“Do me a favor, huh? Remember to give me space while I’m sleeping.”
He frowned thoughtfully. “How much space? Should I just take the floor?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. But, I don’t know. Just don’t get snuggly. I don’t have a lot of personal control when the sun’s up. I’d hate to wake up and find you smeared against the wall or something.”
“No personal control. Got it.”
I grabbed one of the small, purely ornamental pillows and chucked it at his head. “Don’t make it sound dirty. It’s not dirty, it’s dangerous.”
“Lots of dirty things are dangerous. All the best ones, I hear.”
“Shut up. Just … don’t stick your finger in my nose, and I won’t break it off. Does that sound fair?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t do that ghoul thing, it skeeves me out.”
With a twist of his mouth he changed his voice to sound like the typical lisping Hollywood Igor. “Yes, mistress.”
“I will kill you.”
“Not if I run outside.”
“I’ll kill you later,” I vowed.
Then I rolled over and conked out.
Later, as I dozed in the typical near-catatonia that engulfs me during the day, I slipped in and out of consciousness a tiny bit—rising near the surface, like a diver not quite ready to call it a swim and climb back up to the dock. And while I lurked, or lingered, or bobbed up to the edge of awareness, I sensed something large, warm, and familiar nearby. He was stretched out beside me, his breathing deep and regular, and some tiny part of my mind recognized him.
At some point I dreamed (or maybe I didn’t) that I was curled up next to him. His body was warm and firm, even through the blanket burrito in which I’d encased myself, and the softness of his breath in my hair was almost comforting.
It might’ve been the blood he’d swallowed, or it might’ve been something less concrete and obvious. He was my friend, and he was beautiful, and he was strong enough that I surely wouldn’t take off his head by accident or surprise, particularly since he knew it was a possibility and could plan against it.
(Then why was his arm wrapped around my waist? I remembered the weight of it, the way it cinched me close to his body like a roller coaster’s safety bar.)
I’ll be the first to confess that the whole thing was utterly strange, but when the sun set and I got up and around, Adrian wasn’t there and I was alone in the king-sized bed. And inexplicably, I was disappointed.
While I was still getting myself awake and oriented to being upright, he came back to the room toting more carryout for supper. Or breakfast? I didn’t know how long he’d been up.
This time, he didn’t bring any for me. I feigned disappointment, but he only chucked a french fry at me and told me to go get my own, since my head wasn’t broken anymore.
“You’re a lousy ghoul,” I accused.
“I’m a hungry date,” he corrected me. “Fancy suppers never have good food, and who knows? We might not get to eat. Creed might make a scene, and then where would I be? Starving, that’s where.”
“Starving isn’t a place,” I said down into the sink, because I was listening to him justify his failure to provide for me while I was washing my face. “And I won’t be eating anything at the supper anyway. All the more reason you should’ve brought me something.”
“I’ve seen you go for weeks without … eating.”
“I bet you could go for days,” I speculated as I toweled my cheeks off. “But you wouldn’t like it much.”
“Yeah, well, I won’t get arrested for picking up supper. You might.”
“But that’s not something that informs my spotty consumption. I’m lazy, that’s all.”
“And honest, which is something.”
“Hey, you brought a tux, right? Let me see it.”
He bobbed his head toward a clothing sleeve shaped like a tombstone, and left draped across the large seat that was under the window. “It’s over there.”
“Get it out. I want to look at it. Got to make sure we won’t clash.”
“You’re anal.”
“Very, yes.”
“What are you wearing?” he asked, and I realized I’d forgotten to play show-and-tell before we left.
“It’s hanging up in here.” I pointed at the closet. “If I’d had more time, I would’ve sent it out to be dry cleaned before heading out tonight—”
“I thought you didn’t like dry cleaners.”
“I don’t. The chemicals leave a funny taste in the back of my throat. But with vintage, sometimes it’s the only proper care alternative.” I dug it out and let him touch it, because that’s the kind of giving spirit I am.
He oohed and ahhed over it like an appreciative girlfriend, feeling the silk gently between two fingers. “It’s a shame you didn’t bring one in my size.”
“Back in the thirties, I’m pretty sure Chanel wasn’t designing for … people of your height,” I finished with mock care. He knows he’s a dude. I’m not insulting him by being aware of it.
“More’s the pity,” he said, and in those three words I heard his drag voice peek through the macho ex-SEAL persona, the barest smidge. “This is from the thirties?”
“Yeah. ’Thirty-one or ’32. I don’t remember, exactly. It’s been a long time.”
“But it was new when you bought it?”
“Uh-huh. It was a present to myself. Because sometimes, I deserve presents.”
“Damn,” he whistled. “What an opportunity.”
I went to my rolling case and started fishing around for the appropriate underthings. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, living so long, with so much money. Your closet must be loaded with vintage stuff like this. You can’t find a dress like this anymore, not for love or money,” he purred.
“Oh, that’s not entirely true. Collectors, vintage enthusiasts—they’re out there. But it’d cost you an arm and a leg, and that’s a fact. Anyway,” I said, balling up my delicates and strolling back into the bathroom for the illusion of privacy. I didn’t shut the door all the way, so we could still talk.
