"It's where I live, presently." This time, he broke off and leaned back to eye-focusing distance. "And there's only three Armsmen, and one sleeps in the daytime." A worried frown started between his eyes. "Your house . . . ?" he ventured.
"Worse. It's full of parents. And sisters.Gossipy sisters."
"Rent a room?" he offered after a puzzled moment.
She shook her head, groping for an explanation of muddled feelings she hardly understood herself.
"We could borrow Miles's lightflyer . . ."
This brought an involuntary giggle to her lips. "There's really not enough room. Even if we both took your nasty meds."
"Yes, he can't have been thinking, when he purchased that thing. Better a huge aircar, with vast comfortable upholstered seats. That you can fold down. Like that armored groundcar he has, left over from the Regency—hey! We could crawl in the back, mirror the canopy . . ."
Kareen shook her head, helplessly.
"Anywhere on Barrayar?"
"That's the trouble," she said. "Barrayar."
"In orbit . . . ?" He pointed skyward in hope.
She laughed, painfully. "I don't know , I don't know . . ."
"Kareen, what's wrong?" He was looking very alarmed, now. "Is it something I've done? Something I said? What have I—are you still mad about the drugs? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll stop them. I'll, I'll gain the weight back. Whatever you want."
"It's not that ." She stepped back half a pace further, though neither let go of the other's hands. She cocked her head. "Though I don't understand why being a body narrower should make you suddenly look half a head shorter. What a bizarre optical illusion. Why should mass translate to height, psychologically? But no. It's not you. It's me."
He clutched her hands and stared in earnest dismay. "I don't understand."
"I've been thinking about it the whole ten days, waiting for you to get home here. About you, about us, about me. All week, I've been feeling stranger and stranger. On Beta Colony, it seemed so right, so logical. Open, official, approved. Here . . . I haven't been able to tell my parents about us. I tried to work up to it. I haven't even been able to tell my sisters. Maybe, if we'd come home together, I wouldn't have lost my nerve, but . . . but I did."
"Were . . . are you thinking about that Barrayaran folktale where the girl's lover ended up with his head in a pot of basil, when her relatives caught up with him?"
"Pot of basil? No!"
"I thought about it . . . I think your sisters could, y'know, if they teamed up. Hand me my head, I mean. And I know your mother could; she trained you all."
"How I wish Tante Cordelia were here!" Wait, that was perhaps an unfortunate remark, in the context. Pots of basil, good God. Mark was so paranoid . . . quite . Never mind. "I wasn't thinking of you, at all."
"Oh." His voice went rather flat.
"That's not what I mean! I was thinking of you day and night. Of us. But I've been so uncomfortable, since I got back. It's like I can just feel myself, folding back up into my old place in this Barrayaran culture-box. I can feel it, but I can't stop it. It's horrible."
"Protective coloration?" His tone suggested he could understand a desire for camouflage. His fingers noodled back along her collarbone, crept around her neck. One of his wonderful neck rubs would feel so good, just now . . . He'd worked so hard, to learn to touch and be touched, to overcome the panic and the flinching and the hyperventilation. He was breathing faster now.
"Something like that. But I hate secrets and lies."
"Can't you just . . . tell your family?"
"I tried. I just couldn't. Could you?"
He looked nonplused. "You want me to? It would be the basil for sure."
"No, no, I mean hypothetically."
"I could tell my mother."
"I could tell your mother. She's Betan. She's another world, the other world, the one where we were so right. It'smy mother I can't talk to. And I always could, before." She found she was trembling, a little. Mark could feel it through her hands; she could tell by the stricken look in his eyes as he raised his face to hers.
"I don't understand how it can feel so right there, and so wrong here," Kareen said. "It should be not wrong here. Or not right there. Or something."
"That makes no sense. Here or there, what's the difference?"
"If there's no difference, why did you go to so much trouble to lose all that weight before you would set foot on Barrayar again?"
His mouth opened, and closed. He finally got out, "Well, so. It's only for a couple of months. I can take a couple of months."
"It gets worse. Oh, Mark! I can't go back to Beta Colony."
"What? Why not? We'd planned—you'd planned—is it that your parents suspect, about us? Have they forbidden you—"
"It's not that. At least, I don't think it is. It's just money. Or just no money. I couldn't have gone, last year, without the Countess's scholarship. Mama and Da say they're strapped, and I don't know how I can earn so much in just the few months." She bit her lip in renewed determination. "But I mean to think of something."
"But if you can't—but I'm not done yet, on Beta Colony," he said plaintively. "I have another year of school, and another year of therapy."
Or more . "But you do mean to come back to Barrayar, after, don't you?"
"Yes, I think. But a whole year apart—" He gripped her tighter, as though looming parents were bearing down upon them to rip her from his grasp on the spot. "It would be . . . excessively stressful, without you," he mumbled in muffled understatement into her flesh.
After a moment, he took a deep breath, and peeled himself away from her. He kissed her hands. "There's no need to panic," he addressed her knuckles earnestly. "There's months to figure something out. Anything could happen." He looked up, and feigned a normal smile. "I'm glad you're here anyway. You have to come see my butter bugs." He hopped down from the footstool.
"Your what?"
"Why does everyone seem to have so much trouble with that name? I thought it was simple enough. Butter bugs. And if I hadn't gone by Escobar, I would never have run across 'em, so that much good has come of it all. Lilly Durona tipped me on to them, or rather, onto Enrique, who was in a spot of trouble. Great biochemist, no financial sense. I bailed him out of jail, and helped him rescue his experimental stocks from the idiot creditors who'd confiscated 'em. You'd have laughed, to watch us blundering around in that raid on his lab. Come on, come see."