by Chloe Garner
More jumpers would be forcibly retired, and the ones who were feeding the craving by working in security would be shown the door.
Cassie would have been devastated.
They deserved it.
The broccoli on his plate looked like the rotting corpse of a Brigetta Ean from Lamma.
It was staring at him.
Soulless.
He pushed his plate away.
At some point, Troy had eaten. Jesse didn’t see how.
“You ready to get back to work?” Troy asked. Jesse looked at his own plate.
Corpses.
All corpses.
“I’ll go listen to her explain how inept she is, some more,” he answered. Troy sighed.
“You could be more civil, if you tried.”
“I know,” Jesse said agreeably. Troy grunted, then pulled Jesse aside into a storage room by the bathrooms. It smelled like urinal cakes and shoe grime.
“Look, it sucks. I know that. You know that. If you’ve got any better ideas, I’m all ears. I offered to send you to Seattle for a while. Got it cleared up through Donovan. And you wouldn’t go. I don’t know what you want, but you’re making everyone’s lives hell for no reason. I mean, I don’t think you’re even enjoying it anymore. You used to have fun, making us all feel like idiots.”
Jesse blinked at him, once, slow. Waited for him to get to the point.
The point was that he was gritting the gears.
Troy was doing his best to get along, but Jesse was making it impossible. Things couldn’t settle into a new normal, so long as he kept disrupting them, and Troy wanted a new normal.
This was something Jesse was sympathetic to. He wanted his old normal. His lab. His projects. All of the shiny, sparkly new things that he had worked on.
But not here.
He didn’t want normal here.
He’d tried once.
Gone along.
Learned to be comfortable.
He was happy in brief intervals.
He’d been happy a lot, actually.
Somewhere along the way, he’d lost his sense of humor.
Maybe it was when Cassie had killed his daughter.
Maybe.
Maybe it was when he’d come back without her.
“I can’t keep covering for you,” Troy said. “I can’t keep telling people that there’s nothing we can do about it. Because sooner or later someone’s going to do something about it.”
What? Jesse wondered. What exactly were they going to do about the alien who’d crash-landed here two years ago? Put him back under arrest, try to keep him in a cell again?
He was pretty sure he’d proven that pointless.
Troy was waiting for an answer from him. It was a little like Beatrice, with her forehead rub as she sat there, waiting for him to answer a statement that she’d hoped was actually a question. It piqued his anger, the comparison. He’d always tolerated Troy better than the others, and Jesse disliked Beatrice for associating herself with him.
Troy sighed.
“Look, come out for a drink with me tonight. Slav is in town for a couple of days, we can sit and…”
He apparently didn’t know what they would do as they sat over their alcohol.
Jesse didn’t either.
He blinked again.
“I don’t like seeing you like this,” Troy said. Jesse felt his mouth twitch a bit at this. He knew Troy felt responsible for him, but it was a strangely human trait that had never really made sense to him, like Cassie’s persistence in apologizing for things that she had no control over.
“I don’t blame you,” Jesse finally said, turning to go back out into the hallway.
“For what?” he heard Troy ask as the door closed behind him.
He grunted under his breath.
It was the first good question anyone had asked him all day.
Tile floor.
Tile ceiling.
Cement walls.
Fluorescent lights.
The smell of a space that was frequently occupied and more frequently cleaned.
Beatrice and her eyebrow rub.
Samples.
Data.
Clock.
A note under the windshield wiper of Cassie’s car.
Rude words.
Road.
Gate.
Streetlights.
Apartment.
Darkness.
Silence.
Waiting for tomorrow.
*********
Troy whistled to himself as he fried eggs on the stove, shuffling on the kitchen linoleum in bare feet. Polly had left a few minutes ago with a friendly kiss, off to her job as a cook or a housekeeper or a bookkeeper or something. He’d met her at a bar in town the night before and they’d had fun.
Whatever her job was, it kept her in great shape, and she liked soldiers, she said, just not the kind with buzzed hair and no neck. Troy did not have buzzed hair and he did have a neck, so he was just her type.
It was Tuesday morning and he didn’t have any meetings until ten, and no one was slated to arrive through the portal with a new pile of data for him until at least tomorrow. He’d heard a rumor that they were renegotiating their return time by twenty-four hours, but you can’t trust those things until they’re finalized.
In the barracks, he’d been expected to be at his post at seven in the morning every morning, regardless of when he’d been dismissed to go to bed the night before. At the time, he’d thought it was his life’s calling, to be that kind of soldier, always on time, always disciplined, always ready. Then they’d booted him out of the program for his eyes and he’d started working the technical side of the base and he’d found another kind of life. One that made him realize that the decade of body aches and fuzzy-brainedness were because he was not sleeping the right hours. In an ideal world, he would have gone to bed at four in the morning every night and shown up for work at eleven or noon. The base wouldn’t tolerate that, but he could go in at nine every day and work until ten at night most days, and no one objected in the slightest.
