She did not respond, but her gaze stayed on his face, and he could see her processing what he'd said and what it meant and whether he had meant to say it.
Yaaf could see the small recalculation happening behind her expression, the same recalculation she had done on the bench when he had told her about the collective, the same readjusting of categories that her mind seemed to be performing whenever he handed her a piece of himself that did not fit the narrative she'd created around him.
He looked away.
Sometime before Yaaf's blunder and Sullha's calculations, Number Three had walked toward the sandbox, and he was now crouching next to it and watching Bianca and Tomek building their castles.
The children couldn't see him, but Tomek was frowning as if something wasn't adding up for him.
The boy was sensitive like his mother, and he was sensing Number Three's presence in spite of the thrall.
11
SULLHA
Sullha's mind was trying to catch up to what her ears had just heard. Yaaf had said that he felt love for her.
What did he mean?
Did he love her as a friend?
Did he love her like a sister?
The word love could apply to many situations. Sometimes, the novels in the library used the word when two characters had been through hardships and had overcome obstacles together and emerged on the other side with the deep affection that was the result of their shared experience.
The love between Yaaf and her could be that kind.
It could also be the love of two people who had grown up together like siblings, gotten separated by the demands of the cruel world they lived in, and were now trying to rebuild that connection out of the wreckage of their lives.
But what if he'd meant the other kind of love?
The kind that she had started to feel for him before he'd told her that he wasn't a singular entity but a combination of eight.
The moments between her and Yaaf hadn't actually been intimate. They had been moments between her and the collective. Every conversation, every brush of his hand against hers, all of it had been observed and shared by seven other minds.
So, if Yaaf loved her, did all of them love her as well? Or only some of them? Was the love a thing that belonged to Yaaf alone and was simply visible to the others, or was it a thing that had grown in the shared space and now belonged to all of them in some collective way she couldn't define?
She couldn't even begin to understand what it meant to be loved by eight men at once, nor did she want to.
The coward's way out was to pretend that she was interpreting his words as an expression of friendship, or to let the moment pass without acknowledging it. She could redirect the conversation, and Yaaf would thank her for it because he seemed to be regretting the words that had escaped his mouth.
He wasn't even looking at her. He was looking at the playground as if Tomek, Bianca, and Tersan were a magnet for his eyes and he couldn't look away.
She didn't look at him either. She turned to look at the bathroom door as if driven by concern for Rohilah and her prolonged stay in there.
Letting the silence stretch between them, she hoped Yaaf would realize that she wasn't going to address the elephant in the playground. The gradual easing of the tension in his shoulders signaled that he also preferred it that way.
Or maybe it was just acceptance, and he was sad because she hadn't reacted as he'd hoped she would?
It wasn't fair to him. He might not have meant to say that to her, but he had, and it rang true, and she was refusing to acknowledge that it was real. It was the kind of small cruelty that would widen the chasm between them and become harder to fix the longer she let it fester.
Nevertheless, Sullha had no answer for Yaaf, not even a platitude to ease the tension between them.
Thankfully, Tersan's return from the sandbox saved her from having to say anything.
He stopped beside the bench and looked toward the bathroom. "What is taking her so long?"
"I don't know," Sullha said. "Maybe the two stalls are occupied, and she has to wait for someone to be done."
