CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Aiden

T he fact that I didn’t have any spare sets of clothes for Kade had generated what I could only call consternation in my flighty dimari. He’d been darting around the house all morning, in a borrowed pair of my cargo pants and an old t-shirt that was slightly too big for me. He’d rushed to make breakfast, but I got the impression it was more from nervousness than from a desire to please. He’d fretted about whether to run the dishwasher yet – not necessary, I’d told him firmly – and then offered to water the potted plants in the little courtyard outside my kitchen. The plants were fairly hardy, and it had rained a couple of days ago, so I told him not to bother. I was going to have to put together a schedule of chores for him, sooner, rather than later.

“Here’s a pair of socks,” I told him, when we’d eaten and tidied up. “We’re going shopping. So put these and your boots on, and I’ll get you a jacket to wear.” It was early autumn, but there was a cool breeze blowing in from the north today, so there was a chance it would be chilly.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, eyeing the socks like they were going to bite him, before taking them and sitting on the edge of the sofa to put them on. Was it something about wearing his master’s clothes? Or just not knowing all the details about how to look after the house? Or was there something else going on that I was missing? He’d reverted to his brown colouration when we’d finally got out of bed, and I was going to have to talk to him about that at some point, as well.

When I got back to the living room with the jacket I’d chosen for him, he eyed the front door warily. “Will I need my weapons?” he asked.

Oh fuck. We were going to have to have a serious talk about the appropriate role of knives and knuckledusters. “No, you do not need weapons of any sort for social occasions,” I told him firmly. “Weapons are for military missions only. Got it? ”

“Yes, sir,” he replied quickly.

We took the train into the service hub – a quick, ten minute trip – and I led Kade into the shopping centre. It was a bright, airy place, with dozens of small boutique shops selling everything from clothing, to garden supplies, to household appliances.

Several years ago, in response to the growing number of dimari being abandoned on our planet, the Rendol Parliament had instated a social provision law that meant that every person who was bonded by a dimari was given two thousand credits as a start-up fund, to buy the dimari clothes, furniture, a comm, and any personal effects they might need. I hadn’t yet got around to registering Kade, but I had plenty of money in my bank account, so I figured I could buy the essentials now, and worry about the difference when I received the government provision.

And today, we needed to get him a full wardrobe of clothes. I started with a shop selling casual wear; jeans, t-shirts, and the like. “We’re going to need to get you plenty of casual clothes, a few things for more formal occasions – button down shirts and slacks – and something dark for the funeral on Friday,” I told him. As we’d left the house, I’d received a message on my comm from Major Glech, letting me know that Hanes and Revier’s funeral would be at the end of the week.

“Do you have any particular preference for colours?” I asked Kade, sifting through a rack of t-shirts. They came in a wide variety of sizes, designed to cater for everything from a tiny Derelian to a massive Denzogal. This particular shop hadn’t separated them into species-specific sizes, so we were left to rummage through a bit of everything.

Kade hesitated. “I am here to serve your desires, sir,” he said, which stalled a little of my enthusiasm.

“Okay,” I said, turning to face him. “I don’t have any particular desires regarding the colour of the clothes you wear – as I said, with the exception of something dark for the funeral. So, do you generally like bright colours? Natural colours? Do you like to stand out or blend in?”

Kade looked well and truly baffled. He looked at the rows of shirts, then back at me. “I don’t understand, sir.”

Okay, let’s try this a different way. “What colour were most of the clothes you wore on Eumad?”

“Grey,” he answered quickly. The two sets of clothing he’d had with him in the delivery container had been grey, but I’d somehow assumed that they’d been designed to blend in with most natural environments. He’d been a combat specialist, after all, and had been fully equipped to leap straight into battle the moment he stepped out of the crate.

But if that wasn’t the case…

“Was everything you wore there grey?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied .

Fuck. And this was the problem with me not knowing a fucking thing about how dimari were trained. No wonder he was looking baffled. He’d never been shopping for clothes before.

He’d probably never been shopping for anything before.

“Were you allowed to personalise your private areas? Your bed, for example, or… I don’t suppose you had your own bedroom?”

“No, sir,” he said. His voice was back to that flat monotone I was learning to dislike – because it meant there was some unpleasant aspect of his past that he was trying to avoid.

I tried to think of how to approach this… and then I took a mental step back, as I watched him stare at the racks of clothing with a wary frown. Did he even know what we were doing here? Had I explained it to him? “Okay, let’s… Let’s go and sit down for a minute,” I said, abandoning the shop and leading him outside. The centre had plentiful chairs and tables in a row down the middle of the plaza, so I snagged one and sat down. For the next fifteen minutes, I explained what we were doing today; the difference between casual and formal clothes, with examples drawn from the people meandering past. I pointed out the more vibrant colours favoured by the younger crowd, as compared to the more sedate and natural colours that older people tended to prefer, and I found examples of specific styles of jeans or leather jackets, heavy boots or dainty sandals.

“So what we’re going to do now,” I said, once Kade had indicated that he understood what I was saying, “is choose some t-shirts and jeans for you. Would you like to choose the colours yourself, or do you want me to do it for you? Either way is perfectly fine with me,” I added, attempting to cut off the inevitable recitation of ‘being here to fulfil my desires’.

Kade glanced around again at the people strolling by. “I think I will need your help,” he said finally, but then added, “but I like the colours of natural landscapes. Greens or greys. Nothing too bright.”