Most of the time.
There was always the odd fanatic who insisted that he should be there whenever they needed his expertise, especially if that was six-thirty in the morning. He told them to take it up with his CO and went on with his life. If he was going to get reassigned, that was hardly on the first page of reasons why.
So he was standing at the counter eating his breakfast in his boxers at eight-thirty when someone knocked on his door.
He shoveled the last of the eggs into his mouth and dropped the plate in the sink, pulling his robe off the hook in the bathroom on his way to the door.
“Hello, Troy,” Cassie said.
He swallowed.
“Cassie.”
She smiled a dark, devastating smile and he swallowed harder.
“You’re human.”
The last time he’d seen her, she’d been a giant blob of rock.
“I’m better,” she said, pushing him into the apartment and kicking the door closed behind her. He hit a wall somewhere behind him, her mouth on his, her hands pulling him against her by the collar of his robe. His body answered out of simple muscle memory in the first moment as he mentally reeled.
She was alive.
Even more, the disease that had given her schizophrenic genetics was cured. She was better.
And she was here.
And she was kissing him.
His mind caught up and he pulled her tighter against him, kissing her back with a sincere desperation that surprised him. She was so familiar, the feel of her body stretched against his like an invitation he’d known his entire life. Her hands left his robe and found the belt around his waist and untied it.
“Cassie…” he breathed.
“Shut up, Troy,” she answered. He pulled her shirt untucked from her pants, letting his hands find her skin and she fell still for a moment, their mouths locked together. Like this was what had been supposed to happen, all
along. She pulled her head back and looked up at him, sucking on her bottom lip and nodding with mischief in her eyes.
“This is exactly the kind of girl I am,” she said.
He took her word for it.
*********
He lay in bed next to her as she stared up at the ceiling.
He’d always known.
He thought she always had, too.
He couldn’t leave her. He would call in sick in a few minutes, tell them he wasn’t going to be able to make it today, then he would spend the entire day with her, just like this.
“I missed you,” she said finally.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Jesse didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Wanker.”
He snorted a surprised laugh and she rolled onto her side to look at him. His eyes drifted and she waited.
“We waited too long for this,” she said.
“I tried to tell you,” he teased, and she poked him in the chest with a knuckle.
“He plays things close to the vest,” she said. “No surprise he’s been keeping information from you.”
“What happened?” he asked. “I thought you were dead.”
She shook her head.
“Too much. Too much to tell, I’m sorry.” She sighed and reached up to run her fingers through his hair, causing a river of cold and hot to flood down his back. She watched his eyes.
She knew.
He shuddered, unable to contain it anymore, and she pulled his mouth down to kiss him again. He slid her against him, her skin warm and soft and so very right there. She curled around him, familiar and welcome, and he put his hand behind her neck, drawing her deeper into the bed, but she shook her head.
“You have to go to work.”
“I’ll take a personal day,” he said. She shook her head again, sitting up. He stayed where he was, just watching her.
“It’s your turn to keep your information to yourself,” she said, pulling her hair behind her head, a nervous artifact he recognized. She was human again. All those months gone, then coming back as a fish, and then a fairy, and then a rock. And then she’d been gone again, and he’d given up hope. Jesse had as much as told him that she was gone, by refusing to tell him any more than he had.
But she was here. And human. And naked in his bed.
“Like hell I am,” he said.
“You can’t tell Jesse I’m here.”
“Screw Jesse. I’m not going to work today.”
She laughed up at the ceiling, a shade darker than he had ever known her to be, but sexy as he’d ever known her. Confident. She’d lost something, somewhere, something that had chained her down, kept her from being… something. He’d never known what, but here it was, and it made her normal elusiveness maddening, intoxicating. Before, she had been unavailable, unsure. She’d known that doing this would mean risking something valuable, and she’d seen him throw away every woman he’d ever been with the next day. He didn’t agree on the particulars, but that was how she saw it, and she’d been so afraid in the moments when she’d considered the two of them together. He could see it in her face, when she didn’t know she was thinking about it.
And here she was, unafraid, unconcerned, beautiful and defiant. Something she’d always been just short of.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “There’s so much to do.”
She shook her head, then rolled to lay across his chest.
“No,” she said. “It’s still too complicated. I’m not back. I just needed… I needed to come see you.”
“Why can’t I tell Jesse?”
Her face was warm against his skin, and he tangled his fingers in her hair.
“How is he?”
“Falling apart,” Troy said honestly. “He’s not himself anymore.”
“I don’t think we ever knew what he was, to begin with,” Cassie said. “But he deserves some of that.”
