“. . . Happened?” Nita gave him a look that she hoped would be dry without being too snotty.
Her dad had the grace to look embarrassed at asking so baldly. “Uh. Maybe I, uh . . .”
Nita simply leaned on the counter and regarded him, wondering how deep a hole he was about to dig for himself and how long he’d take to stop digging.
“Um.” He looked up. “In baseball terms?”
Nita paused to give this some consideration. “First base?” she said.
Her dad made a face that suggested this was probably okay.
“Might have stolen first a few times,” Nita said. “And thought about stealing second . . .”
At that, unexpectedly, he laughed. “Um. All right. But you do know . . .”
“Almost certainly, Daddy.” She was wishing that he’d get the hint and let the subject drop, but there didn’t seem to be much chance of that.
“That there are parts of what you’re getting into that are, uh . . . they have life consequences . . .”
“Dad,” Nita said. “We had all this in school. It’s okay.”
“Yes,” her dad said, “about the mechanics, I know you know about that—”
Nita had to smile. “You remember that time when Kit was getting the TV set up for PeculiarSat . . . ?” This was the household code for GalacNet and the other major extraterrestrial image and data feeds to which wizards had access. “. . . And Mom was playing around with the remote and she stumbled across the TentaclErotica channel?”
Her father put down the coffee mug and covered his face. “Oh God,” he said.
“You knew then that I already knew everything I needed to know about this,” Nita said.
“Excuse me,” her father said, and picked up the mug again, and he was actually blushing, “I knew that you already knew everything anybody possibly needed to know about tentacly things from alpha Centauri doing it! Because the explanations—”
“Aldebaran VIIa, actually,” Nita said.
“—Nearly gave me a coronary!”
“They’ve got a lot of sexes,” Nita said. “They have a lot of sex. If you go there on business, you have to be prepared. But everybody in that was consenting, Daddy! That’s the important thing. Hvurkh means hvurkh!”
Her dad started laughing. “Okay,” he said, “fine. That’s about a third of the talk I wanted to have . . .”
“Oh good,” Nita said, unable to stop dreading whatever the other two-thirds were going to be.
“So, beyond the, you know, the just doing it . . .” Her dad stopped, cleared his throat. “Look, wizardry aside—you’re just getting started in life. College is coming.” Nita winced and groaned softly: too well she knew it. “And even though you’re as strong and smart as anyone could hope for their daughter to be . . . it’s going to be a good while yet before you’ve got the emotional maturity to deal with parenthood.”
“Please,” Nita said. “I have exactly zero plans for that for the next ten years. Or twenty.”
“Well,” her dad said, “planning is kind of the issue, isn’t it? And not forgetting to have the planning in place when, um, when things do happen. If they do.”
His embarrassment was so profound that Nita would have done almost anything to spare him this. It didn’t seem the time, though, to get into the various management strategies available to a wizard who wasn’t ready to reproduce. “We know what we need to do,” Nita said. “Or not do. Honest, Daddy. You don’t need to worry.” She stopped herself before she could have a chance to say We’ll be careful or any other of about twenty other reassuring phrases that could be terribly misunderstood.
“Okay,” her dad said. “Most of the rest of it . . .” He actually shrugged. “It was going to be about keeping your options open. A lot can happen in ten years. Or twenty.” He looked up, favouring her with an expression that was a bit challenging.
This was harder to cope with, harder to be reassuring about. At the moment Nita was equally torn between not being able to define what was going on with her and Kit, and not being able to believe that the way they were with each other could ever possibly happen with anyone else. Knowing this in the abstract was completely different from the inextricably intertwined senses of fluttery nervousness and total certainty that she got when she looked at Kit. She couldn’t explain it to herself, and she despaired of explaining it to anyone else, especially her father.
“Because you can’t always be sure,” her dad said after a moment. He drank some coffee and looked at something over the top of the cup: not Nita. “I wasn’t sure with your mom for a long time.”
Nita blinked at that. “Really?” It seemed impossible, somehow. And certainly impossible that the two of them had ever been with anyone else.
Her dad shook his head. “We met a fair number of times before we started getting serious,” he said. “At first she thought I was a jock. Well, I was, then.” He grinned a little: his college-football time, to hear him tell it, had been one of the best parts of his life. “And at first I thought she was a snotty stuck-up elitist. Ballet . . .” Her dad snorted. “. . . But then after a while things shifted, and it all made sense. We made sense—when I’d have sworn just a few months before that it never could. We never could. Just . . .” He shrugged. “Give things room to move if they need to.”
“Okay,” Nita said. “I’ll try.”
He nodded, then, and drank some more coffee.
“So,” Nita said. “And . . . you’re okay with everything?” Because she suddenly realized that it was important that he was: surprisingly important.
“Do I have a choice?” her dad said.
Nita didn’t have an answer for that.
He was looking down into the coffee mug again, swirling the coffee. “There was a time,” her dad said, “when I realized . . .” He sighed. “It was that night at the beach, when you told us the truth about what you and Kit were up to. And at first we were just too shocked to believe it. Because honestly, how could we? Magic? Come on.” He shook his head. “But after it started sinking in, I had just the worst possible moment. It was something Kit said that triggered it. And I realized—and so did your mom—that no matter what we said or did, if you were intent on doing this dangerous thing, there was nothing we could do to stop you. Nothing.”
“It was hard,” Nita said after a moment, and wasn’t certain whether she was thinking more about the effect of that night on her mom and dad, or on her. “But I knew you’d be okay with it sooner or later.”
“It was hard,” her dad said, sounding very somber. “But we did get our brains wrapped around it, finally.” He looked up from his coffee. “This is like that, in a way. Even if you weren’t a wizard and you wanted to get it on with somebody, realistically there’s no way we could—I could stop you. What, am I supposed to keep you in a cage? And probably there’s no way I could even know about it if you absolutely set your mind on keeping it secret.”
This struck Nita as the wrong moment to agree with him. She kept quiet.
“But there comes a point where you have to just decide to trust people,” her dad said. “No matter what age they are. And in your case, yeah, you have a set of priorities that your mom and I never could have predicted. But you’re still our daughter, and I know how we brought you up, and I think you’ll do the right thing without me having to watch you day and night.” He laughed a little helplessly. “Even if I could.”