“This new thing? New old thing?”
“New thing.” Though he could never wish the old thing away. His mind was drawn sideways despite himself. “Uh…do you still have your old Betan sex-toy collection?” Not all of which had been Betan, to be fair, but it was a useful and distancing shorthand.
“Mostly not. In a fit of something—depression, probably—I disposed of it a couple of years ago.” She glanced up at him through her eyelashes. “Do you still have yours?”
“Mostly not,” he admitted. “Same reason.”
“Huh.” It was not quite a laugh. “Maybe we can go catalog-shopping together some night.”
“Brilliant idea.” He kissed her curls, nestled under his nose. “When?”
“My schedule this week is packed.”
“On purpose?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah.”
He nodded. “Mine, too.” Though with the Gridgrad Base project swinging into high gear, he hadn’t needed to look for extra time-and-thought-absorbing tasks. Well, this was nothing new. Back in the old days, spontaneity had seldom been an option, though it had tended to be memorable when it occurred. “You’d think it easier to schedule a spot of privacy for two people than three.”
She frowned, although into space, not at him. “Shouldn’t think we’ll need that much privacy. What do you imagine us to be doing?”
“I…um…”
“If the word you are groping for is dating, Oliver, it’s not illegal, immoral, or fattening. Unless we go out to a great many meals together, I suppose.”
“Dating sounds…a bit adolescent, somehow.”
“Seeing each other?”
“Vague. Invites…unrestrained speculation.”
“Courting?”
“Too Time-of-Isolation.”
“Fucking?”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Well, screwing, if you want a politer utterance. I wasn’t actually planning to write a press release, you know.”
“I’m relieved.”
She gave him an amused but admonishing poke.
“I’m just trying to figure out how to describe this.” Aside from private, nobody’s-business judgments such as joyous or astounding, he supposed.
“Ambushed by your need for categories, again? Most categories are arbitrary, though I admit people do tend to find them reassuring.”
“I guess the category I’m groping for here is, what security level are we on?”
“Ah.” She rolled out from his arm and frowned, perhaps by chance, at the back of the piloting Rykov’s head, distorted through two thankfully sound-blocking canopies.
“I mean to be done with such things,” she said after a moment. “I grant you there was real need, once. Surely not now. I gave forty-three years to Barrayar, and I’m not asking for a refund, but the next forty-three years are mine. After that, Barrayar can negotiate.”
“You will never not be a public figure, Cordelia.”
Her fist swiped the air, a negating gesture. “No, I’m going to escape. They’ll all forget soon enough.” She settled back once more. “Though if you insist on going all Old-Barrayaran, I suppose we could tell people I’m your mistress.”
He snorted involuntarily. “Are you trying to get me strung up? Also, not to channel your nephew Ivan, but that’s just wrong.”
She raised her chin and considered this. “There’s a model for you. Alys and Simon. They weren’t, and then one day they’d always been. Very smooth transition, that.”
Lady Alys Vorpatril, Cordelia’s longtime friend and the Emperor’s diplomatic hostess for the better part of three decades, and Simon Illyan, Aral’s Chief of Imperial Security for most of that same period, had become a known romantic item very shortly after Illyan’s own medical retirement. “Had they always been? There was speculation, after.” If not, perhaps, unrestrained. Jole had known both of them well, earlier in Vorbarr Sultana in the course of his work for Aral and later on the couple’s few holiday visits to Sergyar, and even he wasn’t sure. That occluded view was nonreciprocal; Simon had certainly known everything about Jole. Once. They’d all moved on since then.
“Mm, let’s say they had valued each other very much for a very long time. But no, alas, they didn’t get started on anything worthy of proper salacious gossip—is that an oxymoron?—till after Alys no longer had to compete for Simon’s attention with his memory chip and the security of a three-planet empire. I thought they’d wasted a heartbreaking amount of potential happiness, but—not my decision, that one. At least they seem to be happy now.” Her lips curved in unselfconscious gladness for her old friends. Their old friends, truly.
She added after a little, “Why are you uncomfortable with being open? Just habit?”
“Safety.”
“Habit, in other words. Appealing to reason, instead—just for a change, you know—I would point out that open is safer. No one can make blackmail or scandal out of something that was never a secret in the first place.”
He thought she underestimated the ingenuity of persons determined to be hostile. And the degree to which she could be a target in her own right. Decades of standing next to Aral could do that to a person, he had to concede.
Her brows drew down. “Unless this is your oblique way of hinting that you feel this should be a one-time event? Cold feet?”
“No!” he said, panicked.
“Well, I didn’t think so…” Her eyes crinkled at him, and he subsided, slightly embarrassed. “To get back to your original question, then, let’s both keep an eye out for some coordinated opportunity next weekend, and I will undertake not to climb to the roof of the Viceroy’s Palace and shout to all of Kayburg, ‘Admiral Jole is a great lay!’”
“Thank you,” he said austerely. “I think.”
“And I shall in the meanwhile engage to be boringly discreet while we both mull on it.”
“I’m not saying you’re not right,” he protested weakly. “It’s just…”
“Conditioning. I know, love,” she sighed. “I know.”
Kayburg was coming up all too soon, rising on the horizon. They might get some snatches of time to talk later in the week, but probably not to kiss. He pulled her to him, and, till the town limits passed below, they used the time more profitably.
The vicereinal aircar dropped him off in front of his base quarters. He made an effort to transit the walkway into the building suitably sternly, like an officer just returned from a mission-critical weekend conference with his boss. As if looking forward to the queue of his duties on his comconsole, not back at the aircar lifting off with his wildest dreams.
Cordelia’s first priority upon hitting the Viceroy’s Palace was a shower, but after that the pile-up on her comconsole absorbed her attention till dinnertime. Didn’t anyone else on Sergyar ever take the bloody weekend off? She ordered sandwiches at her desk when the tasks overran the dinner hour; they were brought not by Frieda, but by Ryk. He laid out the plates and her tea with his usual military precision, and then stood back and cleared his throat in the time-honored signal meaning, I am about to tell you something you don’t want to hear.
“Yes, Ryk?” She bit proactively into her first sandwich.