Reluctant Partnerships by Ariel Tachna Page B

would have done the same thing she had done, but none of them would have had to worry about the consequences, because they all had partners. They would have calmed Pascale down, taken her back to l’Institut or on to Paris to see Angelique, and gone home to their partners. Instead, Adèle had to be the one to find her. Adèle, who did not have a partner to go home to. Adèle, who had hated having a partner the first time around.
     “I don’t want another partner, damn it,” she muttered, dunking her head beneath the water so she could wash her hair. “The one I had the first time was bad enough.”
    Jude had been gone for six months, mostly out of her life for a year before that, and yet she still tensed when she saw a shadow across a doorway, expecting to hear his voice drawling, “Hello, pussy” in greeting before he grabbed her.
    She shuddered in disgust at herself as she felt her body react to the mere thought of him touching her. If only her body had reacted with the same disgust as her mind, she might have been able to deal with him, but even as he had spewed filth at her, he had aroused her as none of her previous lovers had ever done.
    Even with a partner she had hated, the partnership had turned sexual. Adèle had no illusions a new partnership would be any less so. She had nothing against sex, but she liked men, and her potential new partner was most definitely not a man. She might have said that would make it easier to keep her partnership on a functional level only, but she had seen what happened with Sebastien and Thierry. She was not in Thierry’s confidence, so perhaps he had been bisexual before meeting Sebastien and she had simply been unaware of it, but one way or another, he had gone from being married to being partnered with Sebastien. She had seen them together during the war and since then. They showed all the same hallmarks of a deeper relationship that she had remarked in Alain and Orlando or Jean and Raymond. She had never been invited into their quarters at l’Institut, where they lived full-time now, but she doubted she would find more than one bed if she were.
    She could not care less about what they did in the privacy of their own rooms. Their relationship was their business, but she had no interest in copying it. She had never looked at women in any kind of sexual manner. Sure, she could see why men would find certain women more attractive than others or say whether an outfit was flattering on another woman, but that was hardly the same as wanting to take one to her bed.
    She liked men.
    “This is getting me nowhere,” she muttered with a sigh. Scrubbing quickly, she got out of the bath and dried off, wrapping her hair in a thick towel to blot some of the water out before blowing it dry. As she dressed, she tried to imagine sharing her house with another woman. Two sets of toiletries on the edge of the tub, two brushes, two hairdryers, two nightgowns instead of one. She could list the changes, but she could not fathom making them. She had never shared her house with anyone. She had never met anyone she wanted to share her life with that way, certainly not her former partner, yet if she accepted that she had a new partner, she had to be open to those changes.
    As set in her ways as she was, she could make those changes if she had the right incentive, if she met the right man. And therein lay the rub. On the rare occasions she imagined a relationship, it had always been with a man.
    Adèle had little patience with her own sex most of the time, finding far too many of them melodramatic, weepy, or weak. She could think of a few exceptions. Magali Ducassé, the wizard who had always stayed behind at the end of a battle to mop up, was possibly the deadliest wizard Adèle knew, and given some of the things Adèle had seen during l’émeutte des Sorciers, that was saying something. Angelique Bouaddi at Sang Froid had always struck Adèle as being a shrewd entrepreneur who ran her business