The food is beautiful—layers of charred root and spiced meat, curls of pickled violet greens, steam rising like a sigh—but I can’t taste it. I eat out of instinct. Half the plate. Maybe less.
When I leave, I look back.
He doesn’t.
..
The next night, I bring the bottle.
It’s heavy in my hands—dark glass, silver band sealed across the top. Zerikar nectar. Kenron once told me it reminded him of home, of dusty fields and old gods, of toasts offered in silence and meaning left unsaid.
I’m trembling by the time I step inside. He’s at the counter, slicing something precise and red. He sees me. I know he does. But he doesn’t move.
I walk up to the bar, the bottle tucked against my ribs like a bribe. Or maybe a confession.
“I thought of you when I saw it,” I say, placing it gently in front of him.
He doesn’t look at it.
“You loved this one.”
He finishes his cut, wipes the blade.
“Yes.”
There’s nothing behind it. Not anger. Not warmth. Just the echo of memory stripped clean.
“I wanted to—” I stop, becauseapologizefeels too small. Too practiced. Too easy.
“Can we talk?” I ask instead, voice low.
His eyes flick down to the bottle. “We already did.”
And then he turns back to his line, like I’m just another body he doesn’t need to feed.
I leave the bottle on the counter.
It’s still there the next night.
I don’t sit this time.
I stand by the archway between dining room and kitchen, coat still on, heart lurching in a way that reminds me of stepping onto the debate floor with the wrong speech in my hands. Kenron is humming. That Vakutan war song again—the one he used to hum when he was too tired to talk, or too angry to yell.
I don’t wait to be noticed. I speak.
“I thought if I didn’t vote against it, no one would notice.”
His rhythm falters. A pause in the song.
Kenron doesn’t look back.
“Someone else needs the table,” he says softly.
And that’s it.
Outside, the wind bites through my coat like punishment. The chill gets into my throat and stays there.
I go home, collapse onto the floor, and cue up the Holonet. I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. There we are againon screen—me in an apron, him leaning too close, the two of us laughing like the galaxy could be soft.
