Page 2 of Romancing Rem'eb

That realization makes me blink hard, and then the waterworks start up again. Tears spill down my face and I sniff. Crap. I swipe at my face.“Never mind. I just need to work through it. My shit got turned upside down four years ago when we got here and I was able to figure it out. I’ll figure this out, too. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.”

He doesn’t argue. He’s probably relieved. “I am going to visit S’bren and the others. Shout if you need anything.”

I stare down at my knitting and wonder if I should just start over. My stitches are too tight. I pick up the hat and tug on the loops to see if they’ll loosen, but no dice. I can’t exactly give gifts to my ex-boyfriend right in front of his new mate anyhow. That’s weird. Awkward and weird. Maybe I’ll turn it into a bag of some kind. I flip it over in my hands and contemplate how to start over.

It seems like I’m always starting over. Every private boarding school I went to as a child, where I had to start fresh every time my parents decided that the curriculum wasn’t ‘challenging me enough’. Then when I arrived here on the ice planet. Then again to Croatoan. I should be used to this by now, but each time I have to ‘reset’ again, it hurts more. I sniff again, my nose full of snot.

Snot and angst. It’s not my favorite combination.

I cry on and off through the day, undoing my project and starting over. I’m going to make a scarf for Raashel, I decide. Something with cute, festive pompoms because every little girl deserves cute pompoms. I stay up on the ledge by myself for most of the afternoon, because I hear M’tok talking shit about me and S’bren and A’tam laughing, and I feel incredibly alone.

They were my friends once, and they were so eager to play kissing games. Now everyone’s mated and I feel like more of a pariah than ever.

I wonder if I can live permanently in the fruit cave. I can be like the stories of a cottage witch in the woods, just hanging out and eating fruit and minding my own business…except there’s no fruit. And I’d be too lonely anyhow. I like people. I’m miserable alone and on my own. It reminds me too much of summers back home with my parents. They’d send me off to one boarding school or another so I could have the ‘best’ education, but summers were terrible. When I wasn’t at camp, I had to stay home. Home meant two parents completely absorbed in their work and with no time for me. The only child of two successful, highly educated lawyers, I’ve always been treated more like a box being ticked than a person. Couples in successful marriages have children, so my parents had one. Me. And then they’d leave me with a nanny or send me off to private school because parenting was too time-consuming. They loved me in their way. They just couldn’t divert time away from important casework for a bored, lonely child.

So no, I need people around. I don’t want to be alone.

It’s not that I don’t like the people here. I like everyone at Icehome, even M’tok. But I don’t know where I fit in anymore, and I want to run back to Croatoan and hide again. I don’t know how R’jaal could stand it all these years, watching everyone resonate around him. I’d have fucking lost it.

Hell, I’m losing it right now.

After a while, even the knitting doesn’t soothe me, and I figure it’s time for more drastic action. I need to do something to tire myself out. So I pull up vines and examine the lines that feed water to the plants. They all seem to be heading in one direction—up. I climb to the top of the cave and check out the computing system, looking for anything that might be amiss. It all appears as it should, so I climb back down again, and then farther down, joining the others by the pool.

S’bren and A’tam are by the water’s edge, sniffing a few scattered leaves. They both glance up when I join them. “Find anything?” S’bren asks me. “I saw you crawling around.”

“Nothing.”

“Of course you did not find anything,” A’tam says confidently. “Your nose is not as good as ours.”

I give him an annoyed nudge. “I know that, ding-dong. But I have eyeballs. I went up and looked at the computer system. None of the components are out of place, and there are no flashing error messages on screen. Furthermore, the interface panels have dust on them, like they always do. No one’s touched them, so that rules out tampering.”

They both stare at me. A’tam blinks slowly.

“The ancestor things,” I say, dumbing it down. “No bad stuff there.”

“Aaah,” says A’tam.

I manage a small smile at his response. It’s not his fault he doesn’t know anything about computers or technology. But this is why I came with them. “How goes the leaf sniffing?”

“It is strange,” S’bren says, putting the leaves down in a row on the rocky surface near the pool.

“It is not strange. You are just imagining things,” A’tam tells him. He gets up and walks away. “I am going to go hunt for scents. Again.”

S’bren shakes his head. He picks up the first leaf, ignoring A’tam’s retreat, and holds it out to me. “I found three leaves that were damaged.”

I take it from him, eyeing the greenery. It looks…like a leaf. A leaf that’s been folded at some point, sure, but still a leaf. “And?”

“I smell nothing on it.”

Now I feel like the dumb one. “…and?”

He plucks the leaf from my hand. “That is just it, T’ia. I should smell something. When a leaf is brushed by someone, it will take on a lingering hint of their scent. If I leave this leaf behind, it will carry a faint memory of your scent for some time.”

Oh. It’s hard for me to realize that their noses are that sensitive. “So they’ve been disturbed, but you obviously can’t smell whoever was here?”

He nods. “I found more leaves that were broken, of course, but these are the only ones that smell like no one at all.” S’bren glances over at me and then leans in. “Do you smell mushrooms? I do, but they all say I am a fool.”

I pull back, considering, and then pick up another broken leaf. I give it a sniff, thinking. “No? But I don’t know what a mushroom smells like anyhow?”

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