“You see,” he said, “my parents thought it was time that I should marry. They said, When will you be serious?”

“My guess is never.”

“Exactly. When will you grow up? Also never.”

“Do they have someone in mind?”

“Oh yes.”

“Someone you like?”

“Oh no.”

“Someone you despise?”

“I don’t despise anybody. I am simply not made for marrying.”

I almost asked that he describe the woman his parents wanted for him, but a small, ugly feeling stopped me. I became aware again of the perfume on his coat. “You would seduce women anyway, even if you were married.”

He sighed. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

“Does your family know where you are?”

“Not yet. I hope to keep it that way.”

“Maybe you should just marry,” I said. “Make them happy.”

“But I can’t.” He sounded perplexed. “You must understand why I can’t.”

“I would make my parents happy, if I had parents.”

“You would marry a man your parents had chosen? Someone you didn’t love, and never could?”

I shrugged. “Yes.”

“I thought—”

“What?”

“I thought you and I had more in common than we do.”

“We have nothing in common.”

“All right,” he said. “If you say so.”

“Honestly, your dislike of marriage is an excuse.”

“Really.” For the first time he sounded prickly. “In what way, pray tell?”

“Everything to you is an adventure. Being in prison is one. You wanted an excuse to run away.”

He started to speak, but the gated door at the end of the hall clanked and creaked. Sid said something swift and angry under his breath in his language, but kept silent when the guard came to collect my blood. Swiftly, I took off Sid’s coat so that the guard wouldn’t notice I was wearing something beyond my kith. I offered my arm through the bars. The needle went right into the bruise that had already formed on my inner right elbow.

“Leeches,” Sid muttered after the guard left with a vial of my blood. “And now you’ll sleep, and I won’t be able to argue with you.”

It was true; I was instantly drowsy. Shivering, I tucked myself back into Sid’s coat. “My sentence is for a month. Maybe yours is, too, and we can argue until we are released.”

“A month? They are going to drain your blood every day for a month?”

“I hope so. Sometimes they keep prisoners longer than they say they will. Some people never come out of prison.”

His silence seemed stunned. I closed my eyes. I curled into his coat and drifted toward sleep.

“I want you to think that what my parents would force me to do is wrong,” I heard him say.

We are all forced to do things, I almost told him, but I felt too tired.