He didn’t like standing out. Was that a personality thing, or the result of too much combat training? Standing out in a battle was a death sentence.

“Okay. Let’s go have a look, then.”

Twenty minutes later, we’d chosen a handful of shirts, a couple of jumpers, and two belts. Now, we were working on the jeans.

“How do they fit?” I asked Kade, as he emerged from the changing room.

He wore that baffled look again, then said, “They are good, sir.”

I resisted the urge to sigh. He’d said much the same about literally everything he’d tried on, and I was running out of ways to rephrase the same question to elicit a different response. What was it about this exercise that he wasn’t understanding?

“Do they fit better or worse than the previous pair?” I asked, not holding out any great hope of getting a sensible answer .

“They are both acceptable, sir.”

He was firmly back in his ‘agree with everything the master says’ phase, and I needed to find a way to crack him out of it. But I couldn’t figure out how to make him understand that he was allowed to have an opinion. All I could figure out so far was that he either disliked everything, or he was so worried about disappointing me that he didn’t dare voice whatever preference he had.

I paused and tried to look at this situation from Kade’s perspective. He understood the need to get clothes for him to wear, but he also wanted to please his master. But somehow, in his mind, having an opinion and pleasing his master were mutually exclusive. How was I going to bring those two things together?

“Okay, let’s look at it this way,” I said, hoping this strategy worked. “I need you to have some clothes which are comfortable enough for you to perform some low-intensity physical activities; walking around the city, maybe carrying some small packages, or vacuuming the house, for example. So I need you to be comfortable enough to perform those tasks at an optimal level. Keep in mind that you’re not going to be fighting in these clothes. It’s going to be light physical activity only. Okay?”

He nodded, paying close attention. I’d seen the light go on the instant I’d started talking about what I needed, rather than what he wanted.

“So the thing is, I’m not in your body. I can’t feel what you feel. I can only look at what you’re wearing. So I need you to tell me which set of jeans is going to allow you to move comfortably enough to perform those tasks.”

He nodded. And the stars be praised, he immediately reached for a pair he’d tried on a few minutes ago. “These ones,” he said confidently. “Or also these ones,” he added, pointing to a pair in a different style. “Either would fit the purpose.”

I was tempted to swing from the clothing racks in glee. Instead, I said, “Okay. Thank you. That’s very helpful. In that case, I’m going to get you one of each.”

While Kade got dressed, I paid for the small mountain of clothing and asked that the store have the items delivered to my house. That was one of the wondrous conveniences of these localised hubs; several times a day, trucks would collect all the packages from various shops and deliver them to the properties within that arm of the city. It meant people didn’t have to carry their purchases around all day and try to squeeze them all onto the trains, but they still got their goods the same day. And the fact that the free deliveries were only done locally encouraged people to support their local businesses, rather than traipsing all over the city for an item that was basically the same as the one at their local shopping centre .

We headed down the row of shops, and I kept an eye out for anything that might be useful. It had been a while since I’d been shopping for myself, and I knew we would need shoes, and underwear, and formal shirts. I also needed to get Kade a comm. Almost every person in Hon had one of the handy little devices strapped to their wrists, ready to send messages or record lists or look up information on the grid. The ones the military provided had far more functionality, able to scan heat signals, decode electronic locks, detect certain chemicals in the air, and so forth. But my military grade comm was stored at the base when I wasn’t on rotation, and when Henderson got around to getting Kade one, his would be kept there too. What I needed for him now was just a standard civilian model.

I paused outside one shop, contemplating getting one here. But the owner didn’t have a great reputation for doing any repairs well, so I was more inclined to go to the other electronics outlet, although it was on the other side of the shopping centre. I turned around to tell Kade as much… and realised that I’d lost him. After a momentary panic, I spotted him a short distance away, staring into the window of a…

Huh. It was a lingerie shop, the models in the window displaying lacy bras and knickers, bodysuits, corsets and suspenders, in a dazzling array of colours. I wandered over, a smile tugging at my lips. “See something you like?” I asked Kade.

I expected an apology about getting distracted, or perhaps a dismissive comment about ‘just looking’. But what Kade said next pulled me up short. “Do you see anything you like?” he purred.

And holy fuck, that sultry rumble went straight to my cock, making me very glad I’d worn a jacket, as I pulled it closed in front of me. Was he serious? Because I could totally picture Kade wearing nothing but lacy black suspenders, over his vibrant blue scales…

I shoved the thought away. Now was certainly not the time, and I really wasn’t sure how Kade would react if I actually suggested such a thing. “Most of these things are designed for women,” I said, not sure how familiar he was with female undergarments. He’d been taught plenty about sex, obviously, but I had yet to figure out what context any of that education had had. “Actually, that’s an interesting question,” I went on, as the idea popped into my head. I glanced around, making sure no one else was close enough to overhear us. “Do you have any preferences in terms of a…” I dropped my voice a little further. “…a sexual partner? As in male, or female, or any particular species?” How did that even work for the dimari? Was it possible they were all just programmed to be pansexual?

Kade seemed to consider the question for a moment, and I felt a thrill of hope that he was actually going to say something insightful about this one. But then he said, “I desire to please my master,” and my optimism faded. But even in my disappointment, I noted that there was no bitterness in his voice, not the flat monotone he’d used before when he didn’t like something and couldn’t bring himself to say so. This statement had been far more nonchalant, as if the question wasn’t even worthy of his concern. Fair enough. Pansexual it was, then.