It must be so weird for Taarel, defending the girl who made off with her convenient lover. Although, if she really is in love with Maze, then it might have come as a relief to her to know that whatever people have been saying about me and Maze wasn’t true. No-one’s actually told me that there was gossip, but I’ve started to realise there must have been some, that the direction they’re taking in The Hidden War is what some people thought was happening. The episode Kaoren and I watched last night follows my first rotation with First Squad, and it’s again hinting that the Maze-equivalent character is feeling all conflicted about me. I’m pretty sure Maze has never even considered it.
After lunch, since Third was scheduled to do elementals training, Taarel assigned Tol and Eeli more obviously as my babysitters and we went back to my apartment to find a huge pile of packages waiting – the result of a post-getting paid spending spree.
Tol thought it hugely funny that I’d been getting the equivalent of pocket money, and the mood lightened considerably. I think babysitting me, helping me unwrap packages, was a handy distraction for them as well.
Fortunately I’d opted against buying a whole heap of racy nightwear. I could just imagine Eeli’s reaction to that. Along with clothes I’d picked up another couple of blank books, and a big pack of imported Kolaren permanent markers, which I spent a lot of the afternoon putting to good use on my coat while we chatted. Tol had seen the copies of my coat for sale, and asked if that was why I was altering the pattern, but it was mainly that I’d never finished it in the first place because my permanent marker had run out of ink. I extended it about halfway down the back and a little onto the arms, and although it’s not perfect I do like it.
When Kaoren walked in we were all three sitting on the floor around my coffee table, me trying to even up the wobbly bits of my coat’s pattern, and Eeli and Tol trying to write their names on pieces of paper. They both hastily got to their feet, though I suspect Eeli was mainly hoping for a better view of Kaoren’s expression, but he simply told them they could go and waited till they had.
He brought dinner, and after eating made a valiant attempt to finish off his reports, but has fallen asleep on the couch.
Thursday, July 24
Getting serious
There was a fantastic thunderstorm last night. I turned down all my lights and watched it while Kaoren slept, and eventually fell asleep myself. It was still going when he woke me with kisses in the pitchy dark, and we undressed each other between flashes of lightning. That was impossibly intense, overwhelming, and I was shaking afterwards and clung to him.
And Kaoren said: "You need to spend more time on your studies."
"What?" A whole world of incredulity went into that word, and he wouldn’t have needed Place Sight to tell him exactly what I thought of him saying something so…so prosaic right after something I’d found so amazing. I don’t remember ever being more furious.
To my shock he laughed, a surprised spurt. "That sounded very out of place didn’t it? The tail-end of my thoughts." He paused, and lightning showed me his expression, a combination of dismay and amusement and something rather more. "I can’t marry you unless you pass the adult competency exams," he explained, and then moved forward so he was talking directly into my ear, his voice soft and completely serious. "Are you certain yet, Cassandra?"
"Yes." I was breathless, dizzy with the sudden reversal of fury, but totally sure. It hasn’t even been two weeks, but all the past days have done is confirm what I’ve felt for months.
My Mum would be silently screaming about now, and working out how to convince me that getting married at eighteen is a terrible idea, and that really I need to spend a lot more time before I could decide if Kaoren and I are a permanent thing, and that both of us were probably just reacting to the drama at Unara, and should take things much slower.
But this is Tare.
Tare doesn’t have an equivalent to Vegas. To get married, Kaoren and I both have to have passed the adult competency test, and then register an intention to marry, and then live together for five Taren years before applying for permission to hold a commitment ceremony. And if we break up temporarily in the middle of that, we have to wait longer. I’ll be twenty by the time we can consider arranging for the ceremony.
So, yeah, super-romantic place, Tare. The Paris of the stars.
It was late into our shift when we stopped to shower and eat, and then Kaoren spent a while celebrating our not-quite-engagement by finishing his reports. Even with he and Maze sharing the work, going into new spaces means he has a ton of post-rotation work. I spent the time researching what the adult competency test involved. It wasn’t an ultra-brainy sort of test, more like social studies: knowing laws and customs, and basic biology and health care. Not very much in the way of sciences, but some history. The laws and customs are the ones which are most likely to trip me up – Tare has a by-law for everything, particularly about babies and who can have them. All the red tape about marriage and so forth is designed to delay when people have babies. There’s just not enough room on this planet. Which makes them sensible laws, I guess, but they’re also irritatingly weighted toward smart, talented people. People like the Ruuels, or Isten Notra’s family, are more likely to be given permission to have second and third children.
This got right up my nose. I can recognise the reason for it, but I kept wondering about all the people I knew who wouldn’t exist if Australia had a law like that, and furiously resenting the idea of ever having to apply for kids myself, even though I’m sure the Supa Speshul Magick Gurl will be encouraged to have lots and lots of babies, even without counting the value of Kaoren’s Sights.
At least Mum would be pleased to know that I’m planning at least ten years of pouncing on Kaoren before even thinking about interrupting our sex life with kids. After reading all those by-laws, I’m considering doubling that to twenty.
Once I stopped being irritated I continued ploughing through the recommended reading for the test, getting a little distracted by the laws for when two men or two women want to have babies, and how advanced genetic engineering can open up lots of possibilities. And then I watched a hysterically funny documentary called: "No, We Will Not Raise The Ceilings" from back when Tare first began to make real advances into genetics and the first thing vast numbers of people did was tweak their kids for taller.
After he’d done with his reports, Kaoren asked me to read some more of my diary to him. It’s becoming an important ritual between us, and doing wonders for my ability to speak Taren – my grammar is improving, though my pronunciation is still bad and I miss a lot of the nuances of word meanings. That session, though, I felt so small describing how horrible I’d been to Mum, and I’m really not looking forward to reading out a few of the things I know are coming up. We went off onto a tangent, though, circling around Kaoren’s relationship with his own mother. He says all his family are too alike not to recognise the same fault in each other. An awareness of superiority. He curled the words off his tongue, sounding amused.