My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 261

Jace

Mina came back through the arch with a flask in both hands and I rearranged my face before she'd cleared the threshold. She handed it down to me and dropped onto the couch, and she left a few inches of open cushion between us when she sat. I clocked the few inches. I drank.

The water was cold all the way down. I finished most of it and brought the flask off my mouth and looked at her, and then at the space she'd left between us, and I let a small thing pull at the side of my mouth.

"You know, if the North wasn't such a backward place, this would be the part where we just put a movie on and chill."

She turned a frown at me.

"What are you talking about?"

"A TV."

"What's a TV?"

I stopped.

"You don't know what a TV is."

She shook her head. She did it small, a little embarrassed, her eyes going down to her own hands.

I let out a breath. "That's — God. That's sad, Mina. That's actually sad."

So I told her. I set the flask down and I drew it for her in the air with my hands, a flat bright window the size of a wall, and I told her how the pictures move inside it, faces and places and whole stories, and how a person sits in a soft chair in their own house and reaches out and chooses one out of thousands and it just comes, out of the air, onto the glass, for as long as you want it. I told her about streaming. I watched her face come up out of the embarrassment while I talked.

Her whole face lit. She leaned in toward me without knowing she was doing it, the inches closing, and she started talking fast and bright over the top of me, asking how big, asking if you could see real places that way, real cities, and she said she'd give anything to see one someday. A TV. Like it was a thing you'd cross a border for.

I smiled at her.

"We could watch something right now, actually. On my phone." Then I remembered where I was. "Except you people don't even have the internet up here."

She let her breath out and the light dimmed a little.

I sat with that for a second, the dim coming back into her, and the thing I'd been carrying since the foyer turned over in my chest, and I decided to use it.

"Mina."

"Yeah."

"If I went back. To the humans. Would you come with me?"

Her eyes went wide. Just a margin of it, the smallest widening, and behind it I could see the whole machine of her start to turn, fast, every gear catching.

"You want to leave?"

I let it sit. I didn't answer right away.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify