Jainan didn’t touch the coffee. He stared at the table beside it. “Yes?”
“There’s only so far we need to go with this wedding night thing,” Kiem said. He sat down heavily beside Jainan. “I mean, we can’t get you separate rooms. Press Office has pretty effectively vetoed that, since they say it will get out to the newslogs. But we’re in private here.”
“You don’t want to sleep together,” Jainan said. His lips felt numb.
Kiem’s arm jerked, spilling his coffee on the table. “No! I didn’t say—damn.” He put the cup back gingerly, his elbow brushing Jainan’s. “It’s not that I don’t want to. But it’s—you’re—this is obviously not the best situation, and I can’t imagine you, uh. We don’t have to do anything, is what I mean. I can sleep on the couch.”
Realization hit Jainan like a fist to the gut. He had failed so badly to communicate that Kiem assumed he was rejecting him, assumed Jainan was not even going to try to make the marriage work. Jainan was going to doom this from the start by being too cold, too stiff, too uptight.
He turned to Kiem beside him and put his hand on the back of Kiem’s neck, trying to remember how to do this properly, and kissed him.
After a heart-stopping moment, Kiem responded. Jainan’s heart was hammering so hard it sent a wave of dizziness to his head: he couldn’t tell if it was the relief or the kiss. Concentrate. He didn’t have to be terrible at this. He was focusing so hard that he almost missed the little pleased noise Kiem made when they broke apart, and Jainan stopped in shock when he realized what it was.
Luckily, it didn’t seem to matter. Kiem took a breath and bent his head, kissing Jainan’s neck. It was good—of course it was good, Kiem knew what he was doing—and for a peculiar moment, the constant tension in Jainan’s head disappeared. It was replaced by an odd sense of openness, like light flooding in through a window. Was that the alcohol? Jainan didn’t care. He opened the first few buttons of Kiem’s shirt, shaky with relief. It was working.
Kiem’s hands closed over his. Jainan stopped.
“Is everything all right?” Kiem said. Jainan looked up at his face. Kiem was frowning.
The shaking. Jainan took a deep breath, made himself still. He could do this. This had worked before. “Yes?” He made his voice softer, persuasive. “Do we have to stop?”
Kiem broke into a smile, though it was only an echo of the one earlier. He tried to kiss Jainan again, but Jainan was already on his feet, tugging Kiem up and toward the bedroom. Kiem was suggestible, which made it both easier and harder than Jainan was expecting, but they reached the bed soon enough. Jainan slid Kiem’s shirt off, and Kiem obligingly shrugged his arms out of it and reached for the clasps of Jainan’s jacket.
Kiem’s fingertips were warm. That, of all things, was the most destabilizing sensation. Jainan caught himself on his elbows as he lay back on the bed. He had no time to dissect this sudden strange feeling that had nothing to do with the marriage or the treaty and everything to do with Kiem’s fingers on his chest. The pounding of his heart started to change cadence. He pushed himself up on his elbows. He had to concentrate, he had to control himself, Kiem would notice if he wasn’t concentrating—
Kiem pushed away. The air that had been too hot around Jainan was suddenly too cold. Jainan opened his eyes, a flash of panic rising, and then he saw Kiem’s disconcerted expression. The panic crystallized into dismay, a dismay that ran through him like mercury, no less unpleasant because he knew it had been inevitable. Jainan had failed.
He should have sat up immediately and reached out. He should have acted surprised that Kiem might want to stop. But instead he just lay there as a wave of numbness swept over him. And in that moment, he saw Kiem’s expression harden.
“I’m sorry,” Kiem said. His voice was quiet. Jainan apparently wasn’t the only one who could change his voice to hide his feelings. “I’ll go.”
Jainan opened his mouth to say, Don’t, and then he shut it again. He couldn’t dictate who Kiem wanted to sleep with. He’d thought he could hurry them both into it and hide the sliver of ice inside himself that made him disappointing, but he’d been wrong. The problem isn’t someone’s type. The problem is you. He couldn’t force Kiem to be attracted to him.
“I’ll go,” Jainan said, instead.
