Page 5 of Healing the Leonid Doctor's Heart
His tail and heart sped up again. Mid-life crisis, surely.
No, everyone in your family thought your mid-life crisis was Kaya. Imagine, marrying a Servali waitress, a cook on some backwater planet where there’s only one major spaceport...
He shook off the negative voices. His parents were gone now. His younger sisters gone; his older sister wouldn’t care, too lost in her own troubles, raising grandcubs, mourning her own daughters.
This crew had become his family, but they would fragment someday, wouldn’t they? And his work in the medical field might pull him from this ship, one day. Or, if the ship changed, the crew would change. New people would come.
Coming and going...
A feeling of loss and loneliness swamped him, threatened to suck him in like a black hole.
I want something that’s mine. Mine and mine alone, mine to take with me. Mine to hold, not to lose.
And Abigail’s face was there, smiling at him again.
Marcus stormed away from the table with a sudden push, sending the tray crashing to the ground.
Bathroom. Wash face, scrub paws, clean teeth, change shirt.
Back to bed.
Still haunted by her face, but unlike Kaya’s beautiful golden and black fur, unlike her soft, melodic voice that sparkled with sass whenever they talked—Abigail wasn’t a memory. She was still here.
Don’t you believe in fate anymore, Marcus?
He could hear Kaya’s laughter-filled voice in his head, still hear the clucking tongue at the end of her gentle rebuke.
You crossed the galaxy to find my little restaurant by chance. She was attacked, smuggled aboard a shuttle that barely survived, and sent to you from a whole different world; not just by chance, but by a sheer miracle!
Are you so blind that you can’t see how rare this is, Marcus?
Take the risk, darling. I won’t mind.
Chapter Three
“You okay, big sis?”
Abigail smiled as Kaylie slid into the recreation room next to her, the younger woman’s tiny hip bumping into hers as they sat side by side. “I’m okay, little sis. What’ve you been up to?” Abigail gave her hand a quick squeeze.
“Following Jaxson and Lycen around doing shuttle tune-ups and atmospeeder flushes. Want to play Goats and Knights?” Kaylie pointed to one of the few physical games stuck on the room’s shelves. The rest of the entertainment seemed to be electronic in nature. Media viewers were all over the ship, the collection of Felix Orbus Galaxy content was huge, and there was never a lack of things to do.
So how come I’m so bored? Restless?
Because now that you can move around, your brain isn’t all foggy, and you don’t need someone to help you walk ten feet, it sinks in. After twenty-odd years of surviving and working to make money—you have nothing to do with it. You’re a billion miles from home, and you don’t know what the point is of going back.
“Are you going to go back?” Abigail blurted out the question, and Kaylie’s smile vanished.
“I... I hope not. I’m going to see if there’s something I can do here. There are lots of places to help, and Rupex said he’d buy my contract if there was something he thought I could do that I wanted to try. I just have to keep following the right crew members around until I figure out what that is,” Kaylie said, twisting her fingers one second, then smoothing her shimmering black hair back the next. “You saw where my last contract gotme—drugged and packed like a romance droid bound for God-knows-who. God, the only reason they wanted me was because I have baby-making parts.”
Abigail swallowed. “You could still be a surrogate for a Felid family, Kay. It would pay well, and like you said, you have the parts for it. There are so many families desperate for help.”
Kaylie looked around the room, pale orchid cheeks turning rose pink. “I’m not interested. I don’t think I’m emotionally ready for that—or even old enough for that.” Her voice dropped. “And did you know that you can’t artificially inseminate female humans like you can on Sapien-Three? I was talking to Layla and Jade about this just yesterday, when Wendy started to go into labor, and they said the surgery-assisted birth would be in a few hours? Layla tossed it out there that she started out as Rupex’s surrogate—but then they fell in love. Jade and Ardol had an arranged marriage—buttheyarranged it. He bought her contract with the big goal of producing an heir. Did you know his dad is like Leopardine royalty?”
“I had no idea,” Abigail wondered if she would ever get the hang of gossip. She hadn’t mastered it before she started at the credit exchange, and once she became a “senior” staff member, the young people didn’t want to take her into their confidence. The other women on board were younger than her, too. Oh, some werecloserto her age, like in their mid-thirties, but no onewasher age. Forty-five.
Someone “middle-aged” would be useless in the flesh trade, she supposed, even in the very honorable trade of producing a child for a family in need, a Felid with no family. No Queen.
Stop thinking about Marcus. You’re probably too old to be anyone’s surrogate, anyway. I bet families want people in their prime!
