“The oil is in your ridges,” she says. Lifting my forearm. Examining. The oil has settled into every ridge, gleaming. “It has colonized your ridges. Every single one.”
She scrubs at them with the edge of the blanket, and it does not work, and she starts laugh-snorting, and the laugh-snort is my favorite sound in the universe.
I carry her back to the quarters. Slick and warm, and laughing. We leave oily footprints in the corridor that are going to require an explanation I have no intention of providing.
The shower. Hot water on her skin, cool on mine. I wash her with the care of a male who has just had his mate bound and oiled on a blanket. I wash her wrists. Kiss the marks. She washes my arms —scrubbing the oil from the ridges with soapy fingers, the afterglow ridge-touch that has become our quiet ritual.
She finds oil in places. Behind her ear. Between her fingers. In the ridges of my forearms, which makes her laugh so hard she snorts and the snort makes her laugh harder and I am standing in a shower watching a woman I would die for laugh-snort about oil in my arm ridges and I am the happiest I have ever been.
“Jazil.” She is looking down. Between us. At the place where the oil has pooled. “There is oil on your —”
“I know.”
“Both of them.”
“I know.”
“They’re glistening, Jazil. They look like they’ve been polished.”
“This is your fault.”
“This is entirely my fault and I am going to clean it up and I am going to enjoy cleaning it up and you are going to let me.”
She drops to her knees in the shower with soapy hands and the cleaning-up takes significantly longer than the cleaning-up needs to take and neither of us complains.
The bed. Our bed. Clean sheets that she did not make and I remade while she was in the shower because I cannot help myself. She curls against my chest. My arm around her waist.
“Jazil.”
“Mm.”
“The humming. I can feel it through your ribs.”
“Yeah. The frequency of you. I know where you are. If you’re safe. If you’re happy.” I press my mouth to her hair. “Right now it’s sayinghere, chest, warm,happy, mine.”
“All the time?”
“Every breath.”
“Even when you’re asleep?”
“Even then. Just quieter.”
She presses her hand flat against my ribs.
“That’s you finding me.”
“For the rest of my life.”
Quiet. Her hand on my ribs.
Her favorite color is green. I know that now. I know she takes her tea with too much sugar and leaves mugs on every surface and sleeps on her left side and talks in her sleep — not words, just sounds, small arguing sounds, like she is negotiating with someone in a dream and losing. I know the way her breathing changes when she’s reading something that scares her. I know the sound she makes when she laughs so hard she snorts and the specific silence that means she is about to cry, and the difference between the two is a half-second of held breath.
Three months. I have three months of her. The bond is permanent. The bond was permanent in the first hour — my biology does not negotiate, does not trial-run, does not offer a cooling-off period. The bond saidherand meantforever,and I did not know her middle name.
I still don’t know her middle name. I don’t know what she was like at fifteen. I don’t know what she wanted to be before she wanted to be brave. I don’t know what makes her angry — properly angry, not flustered, not the sharp-tongued-when-cornered angry but the deep kind, the kind that goes quiet. I don’t know what she looks like when she’s sick. I don’t know how she fights, not Vrennaks but us — when the thing that’s wrong is between us and not outside us. We haven’t had that yet. We will.
The bond chose before I knew. That is the Skiveth of it — the biology picks and the knowing comes after. Humans do it the other way around. They date and discuss and evaluate and decide, and then they commit. We commit and then we discover. The commitment is the starting line, not the finish.
