“We can only worry about now,” Shank told her, his arms tightening. “Hold on to the good we do have, and enjoy it while it’s here.”
“I got to call Claire a bad dominant,” Allie said. “That was fun.”
Shank groaned. “You didn’t.”
“I did, and I enjoyed it. Did you know she expected you to give up your entire life and your family to follow her?”
“Actually, yes. Our last screaming match made that fairly clear.”
Allie ran her fingers over the table, tracing the invisible lines of the hologram projectors. This table probably cost more than her father’s farm. “I would never put you in that spot.”
“I know.” Shank rested his chin on the top of her head. Allie almost shooed him off because she didn’t like being reminded that she wasshort. However, she liked the feel of his strong body behind hers, so she swallowed the complaint.
“We’ve never really talked about the long-term stuff.”
Shank went silent. All the small fluttering movements of his body stilled, and even his breathing got quieter. “Oh?” Clearly he was trying to sound casual, but the tone was all off.
Allie turned, and again Shank stepped back and let her. “Caj said Anpaytoo would hate me until we had kids, and then she’d only mildly dislike me, you know, for the sake of the grandchildren.”
Shank blushed. “Caj is an idiot.”
“No he isn’t.”
“Okay, he isn’t,” Shank admitted. “But he reads too much into things.”
“You let me speak for us. You made your mother deal with me, even knowing that after Claire, she was going to call you a moron for letting another woman speak for you.” Allie hadn’t understood the subtleties and undercurrents at the time, but now she understood all too well why Caj and Vi had acted so shocked. Shank hadn’t been risking his mother’s disapproval; he’d been risking his mother’s disrespect.
“I trusted you not to make us look bad.” Shank frowned, clearly not comfortable with this whole conversation. Then again, Shank didn’t do emotions well. He sort of stumbled through them.
“I didn’t understand, Shank. I really could have done some real damage.”
Shank sighed. “If I had explained the whole mess, you still wouldn’t have understood.”
“Are we back to the conversation where I’m several years younger and clearly oversheltered and naive? Because I really don’t want to have that conversation again.”
“No, we’re at the conversation where you’re as bad with words as I am, and you generally need to see something to believe it.”
“Oh.”
Shank nodded. “Yeah, oh. If I’d explained it, you would have assumed I exaggerated the whole thing, that my teenage self misjudged, or that Claire wasn’t all that bad.”
“Oh, she is. She totally is. I’m still having fantasies of dropping her into hard vacuum.”
With a laugh, Shank caught Allie around the waist and pulled her close. “Good. I don’t feel like such a monster for having the same fantasies. Look, don’t worry about Caj or the future stuff. We have time to figure it out.”
“No, Shank. We don’t. If this goes badly, we may not have a lot of time left.”
Shank was quiet. “I know the bats. They won’t kill us. They’ll ransom us back to Mother.”
“How much do we owe her? In terms of all the bribes and equipment—how much debt are we in right now?”
Shank’s flinch told her everything she needed to know. Allie sighed and gave him a little push. She wanted to look him in the eye. Despite the fact that he was a powerful man, he yielded.
Allie started slow. “I want a future. Maybe I don’t want kids in the next year or so, but I want us to have kids, assuming we can get a geneticist to clear us after we got caught by that nuclear blast. And I want to raise them together. I adore my father, and he did a great job, but out here, I just feel like you need lots of adults around in case one of them doesn’t come back from a mission.”
Allie dug in and shared her deepest fears. “You scare me with all your stories. Your father died on a raid. Your uncle was killed doing repairs. You nearly died doing a manhood ceremony. In my world, people don’t die unless they’ve been drafted into the war. Other than that, people grow old and sprain ankles in gopher holes and get bit by dogs and generally don’t die. I need to deal with this before I bring a kid into it.”
“But you want them? You want us to have them?” Shank looked so hopeful it was almost painful.
