Page 12 of Prima (After the End #8)

Obediently he picks up his chopsticks. But he doesn’t start eating until she’s almost halfway through the contents of her bowl. “Why did you dawdle these past few days? Just because you wanted to seduce a random sailor?”

True enough, though that was not the only reason. She pulls her lips. “This raft is the emergency launch for a solar yacht. I lost the yacht and I’m not looking forward to accounting for myself when I get home.”

“Because you lost it?”

“Because I lost it off the coast of the Southern Continent.”

“In the war zone?”

He sounds surprised but not that surprised—he has followed her since before she entered Dawani waters.

“In the war zone—and I didn’t need to go to the war zone.”

She helped Offshore Queensland Coalition secure an important victory and saved their general’s grandson. But her mother will blister her hide for disregarding specific instructions to avoid the war zone—and she’d rather postpone that if she can’t avoid it altogether.

“Will they punish you?”

“I won’t be able to leave the house for a month, maybe two.” She shudders. “My mom will recommend that six months be added to my mandatory reclamation service.”

He is so astonished he sets down his chopsticks. “That’s it?”

“That and a stupendous lecture.”

“Is New Ryukyu’s mandatory service bad?”

“No. I mean, it’s hard work, obviously, but the accommodation is decent and they give you good food and people from the same cohort often stay friends for life.”

Lots of love affairs happen too, which is why some young people even look forward to it.

He stares at her. For the first time, it is not curiosity or desire that animates his attention, but anger.

“So, to avoid a mere talking-to, a few weeks in the comfort of your own house, and extra service that may or may not be implemented, you dragged your feet here, knowing the danger you could encounter?

“What do you think those ‘volunteers’ who didn’t catch you might have done, if they hadn’t been incentivized not to mention you to anyone?

One of them could very well have reported their sighting.

And I’m not the only one who has heard about those Grand Tours.

Do you think it will be impossible for Dawani Coast Watch to track you along the path you must take to return home? ”

She twirls a strand of her hair. “So you, who would take my raft from me, now profess to care about my safety?”

“Even if I could have overpowered you, I wouldn’t have left you stranded in these waters.”

“Why not? I’m not even that beautiful.”

He glances heavenward, then scowls at her.

“Do you know how much you smile? I’ve never seen anyone who smiles so much because she wants to.

All the women and most of the men I grew up around smile because they must. But you are just happy.

Do you not understand what a gift that is, to be your age and still be so light and carefree?

You are in possession of something priceless and you willfully endangered it. ”

She is so stunned at his vehemence that the piece of sea cucumber between her chopsticks hovers in midair for the longest time before she remembers to put it in her mouth.

He has not raised his voice, yet she feels the lashing of his words, a shame that scalds her throat and her nape over her carelessness.

He, too, appears taken aback. He takes a deep breath. “And don’t ask me if I like your smile.”

“I won’t,” she murmurs. Because she already knows that he likes her smiles at least as much as she likes his scowls.

They eat silently, not quite looking at each other.

But she’s aware every time the breeze lifts his hair; she’s memorized the pattern of small faded burns above his right wrist—he’s pushed up his sleeves and exposed shapely forearms with well-defined veins; and she’s hardly tasted anything at all of her probably very good braised sea cucumber because she is too busy surreptitiously inching her bare foot under the table closer to his.

An effort that yields nothing because just as she is a mere centimeter away, he pulls his feet under his stool, foiling her nefarious attempt.

When only empty dishes remain on the table, she opens the hatch, descends into the understructure—he already knows about it so no point pretending it doesn’t exist—and reemerges with a plate of pastries. “I bought these mooncakes in Lion City. Would you like one for dessert?”

He stacks the dishes. “Nobody buys loose pastries in Lion City to take back home. Did you open a gift box intended for someone?”

She can honestly say that in the beginning she wanted him only for those etched abs—and maybe that face, too, so striking under starlight. But now she’s turned on by his perspicacity.

“These were for my mother,” she admits, a tiny bit sheepishly. “I’m hoping to rearrange the rest very artfully so she can’t tell.”

