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It wasn’t like Kammie didn’t know how relationships and sex worked, in theory. She’d grown up on a communal farm, around animals and in shared sleeping spaces. But, everything there had been pretty straightforward.
Sometimes couples joined Three Bells together, already matched. More often, someone new would become part of the community and find people to join with or people would leave and come back a couple years later with one or more partners. Folks who stayed found others in their age cohorts they liked to be with and then that was it, they’d make kids or adopt kids or not have kids at all but share a bed and food and work the same shifts of chores to spend time together. Not everyone stayed together, but that was normal too, the chickens and the goats did the same thing.
How Varna and Kammie’s cousin had paired up made sense. They enjoyed each other’s company, had a few meals together, and liked each other enough to go off on a ship somewhere as a pair. In contrast, a lot of the grown-up relationships Kammie kept encountering in Icy Icy seemed far more complicated. There were people who only liked folks who looked a certain way, or fit a specific social type. There were confusing slang terms to define power dynamics (which, ironically, Kammie did understand, those were all just limited-scope versions of teamwork, really), and she also got the impression not everybody in a relationship always understood the definition of their relationship. That was what she thought was especially weird, after a life of living where people just said what they were feeling and talked it through.
It made Kammie feel immensely grateful that she personally valued becoming a better paladin than figuring all that out. In the same way she couldn’t quite understand why someone would learn to cook when there were plenty of taverns and diners around, she didn’t see why so many people always required others involved in the process of satisfying their occasional physical needs.
Like most things Kammie didn’t understand that didn’t affect her personally or hurt others, she tried to take people’s word at face value and file it away mentally in the big box of “stuff to not worry about.” Besides, she understood enough. She might not be very smart about a lot of things but she was smart enough to see that the hotel owner Bug cared for the fun, absolute mess that was Fireball, and that her squire Frock was definitely lying to her about his relationship with consul member Book.
She was very happy for Frock, she hadn’t been a very good knight to his squire in the mess that happened after overthrowing Icy Icy’s government. Though, in her defence, she’d almost immediately been saddled with raising the three Drok wyrmlings. As it was, most of her free time lately had been spent sending crystal messages to Oddehen. It was good Frock was finding nice ways to spend his time.
Kammie had also been running a lot. She couldn’t quite pin why, normally she kept a chiller cardio regimen, preferring to focus on high-rep sets of bodyweight exercises to burn off extra energy. The most logical reason for it was probably feeling cooped up from having very few chores other than teaching the wyrmlings. It was nice, when you couldn’t sleep, to do a little jog down the beach and think of nothing other than the sound of the waves.
You also couldn’t check your message crystal while running, because the point was to build up a pace and keep it. If it vibrated with the arrival of a new message, too bad, you still had a mile to go. It was nice, actually. Kammie would stop at the end of a run and there would be a little stack of messages from all the people she seemed to know now. Her cousins sending pictures of what they were building in the club of that weird Tabaxi, reminders from her aunt about family dinner nights, inane things from Varna, messages from Concierge on what he needed her to pick up on her way home.
And sometimes, there would be an entire wall of replies from Oddehen, who seemed to wait to reply to little messages sent throughout the day until they had one long block of time to do so thoughtfully. Kammie never read those until she was back at the hotel, though. She figured if Oddehen was going to take time to type all that out she should take time to read it properly.
She was thinking all this during her run and while making herself do stretches on a bench, under a lamp that flickered on with twilight. At the same time Kammie was also thinking that there had been what felt like a barrage of crystal notifications a half-mile back that felt like they could have signalled a new batch of messages from Oddehen. They could also be aftershocks of the day’s drama, or Varna sending a picture of every plate of food at a buffet followed by “y/n.” Kammie hoped they were from Oddehen.
Ten seconds into a side plank hold, all of Kammie’s thoughts re-aligned themselves into something more coherent. She almost dropped the stretch but made herself finish it out and repeat the stretch on the other side. Standing, she checked the cross-streets she was on and changed the route she’d planned for the leg home. It was a good exercise to force herself to keep pace, even if she felt like sprinting. It also meant that when she reached her destination Kammie was able to catch her breath while she knocked on the door of the brightly painted converted apartment building.
As soon as she saw it was Jo who had opened the door Kammie put her thoughts into words. “Auntie, what do you do when you like someone?”