“You’ve got that look,” Yasmin said.
“What look?”
“The one where you go somewhere else and come back sadder.” The other woman put her work down in her lap and gave her a thoughtful look. “So. You and Njkall.”
She sighed. She should have known this was coming. Yasmin had a way of circling a subject three times before she pounced on it, and she’d been circling this one since she arrived.
“There’s no me and Njkall,” she said. “Not like that.”
“You sleep in his bed.”
“I sleep in my own bed.” The lie was small and unconvincing, and Yasmin’s raised eyebrow said so. “Mostly.”Rarely.“Sometimes I wake up and I’ve… I end up in his bed. I don’t decide to. My feet just take me there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s not like that,” she said again. “He’s never… He wouldn’t. He’s a perfect gentleman. Too perfect.” The last words came out before she’d thought them through, and heat crawled up her neck.
Yasmin grinned. “Ah. There it is.”
“There’s nothing.”
“Polly.” Yasmin leaned towards her, careful of the baby between them. “Do you want there to be something?”
The fire popped in the hearth. The baby made a small snuffling sound and settled deeper into sleep, and she looked down at the baby rather than at her friend, because it was easier than facing her.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Sometimes I think—” She stopped and took a deep breath. “This morning the furs slipped, and I wasn’t wearing anything, and he told me I had to start covering up. Because he’s—” She lowered her voice as though the sleeping infant might report her. “He said it was because he was attracted to me. And instead of being scared, I felt—” She shook her head. “But then I ran away. Like a coward.”
Yasmin sighed.
“That’s not cowardice. You have reasons. You’ve been hurt, and you’re allowed to take your time. Even if your alien boyfriend is so attracted he’s having trouble looking you in the eye.”
She huffed a small laugh. “He is not my alien boyfriend.”
Njkall’s role in her life encompassed many things, but boyfriend wasn’t one of them. Boyfriend belonged to the old Polly. The Polly that attended classes and worked part-time at a coffee shop and never for a second believed that aliens were real. That Polly had died in a cell in a mining colony.
“Maybe you should tell him that. I bet it would help.”
The sound of her own groan made the baby stir, and she patted the little back automatically.
“I don’t know what to do.” Her voice came out small and lost. “I’m not… I don’t want to be that girl. The broken one.”
“You’re not broken,” Yasmin said fiercely. “You’re healing. You’re allowed to be wounded.”
“I don’t want to be. I want to be like you. I want to be normal.”
“Oh, honey. I am many things, but normal is not one of them.” Yasmin leaned back, a wry smile on her mouth.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “That’s the truth. I don’t know what I want, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to… how to tell him. How does anyone even start?”
“With Hothians?” Yasmin snorted and picked her necklace back up. “They don’t really do subtle. So you start by saying it plainly, in words, using your mouth.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
‘Well, there’s always the more direct route.” Her friend waggled her eyebrows and Polly’s cheeks flamed again.
“I don’t think I can do that either.”
Yasmin’s eyebrow went up again. “Njkall would sooner walk into a blizzard than push you a single inch you didn’t ask for. He’s decided your comfort matters more than what he wants. Which is lovely and honorable and all that. But it also means that if you sit around waiting for him to make the first move, you’ll both be old and grey and you’ll die having never said a word.”