He studies the mooncakes, tiny, round confections stamped with Old Sinoscript characters far too advanced for the two years she’d studied it at school. “This one has durian filling. You can keep that for your mother—I won’t touch it.”

She’s amazed. “Is that what the characters tell you, what’s inside the crust?”

And then she’s even more amazed. “You can read Old Sinoscript?”

“I can read kitchen-boy Old Sinoscript,” he says with that perfect seriousness that means he’s having fun not telling her everything.

He picks up a mooncake. She bites into another one—and tastes its guava filling—but he only turns his around in his hand. “How long will this keep?”

“If you have refrigeration,”—as she does in the understructure— “another week without any problem. If not, best eat it as soon as possible.”

“My sister would have liked this.” He nibbles at the edge of the pastry. “But I won’t be able to get it to her in time.”

By this point the remaining tea in the pot will have lost its original delicate notes but gained enough body and astringency to serve as a foil to the pastry’s sweet, rich textures. She refills their cups, and in doing so rounds the table unnecessarily to stand next to him.

He looks up. There is wariness in his eyes, but also an intensity that makes her feel a little drunk. A little drunker, that is—his presence always goes directly to her head.

She sets down the teapot and lowers herself into a crouch, so that they are at eye level. “Do you not make mooncakes yourself? Did they not teach you in the Potentate’s kitchen?”

He tilts his head a degree or two and in doing so, comes a centimeter closer to her. “Cakes and sweets are made in a different kitchen altogether.”

She picks up her own mooncake and bites into it again. “Is that so?”

He stares at her lips and swallows. “It has always been so.”

She holds out her mooncake. “Want to try a bit of mine?”

He scrutinizes her half-consumed mooncake. She holds her breath, willing him succumb to the lure. To bend to her will.

He accepts it and takes a sample where her lips have not touched. “Nice,” he says, his voice just perceptibly unsteady.

She sets her left hand at the edge of his stool. “Can I try a bit of yours then?”

Her friends would be astonished at her forwardness—who is this girl, acting with such abandon? Even she only vaguely suspected the existence of this side of herself that he has brought out in full.

“I was going to ask if you would like to,” he says softly.

But instead of taking his pastry—as he did with hers—she takes hold of his hand. With her fingers cupping his, she sinks her teeth into his mooncake. “Oh, jackfruit—my favorite.”

“Eat the rest of it,” he says. “I’ll have yours.”

But she doesn’t care about mooncakes—at least not now.

She only cares that he has not pulled his hand away.

Taking advantage of his non-resistance, she rises a little on her haunches.

Their faces are now only a hand’s width apart.

Her gaze slides down to his chiseled lips.

She places her left hand on his nape and licks her own lips.

A shudder passes beneath his skin, a silent tremor she would not have detected were they not in direct contact.

She rises a little more, until they are nose-to-nose, drops her mooncake back on the plate, takes his out of his hand for the same, then interlaces her fingers with his.

Another ripple of reaction beneath the surface.

At home she has long been considered serious and seriously undersexed—her friends joke that they could each contribute someone to her bed and her total number of lovers would still fall below average.

Of course she’s had the relevant experiences—she’d scarcely be considered of age otherwise—but as much as she enjoyed the company of boys in her student days, she’s never been serious about anyone.

She approached this boy with the same playful lack of purpose, the same democratic interest in sampling the goods.

But his reactions, unseen but very much felt against her palms and fingertips, provoke in her a similar quiver, a sensation of weight and consequence.

Of peril, even. A foreboding that the tranquil river she’s been floating on might suddenly turn into a raging cataract and drag her over its edge.

“I followed you because I couldn’t stop myself,” says the boy, his pupils dilated, his lips close enough to kiss. “I came up with all kinds of reasons and theoretical gains. But I followed you because I saw you smile at the sky and I was transfixed.”

If anyone else said this to her, she would have interpreted it as not only permission but encouragement. But he is granting nothing of the sort. The opposite: He is demanding a steep price for the pleasure of his body, the same kind of naked vulnerability from her as a prerequisite.

