Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 9 / Chapter 11 –>

Brett stopped at the door to his room. Djen had given up the nursemaid role the first time he had descended a ladder without her assistance and without much of a grimace, but she walked beside him nonetheless. Probably to make sure he made it here, he suspected. Not an if-he-collapses sort of concern, but of the or-he’ll-get-sidetracked variety.

“What’s the situation with the rest of the station?” he asked.

“Open the door, Markus.”

He did as he was told, pushing down the handle and swinging the door open. Djen pushed him gently through and closed the door behind him. She put her shoulders against it and leaned back with her arms crossed.

Brett repeated his question.

“Valent is the most upset,” she answered. “The errant projectile lodged in the trunk of one of his saplings. Damn near cut the poor thing in half. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to save it.”

“At least it didn’t damage the biosphere.”

She pointed a finger at him. “At least it didn’t damage you. It could have been worse.”

“That’s what Liston said. Then again, I’ve seen Ritter’s glasses.” Brett grinned at her. “He was probably lucky he hit me at all, even from that distance.”

“It isn’t funny,” Djen snapped. She bounced forward and planted her hands on her hips. “The crew is shaken, Markus. We’ve worked together for five years, all of us, and that includes Ritter. It looks like he just snapped, just out of nowhere, snapped and decided to kill someone. People are wondering–if it can happen to him, it can happen to you or me.”

Brett rolled his eyes. “Ritter is sick. You heard that yourself.”

“No one else has heard it, and you know as well as I do that it isn’t going to calm them down. If they’re just worried about a little cabin fever, they’ll panic over a contagion.”

“Then I should get out there. I’ll show them I’m okay and pass the news about Ritter.”

“You’re going to bed right now. Showing off your ouchy can wait until morning, and I’ll pass the word about Ritter. It won’t help, though.”

“Liston said it’s only minimally contagious, with the exception of the card groupies. We’ll be fine, all of us.”

Djen’s lips began to tremble. “Until someone else gets sick, goes a little crazy and grabs a gun. Where did he get a gun in the first place, Markus?”

“That’ll be one of my questions for Ashburn.” He scowled in her direction. “I’ve also got to search Ritter’s room. I’ve got to post Liston’s warning. I’ve got to track down Sievers and Ilam and Jervis and get them to the med bay as soon as possible. I really don’t have time to go to bed right now, Djen.”

She turned from him and began folding down his blankets. Over her shoulder, she said, “I’ll make the med contact. I’ll spread some calming rumors. Ashburn and Ritter’s room will wait until tomorrow, but I’ll warn Ashburn that you want to talk to him first thing, so he can get his story together. He’s probably trying to answer the gun question himself right now.”

“Those things are my job.”

“Your job is to get into bed.”

Brett shook his head. “I’m not in the mood to argue with you. I got shot this evening.”

“Precisely my point, Commander. Get into bed. That’s an order.”

He started to protest, but saw that it was pointless to do so. Instead, he said, “I want you working on those screens first thing in the morning. Figuring out what happened to Nine and making certain it won’t happen to the other engines is our top priority as a station. I want that clear among the scientific personnel. Ritter’s snap is a minor incident. Is that understood?”

“It’s clear. Get your boots off.”

“Christ!”

“Get your boots off before I have to knock you down and take them off.”

Brett did as he was told. He dropped onto the bed and began to wrestle with the laces. His hands were shaking, which surprised him, and he settled for putting toe against heel and kicking his boots off one at a time. He stretched out on top of the blankets and stared at the ceiling.

Djen was silent for a time, then quietly she said, “You scared the hell out of me tonight.”

“We must both be born again believers, because there isn’t much hell left in me, either.”

She laughed, and he started to laugh as well, but then she was crying with her hands curled into fists and balled against her eyes. The sobs came hard from deep in her chest. Brett sat up, and climbed to his feet. He went to her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders and hushed her as he would a child who had skinned her knee. After a time, the tears stopped, but he continued to hold her. Her face against his chest and her warm breath through his shirt felt too comfortable to release.

Djen pushed away from him first. She swiped at her damp cheeks with her fingers. “For five years I’ve been trying to get you to do that, to notice me as something other than an employee, to hold me like you meant it. If I’d have known getting you shot was all it took, I’d have done it myself.” She seemed to think about that for a moment. “Or maybe it was the crying. I should expect as much from a proven male chauvinist.”

“Djen?”

She held up a hand to stop him. “Shut up, Markus. I’m the one who’s been waiting all this time. And I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of crying my tears where you didn’t see them and feeling lonely and goddamned pining like some old west frontierswoman. I know you’re hurting. I know you came here with some major blight on your soul that hasn’t let you see much but pain and darkness since we got here. You haven’t had a realistic relationship with another human being on this station since the day we left Earth, and no one but me has noticed. Well I’ve noticed, Commander, and I’m sick of it. I’m not going to let you push me away anymore. I don’t care how much your heart hurts or your arm hurts or your freaking pancreas hurts, for that matter. You’re going to notice me now, whether you want to or not.”