“No,” Kiem said, almost violently. Jainan held very still, but Kiem wasn’t looking at him. He was on his feet, opening drawers at random until he found some sort of cloth—a bedsheet. “Never mind. We’ll sort something out. I don’t—make yourself at home. I’m sorry.” The door slid open, and while Jainan was still pushing himself up, protests on the tip of his tongue, Kiem had left.
The door slid shut before Jainan could reach it. He stood frozen in front of it, his hand just outside the reach of the sensor trigger, the blank, white surface only inches from his face. He could go through. It wasn’t locked.
But what would he say? There was no way to fix this.
He turned away. Kiem had made his intentions clear: Jainan had the whole room to himself, and Kiem would make his own arrangements. Jainan looked at the bed. Everything in him recoiled. He briefly entertained the thought of sleeping on a chair, or on the floor, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous. He was not someone who made dramatic gestures. He was practical, and discreet, and a dependable partner. He didn’t have to be liked.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the white ceiling. Sleep would come. It always did.
CHAPTER 5
“I’m going to geo-tag you,” Bel informed Kiem when he came through the door the next morning. “I checked all your usual breakfast spots and couldn’t find you. I even checked the janitors’ canteen. Answer your messages.”
“Sorry,” Kiem said, swallowing the last of his breakfast roll. Morning light streamed through the window, highlighting the folded bedsheet on the back of the sofa more clearly than he would have liked. The bedroom door was still shut. He assumed Jainan was asleep. “I went for a walk.”
Bel gave him a disbelieving look. “By yourself?”
“Yeah,” Kiem said. Bel didn’t lose the skeptical look. He added, “I met a security guard when I was in the Ash Garden. We had a nice chat. Told me about tree borers or something.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Bel said. “I was starting to think you were coming down with something.” She flicked her fingers and sent his calendar to the wall screen. “You’re down to meet the Auditor this afternoon. The Resolution calls it instation, but I understand it’s just an official confirmation of you two as the Thean representatives.”
“Great, great,” Kiem said. He supposed it couldn’t go worse than last night. “I’m ready to be instated. I’m so official and responsible it makes elderly monks weep. What else?”
“You’re still scheduled for a College event this morning. Are you planning to go to it, or has the Emperor given you a new schedule now that you’re married?”
Kiem hadn’t even thought of that. “She didn’t say anything like that.” He looked at the rest of the calendar, which showed the usual roster of events and charity bashes. “We need to show up for the Resolution ceremonies—and Unification Day, of course—but she didn’t give me anything else official. Hren said she wants to keep the whole marriage low-key. Only necessary press.”
Bel gave a quiet hah. Her opinion of Hren Halesar wasn’t high. “I hope Press Office is really enjoying today’s coverage, then. Want to see the reports? They made me laugh,” she added, which was never a good sign.
“Let’s see the damage.” Kiem threw himself onto the couch. It was going to be a far cry from the glowing coverage of Jainan’s first wedding. “Shit, Jainan’s schedule. I should have asked him—” He broke off, glancing at the closed door of the bedroom.
“He’s awake,” Bel said. “He went out to exercise in the garden.”
“He did?” Kiem crossed over to the big windows and looked out into the courtyard gardens, where slender trees rose from between the paths in the shadow of the pala
ce towers. The sun glowed white behind a haze of freezing mist.
Jainan was a whirl of movement in the space between the trees. He held a stick in his hands and went through some kind of martial arts drill like it was a dance, so fast that the stick was almost blurred as he spun and thrust. His undershirt left his arms bare to the shoulder even in the morning cold. His feet crunched into the frosted grass. Kiem stared.
“Quarterstaff,” Bel said. “It’s a Thean thing. I’ll send you a primer.”
Kiem made himself turn away from the window, rubbing a hand across his forehead. He had no right to be staring, not after he had screwed up so spectacularly last night. “Right. Yeah. Thanks.” He should at least know what it was, if Jainan was that good at it.
“Headache?” Bel said. She was giving him her neutral private secretary look.
“Sort of,” Kiem said. He saw her glance at the folded sheet and groaned. “Oh, look, fine. I might need another pillow for the couch. Don’t leak it to the newslogs.”