“Anyway what?”
“It’s not like I knew it’d be such a prize item when I first picked it up. Obviously it’s a nice dress, and I spent a pretty penny on it. But you never know what’ll turn out to be a valuable antique or a hot collector’s item. Over more than your average life span, I’ve been picking up things I liked, just because I liked them. Some of it turns out to be worthless in twenty years, and some of it quadruples in value.”
I could see him in the bathroom mirror, through the crack in the door. Technically this meant that if he gazed at the correct angle, he could see me, too—but he was absorbed in the clothing worship that somewhat characterized his alter ego.
“It’s a good thing you have such good taste, then.”
“Thanks, darling.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” he fussed.
I poked my head around the door as I wrestled myself into a girdle. Okay, so it was Spanx, but the effect is better than the old-school wonder-garments, and even the skinniest supermodel would need a little smoothing underneath the classic Chanel lines. “I’m not being sarcastic,” I said as I shimmied into the stretchy, difficult underpants. “I’m happy to be on the receiving end of a professional lady’s style admiration.”
With a laugh, he set down the corner of fabric with which he’d been toying. “All right, I believe you. And this is lovely. One of these days, when we get back—”
He stopped because I bonked my head against the door. It was an accident, brought on by my overconfidence regarding one final hop into the other leg of the damn Spanx.
“You okay?”
“Sure,” I said, then strolled into the sleeping area looking like a fashionably swathed mummy. “Sorry, do go on.”
“You look ridiculous.”
“Give me my dress.”
Reverently
he picked it up and passed it over to me, and before long I was satisfactorily sheathed for a fancy event. My hair was even doing something cute, a little flippy thing that I didn’t arrange on purpose, but it looked like I had.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“Adorable, with a dash of deadly. What about your makeup?”
“Makeup? Aw, shit.”
“No, no. I’ve got it,” he informed me. “Sit down, and I’ll tart you up.”
“Not too tarty. This is black tie, not Neighbors. Not that there’s anything wrong with Neighbors, but you know what I mean. San Francisco was costume time. This isn’t.”
He said, “Don’t worry,” and was already digging out his makeup bag. “We’ll keep it minimalist. You already have great skin; all you need is a touch of polish. Some mascara, some blush. A dab of gloss, and you’ll be golden.”
“Great,” I said, trying not to sound too dubious. It’s not that I didn’t trust his skills. It was just that I didn’t ever wear makeup. It feels weird, all that stuff all over my face.
But he did a good job. When he was finished I looked decidedly “more put together” but not a bit “draggy,” as promised, and he hadn’t even gotten a speck of powder on my collar.
Ten minutes later he was fully dressed as well, and looking mighty fine, if I might say so as a completely impartial and disinterested observer of a fine male form in a well-tailored suit. I said, “You clean up real nice.”
“Thank you. Now if this were only the sort of gig where I could get away with some false eyelashes …”
“I bet you were one hell of a prom date.”
“Never had a prom,” he said. “But it would’ve been fabulous, yes.”
“Really? No prom?” I hadn’t had one either, but it wasn’t surprising, given when I was last in school. “That’s a shame. Feel free to pretend this is the big day, if you like.”
“But I didn’t bring a corsage.”
“Screw the flowers.” I picked up my fancy-schmancy purse, a strapped jobbie that was too large to be called a clutch and a little too big to go nicely with what I was wearing. “You brought the eye makeup, which is much more useful.”
“True, true. Say, are you carrying that?”
“Yes, and hush up about it. I don’t have anything smaller and perkier or more appropriate that will hold everything I need to bring tonight. Some things just won’t fit in a tiny satin clamshell, okay?”
“I know, but—”
“No buts. I need stuff. This holds stuff. And it’s black velvet. It’s not like I’m waltzing in with a backpack made of olive drab.”
“It’s your fashion funeral.”
“You don’t really care about that. You don’t want to be seen with me, that’s all.”
“I don’t want to be seen with that bag,” he clarified. “You, I’m happy to have on an arm.”
He held out an elbow, and I took it. It felt weird, considering this was the same guy who just gave me bigger, brighter eyes with his travel stash of cosmetics, but oh well.
Downstairs, the doorman hailed us a cab and before long, we were pulling up to the Johnson Space Center, which was lit up like a Kennedy. Though it was closed to tourists or other assorted space buffs, the whole compound glowed with a thousand and one electric lights, including a few spotlights and some banners and flags that were artfully illuminated on the main building’s exterior. At first I thought it was overkill for an honorary ceremony, but then we emerged from the taxi into near silence, and I realized that this was just what the place looked like at night.
“Cool,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said also, and he paid the cabbie out of the leftovers of whatever cash he’d lifted from me earlier in the day. “You ever been here before?” he asked as the cab pulled away, leaving us there to our own devices.
“No. I’ve been to Cape Canaveral, but that was a long time ago. Have you?”
“No. So I have no idea where we’re supposed to go to get inside this thing.”
“I do,” I told him. I triumphantly held up my somewhat-too-big-bag and pulled out our printed invitation confirmations, and also a small wad of other printings … mostly the kind that gave me a good layout of the space center and its surrounding buildings. “I didn’t have time to memorize everything, so I brought everything that looked important.”
