Damn.
“I am, but I need to do something before I go to bed.” I set my bowl aside and scrambled through my pack, looking for my satellite phone.
No signal. Low battery, too.
Stands to reason. We’re inside a cave. The thick rock walls defy connection. I move closer to the naturally formed ventilation hole above the hot spring. Still nothing. Exasperated, I drop my hands to my side.
“Where did you get that, Ari?” Tovian’s dark eyes bounce from the device in my hand to my face.
“My satellite phone?” This would be a good time to come clean about who I am, and what I’m doing here. But for some reason, I don’t. I shrug with all the nonchalance I could muster. “Picked it off one of the dead invaders. Wasn’t hard to figure out how it works.”
“Let me see it.”
“No.”
He makes a grab for it. I jerk the phone away, tucking it behind my back. Daring him to try and take it. Tovian relents, to my disappointment.
“I don’t believe you, Arianelle.” He holds my gaze until I broke eye contact. “I don’t think you’ve been truthful with me from the moment we met.”
Guiltily, I tuck the phone away. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
He tucks two fingers beneath my chin and tips my face up to his.
Kiss me.
He doesn’t. I pulled away as a yawn stages a hostile takeover of my face.
I have no real reason not to trust him. He saved my life, though I thought it was an attack at the time. Tovian revealed his identity to me. I didn’t return the favor. I’m not sure why I don’t now.
Because he won’t fight.The voice inside me is a sulky, fierce little thing. It wants revenge for Orisa and the rest of my guards. It wants my country free from the invaders with a passion that demands I stop at nothing until I personally drive them out. It wants to Lorcan to make a full recovery and Zosia to come back. After that, I can do whatever I want. That interior voice is uncompromising, and it will not allow me to be distracted. Not even for a single night.
“I’ll tell you where I got the phone in the morning,” I relent. He nods and drops onto his cot, back to me. Irritated.
My hopes of climbing Tovian like a tree diminished into nothingness, but it’s for the best. He doesn’t seem like a man who would sleep with a strange woman and then send her off to fight in a hopeless war. He has better manners than that. He isn’t denying the spark of attraction between us, but he isn’t fanning it, either. He’s being cautious, too.
Men here tend not to act entitled to sex, like so many do in the outside world. Auralia is a matriarchy with established and widely-available methods of contraception and abortifacients. Culturally, we tend to take a discreet and measured approach to sex, although there’s some variation across tribes and even villages.
It’s not that there aren’t promiscuous people. We’re human. But it’s not a conquest. Your friends won’t admire you if you’re too casual about it, and if a man fathers a baby before marriage, it’s considered a mark of poor character.
Similarly, we don’t have a culture of shaming women for sex, which is one thing we’ll have to be careful to protect if we continue to engage the outside world after this war. While young people are expected to have an exploratory period, most settle down into stable marriages.
The one exception is the representation of the goddess. Zosia was expected to keep herself pure and holy, even more so than any of her predecessors, because she was the last of her line and there was a lot of anxiety about securing the succession. I know she was looking forward to escaping the pressure while at university, but she never really got the opportunity to explore, because of Lorcan’s constant presence.
Among the things we stole from her: her freedom and her sexuality. It’s a wonder she didn’t rebel more.
As for me, I had a few brief hookups when I was at Royals. Part of me wanted to spark envy in Lorcan. It didn’t work. The sex wasn’t all that great, and ultimately, each experience left me feeling more discouraged.
You could say I was primed to fall instantly in lust with the first man who showed a spark of real interest in me.
I like to think that under different circumstances, Tovian and I might have had a chance at something real. But none of us are getting what we want right now. My problems are minuscule compared to what’s happening down in the valley below.
“Good night, Arianelle.”
Creaking of the reed mat as he shifted his weight. A breeze blew in from the front of the cavern, up and out the ventilation hole, keeping the temperature even and comfortable despite the hot spring.
“Night, Tovi. Sweet dreams.”
His low chuckle is the last thing I hear as I pass out.
