“Because no one would talk to me,” she said. “I tried to get to know a few of the people who lived in the same area, but they ignored me.”
Max remembered how much it had hurt when he had thought Rick’s friendship wasn’t real. The sense of loss and the loneliness had nearly eaten him alive. A day of that had nearly broken him. She’d been alone the whole time. “God, Dee, I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “It’s not like you abandoned me. Hell, I walked away from you to take the job with Carrington because I believed all that shit about Hidden ones being parasites. The last I checked, parasites don’t risk coming to court to defend their families. Rick, I’m sorry I listened to these assholes.”
Rick loosened his hold of Max’s arm enough to rotate.
Dee continued while Rick was still rotating back and forth. “I should turn in my POC card. I mean, I know what it’s like to have people judge me because of the color of my skin, and I go making assumptions about other people because of where they have their eyes. I am a horrible human being.”
Max hated the disgust he heard in her voice. She was a damn good pilot and a good person. Some of the guys from the unit—Max wouldn’t want to spend time with them. But Dee was kind and quiet and she would laugh with people without laughing at them. “I probably would have believed what people told me if the translator had worked well enough for my social worker to say anything other than Rick’s people were loud and unpopular,” Max told her. But he didn’t want to go further into the topic of discrimination in front of a judge. This might not have been a trial, but important rulings still had to get made.
He turned to the judge. “Can I sell the navigation program or not?” Maybe his con had backfired a bit, but he still wanted to make enough profit to get upgrades for the ship. He was going to have to do a lot of security audits and new weapon designs to get the credits they needed if he couldn’t sell Rick’s programming.
They could go back to Hidden planet and sell it under the official terms of the sanction agreement, but Max was vindictive enough that he didn’t want these people to get access to the technology unless they were willing to pay a fair price. Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face was a valid hobby on Earth, one that Max endorsed.
“We must discuss husbanding with Ugly one.” The judge turned and walked back toward the table in the center of the room. Asshole. Kohei followed the judge, and Rick tugged at Max to do the same. Maybe the evidentiary hearing wasn’t over. Max took a deep breath. If his ability to make a living depended on the alien understanding of husbanding, he knew one thing. He wouldn’t deny Rick. Maybe they had never stood in front of an altar in a church, but in Max’s heart, they were married. Nothing would change that.
And if this asshole called Rick ugly again, Max would take it out on the judge’s legs, and since he had kneecaps, Max knew exactly where to kick him.
Chapter Twenty-One
The judge got up ontohis table again, but this time it didn’t rotate. He considered the small group of them. Dee stood slightly to one side, but Kohei was so close that Max could only tell the tentacle tips apart because Kohei’s had far more beige and green and Rick had more red.
“What definition do you give for husbanding?” the judge asked.
Max smiled at Rick. “Mating. Pair bonding. Sharing sameness for the rest of our lives.”
Rick’s tentacles shivered.
“How many individuals are inside husbanding?”
“As the only female here,” Dee said, “I should point out that marriage doesn’t always involve husbands. You’re leaving out wives.”
The judge turned toward her. “Define wife.”
“The female equivalent of husband,” Dee said. “A wife is a female who is in a marriage. A husband is a male who is in a marriage.”