“All of it?”
“There are over a hundred structures here! I had to leave some of it back home, but everything pertinent to the building where we’ll be dining—and the half dozen buildings nearest to it—can be found in this-here wad of shit I printed out before leaving Seattle.”
“I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with you, but I bet it’s hard to pronounce when you’re drunk.”
“What’s wrong with me is that I’m an old hand at this, and I’m totally smarter than you, and that’s why I get paid the big bucks.”
“Because you’re crazy,” he concluded.
“Crazy like a fox. And that’s where we’re headed.” I indicated a big place to the right of where we’d been deposited by cab.
We began walking toward what was known only as “Building 3,” or the first employee cafeteria and store. According to the invitations, it’d been freshly remodeled—top to bottom—and this banquet was one way not just of honoring the hilariously named Buck Penny, but also of showing off the new digs.
Building 110 was the one that housed all the security, where nice young men and women in uniform checked badges and invitations, but that building wasn’t convenient to where we were headed, so the security guards had come to us. They lined up on either side of a red carpet that looked like it was made of bloody Astroturf and, with cute little flashlights in hand, they noted identification and scanned the bar codes on the announcements with weird tricorder-looking devices.
I experienced a momentary pang of nervousness, or really, I experienced a pang of mistrust wherein I strongly considered the wisdom of taking anything Horace told me as factual, complete, accurate, and capable of withstanding outside scrutiny.
The moment passed as soon as a mustachioed fellow in a beige jumpsuit covered in patches scanned my invitation and the machine spit out an approving beep. Adrian was similarly accepted, based on his equally valid (or valid enough) invitation and a fake ID I’d helped him arrange shortly after he’d shown up in Seattle. Everyone needs a good fake ID. Especially people who hang around me.
As we approached the “cafeteria” (a spurious place for a black-tie event if ever there was one), more people joined us and we began to feel less alone, visible, and conspicuous. Not many of the banqueteers were arriving via cab; most of them worked in the area or had friends who did, I assume, for most of the attendees were walking from a parking lot around the side of the building.
We got a few sidelong glances, and when I poked around with my none-too-impressive psychic senses, I mostly got the impression that people were trying to figure out what department we worked in. Fair enough. We didn’t look familiar, and for very good reason.
I also picked up a few appreciative glances. Mostly for Adrian.
I didn’t take it personally. A majority of the guys in attendance looked like the same breed you find in your average basement comic book shop, with the exception of a few astronauts. They stood out from the crowd like rock stars at … at … well, let’s not say a comic book shop. For the sake of variety, let’s say a science fiction convention. Even if they hadn’t clearly been born of superior genetic stock, the astronauts were easy to pick out.
They were the only ones with tans.
I obviously didn’t come from finely engineered astronaut stock, but Adrian looked like he might have. Even in a penguin suit, any idiot could see that he had a body like a Greek statue, and from the neck up he displayed the bone structure of an Armani model. At least one gawker (the wife of a pasty man in thick glasses) wondered if my date was perhaps the sibling of an astronaut … a good cover, and something I wished I’d thought of sooner.
That’s always the rub. When I have nothing but time to prepare, my outings run smooth as butter on silk. But when I have to do things on the fly, I miss opportunities. It would’ve been easy as hell to find a few astronauts with siblings of approximately the right age—and then cross-reference that list with people who were comfortably far away, and unlikely to crash the banquet. Anyone floating around the stratosphere in a space station, for example.
Ah, well. I filed it away as something that someday might prove useful (or not) and strolled along the walkway into the reception area—just beyond which waited the banquet hall.
Security guards came and went, chattering into headsets and tiny microphones in code that any idiot could translate, but almost no idiots paid them a lick of attention. I did, naturally, but mostly I smiled coyly (no teeth showing) and pretended to flirt with my date.
“Any sign of her?” he asked me quietly.
“Not yet.” I felt around with my mind—and since that was really what he was asking anyway, he didn’t bug me about closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. I didn’t know what I was “looking” for, exactly, but I opened myself to the possibility of menace, rage, and vengeance. Surely that was something like what she was feeling, if she intended to come to this place and tackle this guy.
Otherwise, why bother?
But no. Nothing. All I got was the swirling mass of hungry people, bored people, nervous people, proud people, curious people, and people who were freaking out a little about the prospect of public speaking. No crazy people—or more to the point, since I knew what to look for better than anyone in the world, I didn’t feel anyone’s focused, driven, laser-like concentration. So I knew she wasn’t here yet. Because when she arrived, that’s what it’d be—that’s what I’d feel. It wouldn’t be wild and mindless, or outrageous and nonsensical.
It’d be precision hatred in motion.
Yeah. I’d know it when I saw it. Felt it. Whatever.
Adrian and I were ushered to a set of seats at a round table with about a dozen other people, none of whom we knew and all of whom we actively sought to avoid from a conversational standpoint. We kept our heads close and acted like newlyweds, talking softly to each other and generally ignoring everyone else—as if no one could possibly be as fascinating as our own company.
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