Bel, uncharacteristically, hesitated. “I can get you another bed.”
“Not worth the risk,” Kiem said.
“A folding bed, then,” Bel said.
“The couch is fine.”
“The couch is not fine. Nobody will see a folding bed.”
Kiem found he was leaning back against the wall. He drummed his fingers on it. He wasn’t used to feeling defensive. “Yeah, all right. Whatever.”
“Kiem,” Bel said bluntly. “Are you okay?”
Kiem opened his mouth, then shut it again. How did you say that? How did you say, My partner thinks it’s his duty to sleep with me, even though he isn’t into it in the slightest? Kiem hadn’t ever been in bed with someone who wasn’t fully on board with the idea, and he’d now discovered he didn’t like it one bit. He couldn’t remember what he’d done to give Jainan the wrong impression. He’d thought Jainan had been flirting. He’d been badly wrong.
But none of those were things he could air out of the bedroom, even to Bel. “Yeah. It’s not me you should be feeling sorry for.” He gave his best nonchalant shrug. “Could have been worse. I know a whole bunch about heraldry now. Ask me about clan patterns. Now let’s see those cuttings.”
He reached over to the table for the red press folder, a collection of text filmies between discreet blank covers. It updated itself every day but he usually dipped into it once a week or so, just to check that there wasn’t anything awful. As he sat down and opened it, a fan of images reshuffled themselves above their accompanying articles. Most of them showed the post-wedding kiss or the official final photo—Jainan’s smile was sweet and dignified, Kiem’s looked inane, but that was normal—but a couple of the newslogs had gone with shots of them signing the contracts. Kiem’s hand still had red ink on it.
Kiem looked morbidly over the headlines that went with them. Restrained but romantic: Prince Kiem marries Thean count in discreet ceremony. The Resolution and the treaty renewal had been discreetly relegated to the second paragraph. And another one: Prince K’s royal wedding—it’s the perfect match. They’d put in the quotes from his press statement, which he’d virtuously stuck to during all the interviews afterward. Kiem was usually not that bothered about press coverage, unless it actually got him exiled, but he could imagine what Jainan would think when he saw those articles. Most of them had raked up Taam as well, in a “tragically grieving Jainan finds love again” way that made Kiem feel ill. It would almost have been better if they’d gone all-out on the Galactic politics.
“Turn over,” Bel said.
“I don’t think I want to.” Kiem turned to the back, where the press office usually put the negatives. Two images appeared of them all trying to rescue the documents from a pool of spilled ink and Kiem looking perilously close to laughing. Luckily they hadn’t gotten Jainan in those shots. Then the third came up.
The kiss itself was fine. There were only so many ways a kiss could photograph badly. But one of the aggregators had managed to get Kiem approaching Jainan just a few seconds before it, and it was easy to read the panic on Kiem’s face. Forced for the Galactics? the headline blared. Playboy prince hitched to Thean after last partner’s death.
Kiem slammed the folder shut and put his head in his hands. He bet that had been Dak. They’d have blacklisted whoever sold the photo, but that didn’t help now. “Don’t show Jainan that,” he said. “Do you think he reads the news? Shit, of course he reads the news.”
“How much context do you want?” Bel said. She held out another folder.
Kiem looked up at her. It was the same press-office red, but it had a different serial number on the front. “Where did you get this?” He opened it to find the folder packed with headlines and tiny newslog articles, so dense that he had to touch an individual article to enlarge it. The one he’d picked turned out to be something incomprehensible about trade tariffs. The newslog it came from was unfamiliar.
“Press Office. It’s a copy of the Thean Affairs folder,” Bel said. “Thean sources. I thought you might want to stay up to date, but I’ll send it back if you don’t.”
Kiem nodded slowly. The mass of text made his brain hurt, but it usually paid to listen to Bel. “I guess we should have it for Jainan, anyway.”
