"His name is Daska."
"Right. Daska." Dev shifted his leg carefully, wincing. "So tell him you're not."
"It's not that simple."
"Why not?"
"Because I..." I stopped, frustrated with myself. "Because I looked at Nathan when he asked if I had a mate, and now he thinks..."
"Ah." Dev was quiet for a moment. "You know Nathan's an asshole, right?"
The bluntness startled a laugh out of me. "Yeah. I'm aware."
"Good. Just checking." He picked up a piece of carved wood he'd been working on. A new skill he’d developed with all the spare time he suddenly had on his hands. Occupational therapy,basically, something to keep his hands busy while his leg healed. "For what it's worth, Daska seems like a good guy. Patient. Kind. Built like he could bench-press a boulder."
"Dev."
"I'm just saying. If you wanted to, you know, move on from the asshole professor who dumped you for a graduate student..."
"She's a postdoc," I corrected automatically, then realized how stupid that sounded. "And it's not about wanting to move on. It's about..." What? Fear? Confusion? The fact that I'd started feeling things I wasn't ready to feel? "It's complicated."
"It doesn't have to be."
But it did. Because I wasn't supposed to be here at all. None of us were. We were supposed to be finding this magical drain, saving the world and then going home. Back to our real lives, our real world. Being here in the pack camp, this was temporary. Except it had been four weeks, and I was feeling more at home here every day. I helped with the evening meal preparation, or tried to. The men and women of the camp had been patient with me, showing me how to prepare roots and grains, how to identify which plants were edible, how to keep the cooking fire at the right temperature. It should have felt strange, living among people whose language I barely spoke, whose customs I didn't understand, whose entire world was separated from mine by thousands of years and a temporal rift I still couldn't explain.
It didn’t. These people had taken me in when I was dying. Had healed me. Had fed me and clothed me and taught me their language with patience I hadn't earned.
I'd been with Nathan for three years and he still didn’t know how I took my coffee. Daska had spent days bringing me different herbal blends of tea to find some I really loved, and there was always a hot cup waiting for me when I woke.
The comparison with Nathan hurt. Not because I still wanted him. The soul deep pain that had resided inside me for so long,had dulled over the last few weeks to a bearable ache, even with him living mere metres away with Megan. It hurt because I was starting to realise just how little I'd been settling for.
How small I'd made myself to fit into his life.
“Ellie,” said Dev quietly. “You deserve to be happy too.” I didn’t reply. He turned the carved wood over in his hands. He was making something. I couldn't tell what yet. A bird, maybe. Or a fish. The shavings curled at his feet like tiny question marks.
"You know what I noticed?" he said. "You laugh here. Like, properly laugh. Not that polite little noise you used to make at department dinners. You sound like a completely different person."
"I just... what's the point, Dev? Even if I sorted things out with Daska, even if I could make him understand that Nathan is nothing to me anymore, we're not staying. We have a job to do, and when it's done, we go home. Starting something with someone when you know you're going to leave... that's not fair. Not to him."
"And not giving him the choice to decide for himself? That's fair to you?"
I shot him a look. "When did you become a therapist?"
"About three weeks into lying on my back with nothing to do but think and whittle terrible sculptures." He held up the piece he'd been carving, squinting at it critically. It was meant to be a horse, I thought, though it looked more like a lumpy dog. "Also, I've had a lot of time to watch people. You and Daska, specifically. The way that man looks at you, Ells—"
"Don't."
"Like you hung the bloody moon. Like you're the most fascinating thing he's ever seen, and he's lived his entire life in a world full of actual wolves and bears and—"
"Dev, please. Nathan and Megan are working on the scanner every day. Once it's fixed, once we find what we came for, we leave. We go back. And Daska..." My voice caught. "He won't understand. I can barely string a sentence together in his language, how am I supposed to explain temporal displacement theory to a literal caveman?”
Dev shook his head. “I think you’re scared, and you’re deliberately putting him down to get yourself off the hook. That’s not the Ellie I know.”
I closed my eyes, feeling slightly ashamed of myself. “You’re right, I am. But it’s still complicated. Daska is a good man, he deserves better than me. I’m not… Nathan was my fated mate, Dev. We had a relationship for three years, and then he rejected me. He broke our bond, ripped it away and I don’t know if I can even do that again. What if I'm just... broken? What if he broke whatever part of me is supposed to be able to love someone back? You’re right, I’m scared of being torn apart again, and I’m scared I drag Daska into that mess and he ends up hurt because of me."
The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other like stones in a landslide, and once they started I couldn't stop them. This was the thing I hadn't said to anyone. The real fear, the one that lived underneath all the practical objections and the language barriers and the we're-going-home-eventually excuses.
What if I wasn't capable of it anymore?