With a deft and rapid series of zips and jerks, she shed her station suit. Brett had to put his knuckles against his chin just to be certain his jaw wasn’t hanging.

Djen opened her arms wide. “Come and fraternize with the crew before I decide to kick your gimpy ass.”

Brett did not go to her. He grabbed her, running his hands along the naked warmth of her back, down to her buttocks. Djen leaned into him, beginning to smile. Then he squeezed and with a jerk, lifted her off the ground and spun her onto the bed. His momentum carried him forward, and he landed on top of her. She giggled at his sudden fire, but he hardly heard her.

Brett lost himself in her presence, in the minute exploration of her body. He tasted her light and salty sweat. He ran his hands along the smooth, tan skin of her arms, the corded musculature of her belly and her firm thighs. He buried his hands, then his face in the dark coiled and delicate curls of her hair. At some point which he could not properly remember, he stumbled out of his clothes and wrapped the entire length of his body around hers.

When he entered her, there was pressure. Inside him, there was a swelling in his skull and his chest and the tips of his fingers. He was a stoppered bellows squeezed by a mighty smith. He closed his eyes against the strain. And there was a violence in the effort, both in the witholding and the expression. The world throbbed with him, and his thrusts were savage. Djen moaned beneath him, a sound that was pure pleasure, and he lashed at her with his hips. He clutched her and smothered her against him and buried himself in the sweat streaked erotica of that secret hollow place between her neck and her shoulder.

And then he opened his eyes. In the space of a breath, it all changed.

Emily.

Her technicolor blue eyes shone up at him from her white and delicate face. Her small mouth spoke his name where Djen’s full and inviting lips had been. Her trim and petite athleticism replaced Djen’s voluptuous and muscular roundness. She was lithe and quick and fresh as a sylvan fairy. It was her voice, Emily’s voice, that reached his ears.

He stared at her. He stared and stopped whatever thing it was that he had been doing the moment before.

“Em?”

“Markus?”

There was a hoarseness in his voice, but the passion had evaporated from him. “Em?”

He straightened sharply, disentangled himself from too many limbs and too firm a grip on him. He felt a rake of fingernails along his back as he rose. He tried to gather his feet beneath him, tried to keep his eyes on her, on Emily, on impossibility, but the fact of its impossibility could only penetrate incoherently. Then he was caught in the sheets and still wheeling backward. He slipped off the high edge of the bed, fell for a breathless instant and landed with a loud smack on the floor.

Darkness swam about him. His head filled with a detonation of argent flares. Brett blinked them away.

And when he opened his eyes again, Djen was there. She crouched at his side and peered down at him, her large brown eyes rimmed with concern, wariness.

“Markus?”

She spoke his name, just as she must have spoken it before, he knew. It hadn’t been Emily. It had never been Emily. Just Djen and his blind and foolish confusion. Ritter wasn’t the only one whose mind was slipping its gears.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Djen touched his face softly. “Do you want to tell me?”

“No.”

Her eyes clouded for a moment, but then she blinked and they were clear again. “Did she hurt you so badly that five years isn’t even enough?”

“I was the one.”

She studied him in the yellow glow of the room lights. “I don’t doubt that you were.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

Their eyes met and held. Finally, she bent over him and kissed his forehead. Then she rose and lifted herself back into the bed. With two quick flips, she straightened the blankets and sliced cleanly beneath them. She patted the space beside her.

“I make it a point, generally, not to let old girlfriends impinge on a relationship. Memories of them are like blisters. Get them out in the sun and dry them up, then everybody’s happy. But this isn’t a blister, is it? This one’s more like a tumor, and if I could understand its metastasis, I’d understand everything about you, I think.

“You’re not a complicated man. You’re a good man and a solid man who spends too much time punishing himself for things beyond his control. You’re a man who wasted too much effort trying to be decent in a hard and careless world. I’ve learned these things from watching you. You’re sensitive, though you’d like to be made of stone.

“If I wanted to, I could make you unravel this secret. You’d tell me, because you’re as lonely and confused as I am, Markus. But at the end of the story, it wouldn’t mean anything to me but information. It would seem tragic, I’m sure, but tragic in a distant and non-touching way. You would look at it through my eyes and find something of pettiness in the explanation. I know this because I’ve done it a score of times with the ghosts of old gals who needed exorcising. But this is a special ghost. It’s a beloved ghost that makes you what you are, and I can see that making her seem petty would be a crime.

“Come back to bed with me. We’ll let this one ride. Tonight we’ll be old lovers and you can hold me until morning.”

Brett said nothing. He didn’t deny what she said, because he couldn’t. He had the sudden urge to tell her she was beautiful. That in this moment of silence and breath and understanding, she was stunning. But he didn’t do that, either.

Brett rolled to his side, then up to his feet. He slipped beneath the blankets and took her in his arms. He held her throughout the night, awake long after her breathing had settled into a relaxed and constant rhythm. He cradled her with her face against his chest and his arm around her shoulders and their legs entwined.

But it was Emily that he saw in the shadows. It was Emily that danced in the dark, just out of the range of his vision once the lights were out.

It was very late before he slept.

<– Chapter 9 / Chapter 11 –>