“Jainan—that was another thing,” Bel said. She turned to the desk and picked up a pearly, bubble-like diagnostic shell wrapped around a wristband that wasn’t hers. She threw the diagnostic display up on the wall. It blinked up an error and a passphrase request. “Jainan and Prince Taam seemed to have shared accounts. Prince Taam’s has been deactivated, so the system keeps trying to wipe Jainan’s.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Kiem said, holding up his hands. “Shared personal accounts? Maybe Jainan and Taam shared an official account.”
“Jainan said he didn’t have an official one,” Bel said. “This is the only one the wristband has access to.” She clasped her fingers together, and the warning disappeared. “His account was a subsidiary. If he gave his passphrase I could tie it to yours instead, but then you’d be able to see his messages.”
Kiem pressed his knuckles against his forehead. Every time he turned around he seemed to see the shadow of Jainan and Taam’s marriage. It seemed pretty unlikely that he and Jainan would ever be close enough to read each other’s messages. It didn’t even sound that romantic to Kiem, which was probably further proof they were badly matched.
“We’re not really that close,” he said. He remembered last night and winced. “We’re definitely not that close. What if we—”
The garden doors slid open. Kiem and Bel both turned as Jainan paused in the doorway. He was slightly flushed from the exercise but not breathing heavily. He held something that Kiem realized was the stick, telescoped down to carry. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I was just outside.”
Kiem stared at the stick—the quarterstaff—which had folded down to something bronze-sheened and no larger than Jainan’s hand. It kept Kiem’s eyes away from Jainan’s face and disordered hair, which were reminding him of last night in a distracting way. “Uh, good morning,” he said. “Nice morning for … martial art things. Right?”
There was a short pause. “Yes,” Jainan said. He sounded wary, which was understandable, because Kiem was making no sense at all. “Did you want me? I was late getting up and couldn’t see you anywhere.”
“No, no, not at all, I mean, yes, I mean—wristband! Right!” Kiem turned to the screen, trying to dispel last night’s memories. The screen was still showing the passphrase request. “Bel says your wristband—”
Jainan was already looking up at the display. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He crossed to the table and picked up the diagnostic bubble. The pearly gel yielded when he pressed a finger into it to activate the wristband’s print sensor. “I didn’t realize it needed another pass.” He whispered a passphrase.
The error screen cleared and the wall filled with messages. Kiem blinked, not sure what he was seeing, and then realized they were Jainan’s and l
ooked away.
Jainan was watching him. “Was that all?”
Kiem cleared his throat. “Press Office sent over the cuttings from the wedding.” He turned to the folders on the low table. “Do you want to have a look? It’s not pretty.”
Jainan placed his quarterstaff on a side table, neatly aligning it with the edge. When he turned back, he seemed a shade more sallow, but his expression hadn’t changed. Kiem might have imagined the reaction. “I would like to see.”
Kiem handed him the folders. He hadn’t been careful; his fingers nearly brushed Jainan’s arm, and Jainan all but dropped the folder trying not to touch him. Kiem hastily stepped back, wondering how he’d gotten it so wrong last night as to think Jainan actually wanted physical contact. But there wasn’t anything he could do about that, so he turned away to give Jainan some space and poked at the diagnostic shell. It looked like Jainan’s passphrase had automatically bound their accounts together. Surely there was a way to fix that.
“These are the interviews you did after the ceremony,” Jainan said, without looking up. He had turned to the other folder. “I apologize that I didn’t stay.”
“You had to pack,” Kiem said. “No need to apologize. Anyway, some of the articles came out pretty rubbish, sorry about that, did my best. Anything about us in the Thean folder?”
“There are a number of articles,” Jainan said, skimming the thick blocks of text. He couldn’t possibly have had time to read all of that. “Most of them are neutral; the tone is fairly standard for our—I mean, for Thea’s mainstream outlets.” He paused, glanced at Kiem, and then said, “I am afraid the fringe newslogs are much more volatile. Many of them are less than complimentary about Iskat. Four of them name me as a traitor to the planet.”
“What?” Kiem said, nearly fumbling the diagnostic shell. “That’s ridiculous. That’s offensive.” Jainan gave a miniscule shrug, his eyes still skimming over the folder. Kiem strode a couple of abortive paces across the room and turned back. “Can we blacklist them? Bel?”
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