But Lualhati was different. I wondered if, without the stimulation of someone to talk to, exhaustion had overtaken her in the quiet, firelit darkness of the house. She’d had a long journey to get here, after all.
I placed the three boxes in my arms upon the table, along with the other three already there, and paused to listen.
Ah. There. Beyond the barrier of the bedroom door, I could hear the faint intake and release of her breath. Soft and steady. Asleep, no doubt.
Though human ears were not as keen as Zabrian ones, I still did my best to keep quiet as I brought in the rest of the boxes. This turned out to be no easy feat, as my small and usually-empty kitchen was fairly crammed by that point. I ended up carrying some of the boxes into my own bedroom, wading as carefully as I could through the Lualhati-explosion in the kitchen. I felt a bit strange taking her things into my room without asking her, but there was nowhere left to store any of it. Not unless she wanted me stacking things in the frigid outhouse, or out with the shuldu, or on the porch where it would all be exposed to the elements.
Certainly not. I would keep them here for now, and when she woke up tomorrow morning, we would find better places for them. And for the rest of her things, too.
That decided, I put down the last three boxes near the foot of my bed.
Upon straightening up, something on the bed caught my eye. A wrinkled ripple of fabric when I knew that I’d made my bed up smooth and tight that morning, as was my custom.
I picked up the item and let it unfurl from my claws. It was a shirt, slinky and red, and smelling so sweetly like Lualhati Ihad no doubt it was the one that she’d been wearing today, even though I hadn’t actually seen it beneath her coat.
There was no note attached. No sign. Not a word of explanation.
Had she gotten the bedrooms mixed up? No, if that were the case, I would have found her sleeping in this bed, not just abandoning her clothing atop it. And besides that, my other uniforms were neatly hanging in the doorless closet. She no doubt would have seen them, and been reminded that this room was mine.
She’d left this here for me on purpose.
What the blazes was I mean to do with it? It certainly wouldn’t fit me. I’d tear the seams before I even got it over my shoulders.
Am I supposed to take my shirt off and give that to you, too?
Her words from earlier came back to me with a heated throb. She’d mentioned it outside, after I’d told her she could keep the top half of my uniform. I’d told her to keep it because it was of use to her in that moment, and perhaps would be sometime in the future, too. Plus, I had several more uniforms at the ready, each one identical to the last.
But perhaps she’d misunderstood, or read confused meaning into the gesture. It seemed that she thought there was some kind of required reciprocity in the action. For, surely as my name was Hallum, she’d removed her clothing before bed and had laid this piece of it for me to find.
Had she been naked in my room?
My body tensed, and I advised myself not to follow that lurid thought down any dark paths in my brain. Instead, I tasked myself with deciding what to do with the silky, Lualhati-scented garment. I decided not to go place it back among her things in the kitchen. No doubt she would notice it there, whenever shegot around to cleaning it all up. She might think I was somehow rejecting her human kindness. I did not wish to offend her.
It did not seem quite right to hang it up with my own uniforms, either. It was not an article of clothing meant for my wear. Just my keeping, apparently.
Eventually, my eye landed upon the small desk in here. It had a little drawer, meant for keeping important items safe and clean from dust. But I had no important items, not really, so all this time it had remained empty.
I opened the drawer now, and, after precisely folding the garment, placed the fabric gingerly inside. I shut the drawer, feeling mostly satisfied with that. At least one of her items was put away.
I shut my bedroom door without even letting myself look at the kitchen again. If I did, I was fairly certain I would not be able to sleep at all tonight. I’d pass the time simply staring at the mess, waiting for Lualhati to wake up so we could start to deal with it.
The sooner I relaxed into sleep, the sooner that opportunity would come.
Or so I thought. I woke at my habitual time, just before dawn, to find that Lualhati slept on. And on. And on. When the sun had climbed quite high, I considered entering her bedroom to make sure that nothing bad had happened to her. I paused by the door, about to do it, but stopped myself with a clenching of fangs when I realized that I could hear her breathing still. But even so, I was not totally at ease. It could not be natural to doze that late into the morning. Nothing in Tasha’s document had warned me about excessive sleepiness in human women. There was a large window in her room, and sunlight would have been spilling into it for quite some time by now. Was she simply ignoring it? Sleeping right through it? How could such a thing be possible?
While these questions rattled around in my head, I threw myself into the morning’s work. I dusted and swept my room, visited the outhouse, washed, cleaned my fangs, brushed my hair, and dressed. I fed and watered my shuldu, mucking their stalls and doing some shovelling after the snowfall last night. Though this part felt a little unnecessary, as the temperature had risen. The sun and crisping warmth of the air made the snow glisten with melt. Fat drops, heavy and quick as rain, fell from the rooftops of the outhouse, shuldu barn, and my cabin. We hadn’t had a day this warm yet, and some foolish part of me couldn’t help but feel that Lualhati had somehow brought this much-awaited spring to Zabria Prinar One.
Not sure how she managed to bring an entire change in weather systems with her when she already had so many other boxes…
I thought of those boxes now and held back a sigh. With nothing else left to do out here for now, I returned to the house, only to find the kitchen in the same state of disarray as before, Lualhati’s bedroom door still firmly closed.
This would not do. I could not keep standing around here waiting for something to happen. I either needed to go in there and wake her up, or…
Or get better intel.
“Warden Tenn,” I grunted in greeting when he answered my data tab call. I kept it audio-only, holding the device near to my head to hear him best as I walked back outside and onto the porch.
“Good morning, Warden Hallum.”
