She partially wanted to kick her own ass for acting like such a baby.
She sat down on the nearby couch, and put her cup on the table. The cushions enveloped her, but this time, instead of sitting up straight and properly like she had with Baba, she relaxed into it, feeling very small in the furniture built for larger beings.
Stron didn’t stay away, he joined her on the couch. Not quite touching her, but he was close enough.
“So tell me about it,” he said.
“About what?”
“The bad drinks you’ve had.”
“I’ve had good ones too.”
“So you’ve had bad drinks and good ones.”
“Sure. Hasn’t everyone?”
“Maybe,” he replied, his eyes twinkling as he spoke.
She raised an eyebrow. “I think you need to tell me one of your bad drink moments, and I’ll tell you one of mine.”
“Fine,” he said. He took another sip, a bigger one, off his drink before speaking. “When I was nineteen, me and some friends thought we could get?—”
“Nineteen standard, or nineteen Kantenan?”
He stared at her for a second.
“I’m trying to paint a proper picture for reference.”
He shook his head, a smile on his face. “Nineteen Kantenan, then.”
“So like 22 standard. Still young and dumb. Got it.”
“Hey!”
“Well, were you smart then?”
“Probably not that much,” he said with a laugh. “After all, we thought we were smart, and could make our own mix of Depth. We read all the available recipes, and set up a distilling station out of some old parts. When we got it processed and went to drink it, we all threw up. It was atrocious.”
She laughed.
“Terrible, right?”
“No, you’re a horrible storyteller,” Adryel said.
“I am not.”
“You absolutely are. That story was just dumb. Like you didn’t even try to come up with something interesting.”
“Hey, can you do better?”
“You bet I can.”
He picked up his glass again. “So please, master storyteller, tell me a tale of bad spirits.”
She leaned back, took another sip off the drink she had, and then glanced at Stron, who was getting better looking by the minute.
She wasn’t going to think about that context anytime soon, but okay. So he was cute. Didn’t really matter. Not like they were mated or anything. Didn’t their alarms go off immediately or some such thing, when they met their person?
