Aftermath - Ann Aguirre [56]
She stepped into my room from the stairs, and I spun, exposed as I had never been.
To my astonishment, Adele did not flee or scream, though she could never have seen anything like me. Instead, she came toward me and touched the chitin of my thorax where it met the hinged plates of my lower limbs. A gap lies there; it is sensitive and only meant for mated pairs. I cannot imagine how she knew.
“So this is your secret. I must admit, I’m relieved. It could’ve been worse.”
“It could?”
She smiled then. “It explains a lot, too.”
“I am sorry,” I said formally. “I have stolen away your chance at bearing young.”
“I’m not so old as that,” she told me. “But it’s good to understand the why of it. I’d gone to see a doctor, you know.”
“I am sorry for that, too. I never meant—”
At that she shook her head. “I started this, not you. Don’t speak of regrets unless you’re sorry for the time we spent together.”
I could not read her face and did not know what she meant. But in this, I could be wholly honest. “No.”
“But it was never real, was it?” She shook her head sadly. “It was only you pretending to be what I wanted.”
Part of that was true. In some regards I did have to pretend. The camouflage made it impossible for it to be otherwise.
“It was not all false,” I said. “It gave me great contentment to make you happy.”
“Did it?” Her face lit, as it had when I bought her that length of cloth. Such simple things gave her joy. She carried the loveliest heart in her soft, ungainly body. “Then it is my turn, surely? If you trust me, I would know you, the truth of you; and then we shall see what I may do for you.”
So we lay in my bed that night, and I talked. No one has ever heard my story so fully since, nor known me inside my skin as she did then. She lay beside me with sweetness and wonder, listening rapt to the chronicle that brought me to Gehenna. For the first time, I spoke of Ithiss-Tor and the life I had left behind. Her acceptance remade me into something I did not loathe.
Afterward, she touched me as only mates do, and we discovered that there was something we could share. I learned the purpose of pleasure for its own sake. I gave back to her, such as I could. It was a crossways fit, not natural design, but there was rightness in it.
After that, she did not argue my need to wear camouflage to avoid trouble on Gehenna, but on regen-nights, she seemed happiest because it was real then.
And I was happy. Can you quantify such moments? Can you catalogue them by intensity and say, This is the best of times. I cannot. I can only say that those turns with her were good.
I did not leave her by choice. I did not return to hunting because I wanted to. Given the opportunity, I would have stayed with her until she died. I altered my outward appearance appropriately, aging as she did. I was content with that life.
But as all things do, they came to an end. She saw it more clearly than I. At that point, we had been some twenty turns together by my reckoning.
One night, after sharing in our way, she lay with me, running her fingers along my mandible. She had learned the flesh was sensitive where it joined my throat. No Ithtorian mate would do so, for it offered no measure of rank or dominance. It was not done to prove her superiority, and for that reason alone I would have knelt to her where I would acknowledge no other female so.
“It’s time for you to go,” she said quietly.
At first I did not understand. I rose and regarded her; many-faceted images of her came back to me since I looked through my own eyes, and I relished every one.
“Go where?”
“Away.”
“Why?” It was a pointless question, but I hoped she would answer it.
“I will not see you bound to me,” Adele said. “While I grow old and weak and eventually you are my nurse, not my lover. In thirty turns more, that is where we shall be. Already I find it hard to speak these words, so I need you to go and carry the memory of me. In you I will live on, always.