Something about the way she said it brought an immediate reaction from his body. Down, boy, he thought, very carefully not looking down at himself. What are you, fifteen again?
“I’ll drink to that,” he said, instead of all the other things he could have said, and touched his glass to hers.
They passed the remaining days to Earth far more comfortably and companionably than they had begun, though the hint of something more Lorn thought he had detected over their glasses of Earth wine did not materialize into anything physical. It was just the wine, he thought. Nothing more.
The nightmares didn’t go away, exactly, but they were just dreams now, at least for the moment. He felt rested and more like himself than he had in weeks when, at last, the countdown on the flatscreen wound down to the