“What does that mean?” Troy asked. “Did he abandon you out there?”
“Stop asking questions, Troy,” she said. “I’m not going to answer them.”
He pushed her to the side and sat up.
“Now, wait a minute. You can’t just show up here after all this time and expect me to just accept that you’re back, no questions asked. You were MIA, presumed dead. They gave your desk away.”
She laughed.
“How long has it been?”
“Six months day after tomorrow,” he said, too quickly. She laughed again.
“That’s exactly what I expect,” she said, getting up.
“What?” he asked.
“That I’m going to come back and you’re going to accept it, no questions asked.”
He blinked. She’d metamorphosed in mere seconds from the woman he’d always known her to be to one he didn’t know at all. She looked at him with compassion as she dressed.
“Okay, okay. Look. I’m sorry. I know this has been rough on you. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through. I’ve learned a lot, and one of the things I’ve learned is that it’s best to go into something knowing where you stand, no matter who the other guy is.”
“But you’re okay?” he asked.
“I’m okay,” she said. “And you were the one person on the planet I knew I could trust.” She ran her fingers along his scalp again, then down the back of his neck and his arm, taking his hand and putting it to her mouth. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t going to make any sense to you for a while, but it’s going to be okay, in the end. Okay? I promise.”
He frowned harder. That was extremely unlike her. She saw it and laughed again.
“I know. I don’t promise things I can’t guarantee. I was hoping that would make you feel better.”
He watched her for a minute as she dressed, not feeling any better, then waited as she went to the bathroom and came back again with her hair brushed and put up.
“Cass,” he said. “You can talk to me. You know that, right?”
She sat on the bed, a troubled expression crossing her face.
“I know, babe. That’s why I’m here at all. I missed you and I knew that you deserve to know. This isn’t about you.”
“Is it about him?”
She twisted her mouth, looking away.
“No,” she said. “Not exactly. It’s about me. About trying to figure out who I am and how I fit here, any more. I need some time, okay? I just didn’t want to be alone anymore.”
He waited some more, trying to find any of the meaning in her words that he might have missed, then he reached out and took her hand, squeezing her palm with his thumb.
“You can trust me,” he said. “And I believe you. You’ll figure it out.”
She stood again, giving him a brief, wistful smile, then jerked her head.
“You’re going to be late for work.”
“I’d rather stay,” he said.
“I’ve got stuff I need to do,” she said. “Tomorrow. Ask for tomorrow off.”
“Will you be here when I get home?” he asked.
She leaned over him, pressing her lips against his for several slow breaths.
“I’ll be here.”
*********
If they’d checked his gate numbers that day, they’d have found that he arrived two hours late and left and hour early, but no one checked those, and he was around so many different places during a normal day that no one noticed that he wasn’t anywhere for the beginning or the end of the day.
Except Jesse.
But even Jesse didn’t seem that interested, which wasn’t like him.
He was working with Phylis in the kinesiology department, working on a long-standing issue called jumper’s pain, and he was pretty demure today. He didn’t hate Phylis. The woman was solidly built and fifteen years older than average on the base, and she didn’t let Jesse push her around. It helped that her credentials weren’t technical; he had nothing to use to berate her for.
“Have a little too m
uch fun last night?” Jesse asked over lunch. Troy shrugged.
“Had a hard time getting out of bed this morning,” he answered. True enough. He knew that Jesse was a human lie detector - in the sense that he detected human lies, seeing as he wasn’t himself human - so he did his best to make it sound like an unimportant answer. Jesse snorted down at his meal, presumably thinking that Troy didn’t want to go into more detail out of a sense of modesty or discretion.
“How’s it going with Phylis?” Troy asked, treading a fine line between over-engaging Jesse and drawing more attention than he wanted and under-engaging him and making the Palta suspicious that he was hiding something. A lifetime of office politics in a super-secret industry gave him a head start, but he knew he had to be even more careful than that with Jesse.
“She’s a bear,” Jesse said. “Deserves better than this place.”
“And yet,” Troy teased reflexively. Jesse didn’t look up. Troy watched the Palta for a moment, sensing that there was something that he, himself, was missing, then decided against going after it. Not today.
“As great of company as you are, I’ve got some work to get done,” he said. “I think I’m going to eat at my desk.”
“Another day, another dollar,” Jesse answered. Troy frowned at him, but took his opening to collect his food and leave. He hoped Cassie didn’t expect him to keep her presence on the planet a secret for too long.
He needed to keep a closer eye on Jesse than that.
*********
Cassie was at his apartment when he got home.
She was cooking.
“How was your day?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him.
“What?” he asked.
She was in her underwear.
“How was your day?” she asked again, glancing back down as she stirred a sauce on the stove.