He chuffs. "Time well spent," he says with a purr, and I feel an answering ping down low.
It makes me realize I still haven't had the perma-arousal return since the cave.
Small fucking mercies, assholes, I grumble to myself, imagining myself flipping off the genali from the ship.
That would be a nice revisionist history, though I guess at least some of them Thivoll already killed in one of the most painful ways possible.
"Your family?" he prompts me again, breaking me out of my fantasies.
I think for a moment, then share.
"My parents drove me hard to succeed. They both grew up poor and didn't want me to have the same struggles. Time spent together was precious because they worked a lot. So I could go to good schools and I wanted to make that sacrifice worthwhile. I didn't have much of a social life. I just focused on being a student, until they both died in a wreck when I was twenty. After that I lost my way for a while."
He growls lightly and his tail whips around to pat my ass. "I remember that. Just a kit. That's terrible."
"Well, a bit more than a kit, but yes. I miss them so much. Sometimes a song plays and I can hear my dadsinging it. Terribly. His voice was terrible."
A tear escapes, along with a chuckle.
"My momwould dance around to whatever he sang, but she was graceful and creative. It made it into a beautiful show, despite the caterwauling . . . er, bad singing. I look a lot like her."
"She must have been beautiful. I'm shocked you didn't have a mate. I apologize. That was rude."
"Well, I did, but it didn't work out. Unfortunately, all of that social isolation to be a successful student meant I didn't recognize a predator. I married young. To a horrible person, though it took me a long time to realize he was the problem, not me. Or mostly the problem. I'm not perfect."
I suppose it wasn't something my parents felt like they needed to mention, but I wish I had known there were people who couldseem like they loved you while slowly eroding everything about you until your confidence was completely gone.
It would have avoided a lot of heartache.
I shake off the memories that try to surge up and continue. "It took the limits of my body, and realizing how sick it was for him to be angry with me about that, for me to realize I should leave."
"How so?"
"I couldn't have kits. Uh, children, because of endometriosis."
I let out a grunt of frustration at how little of that translated. "Let me rephrase. I have scarring in my uterus that makes pregnancy impossible."
"The scarring is still there. Nanites only minimize them slightly on fresh wounds and do very little for old ones. There would be ways around it, though. With the right technology."
I blink, gobsmacked.
The thought never occurred to me that there would be other options. Even after healing like some sort of freak from a fucking gunshot.
I shake my head, shelving that life-changing possibility for much later.
"Anyway . . ." I clear my throat, still reeling. "He had a way of twisting things around. Isolating me. Blaming me. It took anextended, nasty argument about my condition for me to finally see him for who he was."
He growls in earnest now. "He sounds like he needed a few claw marks on his hide. At minimum."
I smile at him, though he can't see it.
"Well, sometimes we need those sorts of people to find ourselves. His frequent, illogical anger meant I learned how to read people. That I know how to convince people of something based on limited information my brain just puts together into an intuition without conscious thought."
He lets out a chuff. "I can attest to that. It's awe inspiring . . . and terrifying all at the same time."
I let out a mock growl and poke him hard on his right shoulder. Which really just earns me a throbbing finger and he doesn't even flinch.
Scales are annoying.
