Earth Husbands are Odd (Earth Fathers #2) - Lyn Gala Page 0,59

make enough profit to get upgrades for the ship. He was going to have to do a lot of security audits and new weapon designs to get the credits they needed if he couldn’t sell Rick’s programming.

They could go back to Hidden planet and sell it under the official terms of the sanction agreement, but Max was vindictive enough that he didn’t want these people to get access to the technology unless they were willing to pay a fair price. Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face was a valid hobby on Earth, one that Max endorsed.

“We must discuss husbanding with Ugly one.” The judge turned and walked back toward the table in the center of the room. Asshole. Kohei followed the judge, and Rick tugged at Max to do the same. Maybe the evidentiary hearing wasn’t over. Max took a deep breath. If his ability to make a living depended on the alien understanding of husbanding, he knew one thing. He wouldn’t deny Rick. Maybe they had never stood in front of an altar in a church, but in Max’s heart, they were married. Nothing would change that.

And if this asshole called Rick ugly again, Max would take it out on the judge’s legs, and since he had kneecaps, Max knew exactly where to kick him.

Chapter Twenty-One

The judge got up onto his table again, but this time it didn’t rotate. He considered the small group of them. Dee stood slightly to one side, but Kohei was so close that Max could only tell the tentacle tips apart because Kohei’s had far more beige and green and Rick had more red.

“What definition do you give for husbanding?” the judge asked.

Max smiled at Rick. “Mating. Pair bonding. Sharing sameness for the rest of our lives.”

Rick’s tentacles shivered.

“How many individuals are inside husbanding?”

“As the only female here,” Dee said, “I should point out that marriage doesn’t always involve husbands. You’re leaving out wives.”

The judge turned toward her. “Define wife.”

“The female equivalent of husband,” Dee said. “A wife is a female who is in a marriage. A husband is a male who is in a marriage.”

“Define female,” the judge said. Dee opened her mouth, but Max quickly jumped in.

“Careful,” Max warned. “That word will lead you down a rabbit trail, and somewhere along the way, you’re going to decide that you don’t know what female means, and I say this as a male who carried and gave birth to three children.”

She grimaced. “Yikes. You have a point.” She turned to the judge. “But I can say that I call myself a female, so I am one. If I join a marriage, then I would be a wife, not a husband.”

The judge tapped something on his wrist translator. “How many individuals are inside marriaging?”

“Two,” Max said. Yeah, there were polygamists, but that was another rabbit trail he was not going down.

“Define length and termination of marriaging.”

Max wanted to say that marriage was forever, but being in the military meant he had seen entirely too many marriages fail. Trying to maintain a relationship when one partner kept getting deployed wasn’t easy. “Most humans hope that marriage will last forever, but honestly, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes people change and after a time, they find that they don’t fit together anymore. Then they get a divorce.”

The judge tapped on his wrist translator again. “Is ‘fit’ a reference to tentacles and intestines?” he asked.

Dee snorted.

“No!” Max blurted. Oh god. Obviously the rest of the universe knew how Hidden ones reproduced, but that was not a topic he ever wanted to discuss. Nope. He might enjoy tentacle sex, but he did not enjoy talking about it. “No, it’s more about having compatible goals. Sometimes people decide they want different things.”

“And sometimes,” Dee added, “people live together for their entire lives. They raise children and grandchildren. They love each other until the end of their lives, and when one dies, the other never recovers and they live a half-life.”

That was specific.

“My grandparents,” she added.

“My parents have been married for forty years. That will probably be them.” Max focused on the judge again. “That’s the goal of most humans—to have a marriage that will last forever.” Max tightened his hold on Rick’s tentacle. Maybe Rick understood the gesture because he leaned closer and wrapped a tentacle around Max’s arm. God, Max didn’t even know how long Hidden ones lived. He selfishly hoped it was a very long time. He couldn’t bear the pain of losing Rick, not even if that