“Of course he wouldn’t be an asshole,” I said, “I wouldn’t let him be.”
“You’d want me too?” Bartosz’s eyes were wide.
I held back a joke about how I needed to complete the set; Bartosz obviously needed to know that he was just as wanted as the other men.
“Of course, Bartosz.” I smiled at him, and his shoulders relaxed in something like relief.
I looked at Oskar, not quite asking permission, but sinking back into the state where we were part of each other. Of course, you would want to use both parts of your brain when you have an important decision to make.
He knew exactly what question I was asking.
“I think that this is a good plan, I am Renai after all, and I want you to have the best, and they’re pretty good.”
“Pretty good?” Bartosz scoffed, once again full of confidence.
Oskar shrugged.
“I haven’t really noticed you at the conferences, but I know that even Renai women with full beds have tried to get Ettore and Jin Woo to join them.”
Jin Woo blushed in light embarrassment, while Ettore just looked smug.
“Is that where you all were heading? To some type of Renai conference?”
“Yeah, but it’s basically a matchmaking conference,” Oskar answered, “basically, all male Renai who are unattached and of marriageable age are required to attend. Female Renai with two or fewer partners are also required to attend. After World War One, our numbers got quite thin,”
“World War One, also our fault,” Bartosz added.
“So the conference became mandatory to make sure that we don’t go extinct. Our numbers are steadily climbing up, but it’s slow going.”
“Hmm. So the people at the conference know that you were en route, yes?”
I asked.
“Yes, exactly, and even male Renai are valuable since there are so few of us, so there’s a chance that the Renai searchers will find us sooner than the Norwegian coast guard,” Oskar responded.
A thought hit me.
“They won’t be happy with me being together with you, will they?”
Jin Woo was all black ice and intensity.
“Leave that to us.”
“I personally think that you may have some Renai blood in you,” Ettore mused, before Jin Woo checked him hard on the shoulder.
“Don’t listen to him, Mina. Every female Renai is obsessively tracked; it’s crazy, you have to basically report anyone you have sex with, and they track them for ten months to make sure they don’t have your child. Every living female Renai in the world has attended MacBeir school in Scotland unless they were incredibly ill. The idea that there would be an unidentified female Renai would be inconceivable.”
“So there aren’t a lot of mixed human-Renai people out there?” I asked
“No, it’s incredibly hard for a Renai and a non-Renai to have children; most Renai are 95 plus percent Renai, and all Renai genes are dominant. It’s very much that you are either Renai or not, there isn’t really a gradient.”
Ettore didn’t seem sold, but he didn’t contradict Jin Woo. Plus, how could I have been Renai? My parents had gotten divorced almost immediately, which didn’t seem like a Renai thing to do. For a moment, I had hoped that I was Renai, so everything would go easier, but I should have known getting shipwrecked in the twenty-first century was weird enough; being some secret Renai princess would be like being struck by lightning twice.
The ‘after-this-place’, the fuzzy possibility of something good coming, was solidifying into something exciting, one conversation at a time. It made my stomach toss as it used to when I was at the starting line of a cross-country race, anticipation and trepidation mixing and separating within me like balsamic dressing.
Chapter Eleven
Next to me, Ettore watched the sunset like a hawk. For the first time since the eruption, the sunset wasn’t red; it was a muted orange that burned without the vibrant scarlet that we had become accustomed to. It was strange how important the sunset had become to me. I had never been interested in it before, but now sunset and sunrise were more important than any clock or weather app.
