Page 15 of Star Bright
“It’s not that.” He slanted a look at her. “Just as I said, it’s hard.”
“Then let me introduce you first to the joys of Korean street toast.”
They tried a few other things too, and she noticed he liked the sweet as well as the spicy. A man after her own heart.
She jerked herself up straight. He was not a man, even if he looked like one at the moment. And more to the point, he was someone else’s man—er, mate—even if he might not remember why his Shanya wasn’t with him when the ship crashed.
A sly little voice nipped at her: If he was taken, why did he have a contract with the IDA?
It didn’t matter. At least not to her. She had no interest in infidelity or even ethical nonmonogamy. Maybe her relationship with Christopher had gotten a little too complacent, drifting along while the rest of their friends got married and bought houses and started families. Maybe it said something about their relationship that she was only now thinking about how odd it was that they’d never once discussed marriage, homeownership, or kids themselves. As if they’d been stuck in separate stasis chambers, drifting.
Had he always known she wasn’t the one for him? Had some unheard inner part of her known he wasn’t the one for her?
That didn’t matter either. Not anymore. She was only a temporary caretaker, having a quiet little holiday alone.
Alone with a not-dog, a robot, a dragon man, and soon to be two dragon kids.
Alone was getting sort of crowded.
When Vash had approved all the food—supplemented with more chili powder, tabasco, and pickled jalapeño from the barstocks—it was midafternoon and he looked like he was tilting sideways a bit.
“Rest,” she told him. “This might be your last chance before your kids are back.”
“Is that what I told myself before I put them in stasis?” He pressed one hand to his head. “I still don’t remember that part.”
She walked him back to his pillow fort, now flanked with two more forts. It actually did look welcoming and comfortable. Her day job selling high-end AV electronics—through which she’d met Brin—was usually impersonal and lacking style since there was only so much that could be done with various black plastic boxes, so this was a nice change.
“If you think of anything else you need,” she started. “Or I mean, what the kids might need.”
While they’d taste-tested, he’d given Kong enough information to pass along to the closed world authorities about the accident. But he didn’t seem energized by the first steps toward reunion.
He sat at the outer edge of the pillows, staring toward the big windows. The clouds from earlier had expanded across the whole sky, and with the winter sun already somewhere below the tree tops, the light was fading fast. But what remained caught in the gray of his eyes, turning them a distant silver.
“I remember,” he murmured. “We were on Skyearth’s smaller moon, where our spaceport is, waiting for our ship. Yadira was so angry with me, she was crying. And my little Susu… He was hugging his sister but looking at me as if his heart was breaking. What have I done?”
Slowly, she dropped to her knees next to the cushions. His shuddering breath made her ache to console him. But she was only here to make sure the dog got fed and nothing blew up, and here it turned out she hadn’t been needed for the first and the second… “Whatever it was, it obviously wasn’t done on a whim.Vash, I don’t know you, and you still barely know yourself, but it’s obvious you love your family. You must’ve been seeking some sort of future, even if that future was a hundred years ago. And you don’t mind sleeping in a pillow fort or eating comfort food from a closed world. I can’t be sure that makes you a good person, but I think it’s a good start.”
He let out another breath, longer this time and maybe a little steadier. “You are a good person, Darcy. So why are you here among the pillows?”
“Well, you seemed like you needed a little reassurance—”
“I mean why are you here in this empty outpost?”
She didn’t exactly want to spill her guts, but maybe it was those extra bites of hot sauces giving her a reckless nonchalance, her sensitivity scorched away. “When my boyfriend, Christopher, decided he didn’t want to spend any more time with me, I felt like I’d wasted my best years on him,” she said bluntly. “He made me feel like a fool. No, that’s not quite right. I felt like I’d been fooling myself with him. That’s worse, isn’t it?”
“Did you love him?”
Jerking back in surprise, she blinked hard. “Love him?”
“I’m sure there’s a handbook about it somewhere around here.”
She snorted, reluctantly amused. “Maybe… I guess I loved having a boyfriend. Someone who was there. Someone to be with. Someone who…”
As the light faded, the silver in his eyes tarnished. “Who meant you weren’t alone.”
“It was like a handbook that had all the facts but none of the reality.” She looked down at her hands clenched on top of her fleece leggings.
“You have not lost your best years,” he said. “Maybe you were just sleeping through some of it, and it’s time to wake up.”
