*****
Silk
She was meeting Nate Lee again for lunch. It still amazed her how fast he'd become a central part of her life. After nearly thirty years alone, she suddenly had someone else, someone to care about, someone—she hoped—who cared about her.
Nate Lee, what an odd, foreign sounding name, as odd as the man himself. She'd taken to calling him Nathan, a much more familiar sound. His difference wasn't in the way he looked. With his lanky height, long, white-blond hair and ice-blue eyes, Nathan looked enough like other men of Ushan to blend in. But the way his mind worked! Ah, that was something very different.
He was the first person she'd ever met who truly didn't look down on her for being a solitary. It meant absolutely nothing to him. It was so strange to Silk, so refreshing. Even the other solitaries in Ushan had the sense of discrimination burned so deeply into their souls that they looked down on one another. They knew their place, as the Brownshirts put it.
But not her Nathan.
She was on her way to meet him at a little restaurant near the port, a place humble enough to accept solitaries—and travelers—as customers. She wore her best dress, a soft fabric in turquoise blue. She hoped Nathan would like it. Silk caught herself hurrying and forced herself to a more decorous pace. She was afraid, she was very much afraid, that she was falling in love with the handsome stranger.