“I understand,” he said, with an expression of pleasantly ill-hidden regret. “That’s too bad. Well, here’s the key to the apartment on Jamascine where I’ve put up the Aurdwynni refugees. The address is written inside. I’ll happily turn them over to the navy’s custody. May I take your bill?”

She shook her head. A woman who turned up at a dinner without a way to pay was a grossly masculine woman indeed. “I have a navy credit stamp. I already gave the papers to the waiter.”

“Wonderful.” He stood and offered his arm. Everything he did seemed to involve the ripple of small muscles, like an anatomy show. “May I escort you to the dock?”

She wanted to stop thinking about Baru. She wanted to stop thinking. “I would love an escort.” She took his hand and pointed toward the back. “Would you like to follow me?”

“But, Lieutenant Commander, the docks are down that way, this is the way—”

“To the alley, yes. Am I being too forward?”

“Oh,” he said.

*   *   *

SHE dragged him out the back, across the driftwood ramp that bridged the kitchen slops, into the quiet well-kept alleyway that she had suspected might be here. “Take your gloves off,” she ordered, leaving hers on.

“Are you propositioning me?”

“Yes, I’m trying to fuck you.”

“But we’ve just met!”

“I’m going to be on a ship for a long time and I’m impatient. One tryst, right here, and I won’t take on or offer any obligations of contact. Do you understand?”

He blinked at her, rather owlishly, a curiously hesitant and intellectual face on a man so self-assured. “I’m not sure I ought to…”

“If you don’t like Oriati women, just say it.”

“No,” he said, without defensiveness. “It’s just, without any offense, that you seem young.”

“Get over yourself,” she said, “we’re not getting married.”

His fingers played over the buttons of his coat. “It’s not proper.…”

“No one’s ever gotten off on propriety.”

He laughed. “Trust me, mam. Someone has gotten off on everything.”

Aminata hooked her cover on a protruding brick. Fresh sea wind caressed her scalp. She closed her eyes, and sighed, and stretched against the wall. “You knew this important Oriati woman when she was my age, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“Kindalana? Don’t tell me you didn’t want to fuck her. Everyone goes for important Oriati women. They’re so unattainable.”

A tremble of passion across his broad face. It took a moment for him to master himself. “You seem quite attainable,” he said. His eyes had gone casually dead, neither eager nor fearful, simply resigned. Aminata realized, with a soiled thrill, that he must be a whore of some kind. He’d said he was a womanizer, yes. Was he ashamed? Was he debased that she’d recognized him as wanton? She liked that a little. Men had strange reasons to proposition her, racialized and fraught. Whores did it for sex and money, which were much safer.