She has sensed a hint of darkness to him from their first encounter, an element of danger.

And she liked that—he’s more complex and more interesting than the boys at home, boys brought up in peace and relative plenty who only need to worry about whether they can ace their exams and please their lovers.

But now, at last, she sees the ineffable sadness beneath the hint of darkness and the element of danger. He is asking her not to proceed solely for her own gratification, because that would add to his sorrow, perhaps even multiply it.

She shoots to her feet and stumbles back two steps.

He tilts his head back and takes her in. It occurs to her that while she looked forward to their lunch being a prelude to other things and more time together, for him the end of the meal has always marked the last he would see of her.

This mysterious, airless ache in her chest, is that what he is feeling too?

He pushes the untouched porcelain jar of spirits toward her. “Give this to your mother—maybe she’ll blister your hide less.”

And then it’s as if they are at a diplomatic reception, all stock phrases on his part for the lovely food and similar banalities from her for his company.

He leaps back onto his boat. She sits down at the edge of her raft, her feet in the water, as he undoes the line that ties their vessels together.

He throws the line to her. “Hurry up and go home.”

She catches it. “Good luck to you.”

His boat is already drifting away—because hers has never stopped advancing toward Dragon Gate. “Thank you. I’ll need it.”

He turns away from her to hoist the sails—he’s not going to stand at the taffrail and gaze hopelessly as she disappears into the distance, is he, this boy? Maybe it’s for the best that they meet as strangers and part as strangers. Maybe—

Wait. What’s that? She leaps into the sea and he dives in a moment later.

A klick out, his orca circles. Some ninety meters below, a colony of crabs scramble across the ocean floor, churning up tiny clouds of silt. In between, everything feels normal enough: Temperature, pH balance, oxygen content, the number and variety of marine plants and animals.

Then she feels it again, the disturbance that first caught her attention.

At the very edge of her perceptive powers, something several times the size of the orca hurtles forward at more than thirty knots.

A blue whale can achieve and maintain such a pace for a short while, but the motion of this incoming object is too…

linear. No bobbing of the head or side-to-side motion of the tail fin.

It’s a machine, a submarine, and it’s on a collision path with her.

She and the boy surface at nearly the same time.

“It’s a Risshvai sub!” he shouts across the thirty meters that separate them.

Which he might know because he was spying in Risshvai waters. “Are they after you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I didn’t cause any trouble in Risshvai waters—passed through at full speed, never stopped for any patrols.”

He smiles very slightly. Is this the first time he’s ever smiled at her? Alas, there is no time to rejoice in the brightness of his expression. Risshva is allied with the warlord faction off the Southern Continent. If the warlords wanted Risshva to send a sub after her, they just might have.

“How fast can your sub go?” he asks.

“It tops out at eighteen knots.”

He swears. “You won’t outrun them. And you may not win in a shooting match. Jettison the raft, set your sub on autopilot, and send it off at an angle so it can lead your pursuers astray. I’ll take you to Dragon Gate on a more easterly course. If the wind holds, we can be there by sunset.”

He swims the short distance to his boat.

With a mere tap at a stabilizing float, he leaps up from the water to the deck, a distance of more than ten meters, leaving an arc of droplets in the air that shimmer iridescent for a fraction of a second before falling back into the waves.

He gives a shake to his hair and resumes hoisting his sails, rivulets still streaming down his sinewy, sun-kissed back.

Two seconds pass before he turns around and frowns at her, bobbing in the same spot. “What’s the matter? Hurry up.”

What was the word he used earlier? Transfixed. Is that what she’s feeling, unable to do anything but stare?

“I feel bad that you won’t have a prize to take back to the Potentate’s Palace.”

He blinks. “That was always a castle in the sky.”

“It doesn’t need to be.”

She smiles—or is she grimacing, in truth? He was looking for excuses to keep following her. She might be rolling along similar tracks, grabbing onto any acceptable pretext to delay their inevitable farewell.

She gazes into his beautiful, melancholy, fierce eyes. “How would you like to capture a Risshvai submarine for the powers that be?”