Page 67 of Eat My Moon Dust
The roots of my tendrils tightened as if I might keen. I swallowed hard, lacing my upper hands together on the table. “Thanks,” I managed.
“And we like her,” Reha added. “A lot.”
“And hugs!” Tahavir added. “Hugs are so great. Maan never gave them to us unless you came to visit, and Virhek wasn’t always nice if she wasn’t around.”
“Did he hurt you?” I asked, unable to tiptoe around the subject anymore. My stripes flashed, instantly furious at the thought. “Did your maan…”
Tahavir and Reha looked at each other, then both shook their heads.
“He threw things sometimes, and didn’t like us being around,” Tahavir admitted. “He could be mean, but he never did anythingbadbad. Maan just didn’t care a lot. She really wanted us to go to a guardianship and said you were standing in the way of our futures.”
My lower hands clenched into tight fists beneath the table.
“But Tinsley isn’t like that. We’re old enough to know the difference,” Reha cut in with finality, and I swallowed my fury. I could talk to them about the past and what they wanted to do about it later. Right now, my spats wanted to talk about the future, and frankly, so did I.
Reha grimaced though, looking around the unit with disdain, and my soul sank a few more inches into my gut. “But Baan? This place issotiny. Ladh kicks Taha out of bed every morning because he sleeps like a furnace, and it’s impossible to share one bathroom. You only have, like, two of everything too, so we have to share bidents and cups. Can’t we get a bigger unit yet?”
I grumbled about having more than two cups but curled my tendrils in agreement. My daughter was right. “Zufi approved us to stay last night, thanks to Tinsley. I haven’t talked to her about living together but,” I swallowed around the thick trepidation stuck in my throat, “we can’t convince her without showing her, right?”
Reha and Tahavir both jumped up with screeches of excitement and flung their arms around my shoulders. I chuckled, that lump in my throat melting away.
What would it be like to walk into ahomeat the end of each day? Tinsley’s place felt like a refuge. It wasn’t just her scent in the air that comforted my laborer’s bones. From the first moment I stepped inside with my spare mediplasma in hand, it had soothed something in me I’d let turn brittle through years of ISU vessel pods and bachelor dorms. The feeling of belonging somewhere.
Even if this unit were bigger, Tinsley and my spats deserved that too. I huffed a self-deprecating laugh once I realized… it’s what she’d been chasing this whole time, wasn’t it? Feeling like she and the other humans belonged here instead of being dumped and hidden away.
I could make that happen for her. And the other humans? We could work on “cultural infrastructure” as much as she wanted.
“The top half of Home Tower 03 is full of empty family units,” I said, intertwining my tendrils with theirs. “I’ll reserve one this morning. Reha, you tell Miss Jeong that you and your brothers need a few days to move. We’ve got a lot to do before the Winter Festival, and I need you to orchestrate some drone work. Think you can handle that?”
Reha’s eyes twinkled with purpose. “You got it, Baan. I still have the twinkle lights on my holotab.”
“Then you know the basics,” I assured her with a fond hand on her mane as I disentangled their limbs from mine and stood. “Tahavir, you get breakfast started while I, uh…” I glanced down at myself with a self-conscious tick of my jaw. “Put on some clothes.”
Tahavir broke for the kitchen as I shuffled down the hallway, and Reha took advantage of the empty bathroom just as Ladh stumbled out, squinting at me with a groggy sniff. “Did I miss something?”
I smirked, patting him on the shoulder as I disappeared into my bedroom.
I wouldn’t dare take the chance to tease him away from his siblings.
24
?TINSLEY?
Stretching my toes towards the end of the bed, my eyes popped open. I knew instantly that Hunar wasn’t there, that telltale slope of someone dragging me into their gravitational well absent. I kneaded my pillow with my fingers gently, a pang of worry tap-tap-tapping away at the back of my sternum.
Logically, I knew he had to get back to his kids, but he could have woken me up instead of slinking out like a one-night stand.
Or was that all it had been after all?
“Aaaagh,” I growled, scrubbing my hands through my hair. I sat up like a zombie, all of my curls falling straight into my face. My nipples shrank to points in the cold air, bummed that there wasn’t a warm shilpakaar in bed next to me to keep the goosebumps away.
“Shut up!” I pointed accusingly at my comforter, throwing it aside with a huff. “I’m Canadian. I don’t need a buff Scrooge to save me from the cold, okay? I can do it myself!”
Was I being ridiculous? Yes. Did I need to burst with all the pop rocks exploding in my chest? Also yes. So talking to my furniture like they were people was the name of the game.
I grumbled and griped, opening the wardrobe with a flourish, deciding it was a “she” as I complained about boys. It smelled a bit like warm plastic, the scent of finishing a cleanser cycle. It confused me since I usually added the fresh spritz option afterwards to make my clothes smell like “Aescipolian Breeze.” I squinted, tapping my fingers suspiciously, then whipped my head around to stare at my comforter.
Which should be a crusty, wrinkled reminder of a humiliatingly hot night.
