scratched his head, ever so perplexed by Terran sibling relationships.
Courtney turned back to Esteben. “Well?”
“I fear you’ve given me too many variables, and I’ll not be responsible when the shipment comes and you’ve changed your mind.”
“Nope. No copping out.”
“Pardon?”
“You can’t back out of this mess. You’re tied up in this debate now. That’s what happens when you step into a house McGarrys live in. You get enmeshed in the drama whether you want to be or not, so you learn to cope.”
“Learn to cope, Esteben.” Fastida held up one of her tiles and squinted at it. “Or go back to your cottage.” She set the tile down and craned her neck, ostensibly so she could see the McGarrys. “You know, I like things this way rather than the Jekhan way.”
“What do you mean?” Erin asked.
“Our way is for the women to isolate themselves and leave the gathering spaces for the men and the children. How come our women don’t congregate?”
“If there were many of you on this farm, I think you would quickly learn why you don’t,” Esteben said.
Fastida made a tart face at him.
He chose not to return one. “You’re young, and perhaps you don’t have the experience of being around other women of your kind besides your mother.”
“Are you being insulting or simply factual, Brother?” Murki asked from the doorway.
“Factual. I’m explaining why Jekhan women don’t congregate.”
“Ah.” Murki stepped down into the lower seating area and scooped up Kerry from her mother’s grip. “You might explain without speaking in so many generalities, Esteben. As we’ve discovered just from the societal cross section on this farm, very few of us are wired the way typical Jekhans supposedly are.”
“So I’ll speak in terms of history.” Esteben laid his arms atop the back of the bench and crossed his legs at the knees. “Historically, our women have been known to avoid crowds, or even small gatherings such as this one. I believe there’s an agoraphobic component of the Tyneali DNA, stronger in the X chromosome than the Y. Because of that, Jekhan women tend to seclude and are generally intolerant of group events.”
Fastida shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.”
“Yes, but if Amy had been here, her nervousness would likely trigger yours.”
“Is that why she’s always missing?” Courtney asked Murki quietly. “Are there too many people here?”
“I think that may be as reasonable an explanation as any,” he whispered back, though obviously not quietly enough, because Fastida called over, “She’s not antisocial. She’s ashamed. Let’s not pretend we don’t know that.”
Courtney sighed and rolled her head back on her neck. “She shouldn’t be ashamed. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I agree. Want me to talk to her again?” Erin asked.
“No, no. Leave her be. I’d be more concerned if she never came out at all, and she does on occasion. I guess I can understand her perspective. Her father was an extraordinarily high profile politician, and Jekhans tend to go into the same careers as their parents. She probably feels as pressured to be a leader as Murki did to be a merchant.”
The occupants of the room sat or paced in silence for a minute, and Esteben watched every one of them. He was intrigued by there being so many women in one place, and by Murki’s easy acceptance of the new way of things.
Esteben thought society was changing far too quickly and that Jekhans would no longer be able to recognize themselves in twenty years’ time. But Murki had always been far more practical than Esteben. He listened to his instincts, not the rules. He was hardwired to consider survival first and appearances second. That was why he was in a place where he had a woman watching with adoration as he paced with their daughter. That was how he’d gotten his small family to a safer place while so many other people on Jekh were desperate for someone to save them. Murki thrived because he broke rules all the time and didn’t wait for saviors. He was his own.
Esteben pondered which rules he should stop clinging to.
He twined his fingers, untwined them, and met Courtney’s gaze when she looked over.
“One green, one yellow,” he said.
She blinked, and slanted her head. “The blankets, you mean?”
“Yes. One green, and one yellow, and let Kerry choose which she wants.”
“Ah. I see.” She smiled. A gentle smile as genuine as the woman wearing it. “Because she’s greedy like her father, she’ll want both, but I like that idea.”
Courtney leaned across the bench, laid a kiss on Esteben’s cheek, and then padded toward the kitchen, repeating quietly, “Green and yellow.”
Murk followed with Kerry.
Erin pulled her feet up into the space her sister had abandoned and propped the side of her head against her hand, staring at him.
He stared back, tenting his fingers and bobbing his top knee, silently daring her to look away.
No one else in the room seemed to pay them any attention at all. They’d gone about their business—or in Brenna’s case, a decided lack of business.
He let his gaze track down on what he could see of Erin’s body. She’d obviously bathed since their time at the fence. She’d smoothed her short hair. Put on a clean flannel shirt. Changed out of the leggings she’d been wearing into jeans. Her feet were bare, her toes slicked with cherry red lacquer.
Where’d that come from?
Perhaps his Tyneali biology made red attractive to him, because he could never not stare. Those little polygons of color on her toes may as well have been blood moons for how alluring they were. They called out to him, made him want to crawl over and touch. Examine. Kiss.
“Dinner is ready,” Headron said from the doorway.
Now it is, of course.
On a groan, Esteben closed his eyes.
“My apologies for the meal being so late.”
“Stop apologizing for everything,” Erin said. “You’re doing the best you can, and it’s not like we’re out here rioting.”
“Well, good thing there’s peace somewhere on this planet, then.”
Even with his lids closed, Esteben could see the shadow of her passing in front of him and moving toward the doorway, and though his instinct was to hiss and grab her by the waist as she walked by and pull her onto his lap, he balled up his fists and resisted.
Later. She’ll come to me later.
He sensed the room emptying around him. Smelled the feminine scents dispersing. Felt the energy around him lighten.
Only then did he open his eyes, stand, and force himself to the very human kitchen to have his first meal in over a year with a group.
And he knew that if Erin hadn’t been in there with the s
o-apologetic baker, he would have gone back to his cottage without bothering to speak a polite goodbye.
There was nothing quite like a bit of competition to get Tyneali blood pounding, and Esteben wouldn’t lie to himself. He knew what kind of beast he was.
And he didn’t intend to lose.
CHAPTER SEVEN
On Earth, Erin had indulged in more booty calls than she cared to itemize, but back on her home planet, she’d also never felt like they were taboo. She’d never let society inform how she managed her sexuality. She’d never been apologetic about the fact that she was sexual. After all, she was human, and sex was a biological imperative.
Tiptoeing in the dark toward Esteben’s cottage seemed illicit, however.
“What is this? What am I doing?” she muttered.
She paused to scan the farm in every direction before continuing. The cottage was a two-minute walk that felt like a mile, and there was plenty of risk of discovery in that mile…and lots of steps during which guilt could settle into her brain and make itself at home. She could have been pitching in and watching the property boundaries.
She sighed.
Not my turn. We take turns.
Owen and Headron were on patrol duty, and they were more than capable of doing the work, but she wasn’t good at anything else on Jekh. Paramedics weren’t in high demand in Little Gitano and in spite of her having a much greener thumb than Courtney, Erin didn’t have the know-how for farming. At least not with any degree of autonomy. She wasn’t feeling very good about herself lately.
“What’s one more thing to hate myself for?”
She continued on, and then halted in the doorway of the cottage. She put her hand up to the door.
Could still turn around.
She could pretend the deal had been made all in good fun and that they’d never meant for anything to come of it.
She shook her head.
Of all the things she was, a tease wasn’t one of them. She believed a woman should be allowed to change her mind without repercussions or guilt, but she hadn’t changed her mind. The only thing that had changed was her agenda. She wasn’t so sure of what she wanted from Esteben. A night? More, upon mutual agreement?