The farewell meal contained peaches, pickled beans, a small amount of chocolate meant for a celebration that had already become impossible, and three bags of something labeled STOCK that turned out not to be stock.
“They're sweets,” Nessa said. “Who keeps sweets in a stock bag?”
“Somebody who wanted to go on having them,” Ivo said.
He floated one toward her. She caught it and tasted it with an expression of restrained professional offense.
“Pepper.”
“The owner had a complex inner life.”
Traverse's dining space was laid out to serve passengers, not a town that thought it owned the furniture. People were learning the difference. Someone asked where to put a chipped plate and an attendant, politely, took it away. It returned twenty minutes later because Alma had asked for it back.
In the ship's floating room food came in secured containers, and everybody fastened themselves at the tables as if reluctant to admit what kind of room this was. The rings of straps looked like a clumsy dance someone had forgotten how to begin.
Ivo helped Nessa turn the collected ingredients into a meal. She gave him real work this time. No laughing permission to improve onions. She put a packet into his hand, told him which containers wanted it, and moved on.
“What if I do it wrong?” he asked.
“Then we'll get a free story with dinner.”
He counted what he'd been given and began.
Mara arrived with wet hair and a clean shirt. She had a scrape at her chin, just below the corner of her mouth. He wanted to touch it. She settled beside him, hooking a foot under the table restraint without looking, and handed him the container he'd been searching for.
“Here.”
“Have you been assigned to me?”
“Temporarily.”
He looked at her. She did not look away.
The room was loud. Somebody started to make a speech, then abandoned it because a little girl asked whether the peaches were meant to be with the beans. People ate, took tastes from neighbors, complained, praised the wrong thing. Suri had a hot meal and discouraged interruptions by keeping her spoon raised like a small weapon.
Alma's chair had arrived in storage. She let that fact circulate until everybody stopped asking.
“Will you bring it to Kestrel?” Mara asked her.
“No. I gave it to the families.”
“Even if you change your mind about Kestrel?” Ivo asked.
“Even then. They need a chair. I can make another.”
Nessa sat at last, with a portion Ivo had set aside. She inspected it, took a bite, and said nothing.
“A triumph,” he said.
“Don't spoil it.”
Across the room the teenager with the stones offered one to a younger child. Ivo watched the child hold it very carefully, although it weighed nothing here. He thought of the commons mats, which would have to be cut, and of the first time he'd lain on them with Mara above him. She had laughed because he kept correcting the knots he could see over her shoulder.
He turned to her. She was already watching him.
“Walk?” he asked.
“There isn't much walking.”
“Come and complain about it with me.”
They left the meal with nobody following. In the passage he caught a handhold and she caught the one beside it. Her shoulder touched his chest. He smelled soap and the familiar warm place under her hair, changed by the ship and still hers.
“I'm sorry about this afternoon,” he said.
“Which part?”
“All the parts you had to do.”
“You did plenty.”
“That's not what I meant.”
“I know.”
He touched her chin with one fingertip, close to the scrape. She shut her eyes briefly. For eighteen months they had been very capable of arranging calls, visits, expenses, the innocent tasks that could leave a marriage untouched while it slowly ceased happening. Her skin made all that competence look ridiculous.
“Will you come with me?” she asked.
He followed her to the assigned cabin.
The door closed. Mara braced a foot beneath the bed restraint and pulled him toward her. He had forgotten she could be impatient like this. He kissed her and felt her make a small sound against his mouth, not grief, not explanation.
They bumped a wall, laughed, caught hold again. It was an undignified room for people who remembered being graceful together. Mara took his shirt off and turned it to inspect the torn yellow seam.
“Somebody's work is getting neglected,” she said.
“You know how it is. The town's ending.”
She laid the shirt aside. “Come here.”
They undressed without hurrying after that. Her body was familiar where he expected strangeness, strange where he had expected recollection. He found a new little scar at her hip, and she told him, breathlessly, that an Earth cupboard had a design flaw. He kissed the flawed cupboard's evidence.
She brought him closer with her legs. He stopped for a moment to look at her face. It wasn't the face he remembered from their visits, worn by wanting every touch to settle a question. She was here. She wanted him here.
When they made love, he could feel the work of the day in her body. She held him hard, then softened, then held him again. He let the straps and the small room take care of keeping them where they were. Once she said his name in a tone that made him answer with his mouth at her shoulder instead of words.
Afterward she lay against him, one knee anchored over his. His chest hurt with happiness and exhaustion.
“Your room's very small,” he murmured.
“You have very high standards.”
“Higher than I used to. You should meet the engineer who inspected them.”
She laughed into his skin.
He thought of the empty commons, then of Kestrel's new sleeping restraints. They would have a place like this. Not this, not even almost this, but somewhere to find each other after work. He knew she hadn't said she would stay. He also knew she had felt the day with him, lost something with him, wanted him without asking him to become someone else first.
Hope moved faster than his caution. He let it.
Mara fell asleep with her hand near his throat. He looked at it a long time. Then he closed his eyes and slept beside her in a room whose air neither of them was keeping alive.