Emberwood you're a dime, plus ninety-nine

I actually like fish a lot, Easy thought to say, but that sounded argumentative and that wasn't how she meant it — she just wanted Bhediya to know her, and wished that there was a way to do that without all this awkward in-between stuff. And she wanted to say, I don't want space. I want to get to know you, but she was still determined to hold off on the pressure; this wasn't supposed to be work, was it?

But she thought of her father and remembered that all worthy things took work, and that relationships were not built in a day, and that she had been knit together in this woman's womb and it'd taken many weeks, and that, once upon a time, Grayday had found her worthy of his love.

"If I ever start to feel crowded, I'll tell you," she said after a moment of quiet contemplation. "And if you start to feel crowded, you can tell me. And it might disappoint me, but that's okay. We will learn as we go." Or we will learn to go our separate ways.

Grayday had not liked talking about Bhediya. When he had, he'd called her Akuti, or Cutie when he was feeling most kind. The woman before her seemed very much like an unknown quantity, even as she drew parallels from what little she'd been able to learn from her sire. She recalled now that Grayday had rarely known what was on the woman's mind, and that sometimes he thought he was supposed to catch a different meaning from the words she said, but they had never been on the same wavelength in that regard.

It seemed too flimsy a thing to trust; a tidbit said in passing when they'd been speaking of other things. Easy was frustrated with herself for allowing Akuti to be erased like this, even as she knew that her father had brushed the woman aside in order to protect his own heart. Regardless, she was dealing now with Bhediya, who might be someone else altogether.