Something that told me I could find a way to get her back to them, if I really wanted to.

Which I did not.

“You could take me back to my planet,” she said evenly.

“I do not know how to find that, either,” I growled. “I have never been there, and I do not know where it is on the starmap.” Normally, I would hate feeling so incompetent, so ignorant about the universe, in front of her. But at least in that moment such ignorance served me. There was no way to take her somewhere if I could not find it.

She sighed, crossed her arms, and looked away.

“I shouldn’t go back there, anyway,” she whispered. “It probably isn’t safe for me.”

The world tilted.

“What isn’t safe for you?”

“Going home. My people... I didn’t want to be on that ship, on that planet where you found me. I, and other human women like me, were forced into service of our planet. To go to other worlds, study them, find resources or types of energy that could be of use to our governments.”

Her voice shook and I wanted very badly to kill somebody for her. If only she would let me.

“I was pulled right out of my bed. Abducted in the dead of night, drugged, shoved onto a ship and sent off-world and then forced into service of the ship’s mission.”

Tension was a hot throb along my spine, making wings tighten and darkness dance at the edges of my vision.

“They forced you?” I could not stop myself from reaching for her, drawing my knuckles along her rounded cheek. “They hurt you?”

Maybe I would find her planet for her after all.

So I could burn it into nothing.

“It wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” she replied stiffly. She gave a bitter laugh. “I’m a people pleaser. I fall into line easily. I’m quiet. I have friends... Friends who often ended up with a black eye and a night spent in the ship’s brig for fighting back. But never me.”

That was some relief. But the next thought was not.

“And these are the ones you wish me to return you to?” I wondered aloud in disbelief. “These ones who’ve forced you into servitude and hurt your friends? Who might one day hurt you? You’d rather return to them than be with me?”

She appeared as if she wanted to be angry or offended by my question, but then her expression collapsed into confusion. Her smooth forehead wrinkled, her mouth opening and closing several times without sound before she finally said, “Well, it’s not that simple!”

“Make it simple for me, then. Explain it to me.” Perhaps, with my memory gone and madness still nipping at the edges, I needed things broken down into the smallest, simplest shapes possible. Because what she was saying did not make any sense.

She did not explain it. Not really. Perhaps it was too complicated, even for her, because all she said was, “I just... I don’t know what I want.”

“When the starburn comes, you will know exactly what you want,” I countered.  “And what you will want is me.” It felt like a cruel thing to say to her in that moment, to remind her of what was coming for her, for us both, so I tempered the tone in which I said it. Made my voice a low rumble, nearly apologetic.

Nearly.

Not quite.

She veered away from the subject at claw with such speed and at so sharp an angle, that I found myself floundering to keep up.

“I don’t want to stay in this room anymore.”

Sunlight, she wanted.

Space.

And I was nothing if not devoted to her, because I did not argue, did not offer some meaningless placation like “I will see what I can do.”  I merely steered myself right back out the door and said, “If my mate so desires it, so will it be.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Suvi

Fortunately, Jolakaia and her wife Zev had a small second-floor apartment attached to the side of their home that they sometimes rented out to young citizens of Callabarra that currently stood empty.

Unfortunately, it had a single bedroom.

With only one bed.

It was a large bed, at least. A huge square with a wooden frame and a comfy-looking cotton-stuffed mattress, built for two Bohnebregg people (and I’d yet to see a Bohnebregg adult under six feet tall) to fit comfortably.

It also took up so much space in the bedroom that there was no room on the floor for a Bohnebregg adult (or a half-stone sky, half-Bohnebregg male as huge as Skallagrim) to sleep down there.

That’s fine, I told myself as I surveyed the space. I’d had the only bed in the medical room up until now. I could sleep on the floor.

But when I told Skallagrim as much, he balked, as if I’d suggested something as absurd as sleeping in the fucking river.

“Absolutely not,” he growled. “If anyone is to sleep on the floor, it will be me.”

“You won’t fit,” I said with a sigh. I rubbed at my temples. I couldn’t remember the last time Skallagrim and I had had a normal conversation. One unburdened by all the circumstances of our strange meeting and even stranger staying together. When was the last time we’d talked, even laughed, and hadn’t argued? Hadn’t hurt each other somehow?

“Then I can sleep in one of the other rooms. Or out there,” he said.

“One of the other rooms” meant the small bathroom or the little strip of a cooking area with alien appliances I didn’t recognize at all.

“Out there” meant the little balcony that opened outward beside the bed, separated from the room by a yellow-and-green tinted glass door.

I sighed again, feeling, to be honest, like a total bitch.

“I’m not going to make you sleep outside,” I muttered. Even when we’d been outside together, before we’d come to Callabarra, Skallagrim had constructed a shelter for me, or had found a house with a roof to protect me. And even with all the soreness and tension between us, I wasn’t about to make him sleep outside all by himself now.

“Then we are at an impasse,” he said mildly, though a tightness in the muscles at the back of his snout’s jaw betrayed him. “I will not allow you to sleep on the floor. And you will not allow the same. And before you even suggest it, I will not go sleep somewhere in Jolakaia’s home. I refuse to be that far from you.”

Jolakaia and Zev’s house was a lot larger than this apartment; there would be room for him. And even though we both knew that, the possibility of him (or me) sleeping there hadn’t even crossed my mind. I didn’t want to examine just what the hell that meant. What it meant that I was more interested in stymieing myself over the tight pieces of our sleeping arrangement puzzle rather than present the obvious option – one of us not sleeping here at all.

I’d told him I’d wanted space. I was realizing quickly that even after leaving the small temple medical room, I wasn’t really going to get it.

At least there are windows.

Beautiful ones, too. The door leading out to the balcony was one huge stained-glass window, its shapes and shades reminding me of sun-soaked stalks of grass. Large panes of glass continued along the entire outside wall, letting in warm, dappled beams of late afternoon light.

The light spilled onto the bed, illuminating the simple comfort to be had there.

“Then we’ll both sleep in the bed,” I said, without allowing myself to stop and think about it. But even if I had thought about it, what other options were there? If I tried to leave to sleep in Jolakaia’s place, he’d no doubt just follow me and stare at me all night while I slept, sulking. And we’d already established he wouldn’t go somewhere else.

So, that was that. We’d sleep together.

Not like that!

At least... not yet.

I shivered, and a heated yet guarded look entered Skallagrim’s eye.