by Chloe Garner
“Hmm, um,” he said, swallowing.
Those were not Cassie’s normal underwear. He was still holding the doorknob in his hand. Which meant the door was still open. Yes. The door was still open. He closed it, turning back to Cassie, unable to process. Red lace. And nothing. Nothing but her skin, bare feet to loose hair.
She winked at him, and his heart fell into his pants.
“Go get changed,” she said. “Something comfortable. With buttons. But not too many.”
She went to get something out of the refrigerator, and he scrambled sideways out of the front room of his apartment, understanding how deer felt.
He wondered if his mouth had been open the whole time.
He shook himself, then went to his closet. He had a wine-colored silk shirt that he often wore to bars because it didn’t show stains and women liked to touch it.
She’d rearranged his closet.
His base uniforms were all there, neatly separated from each other so that they didn’t wrinkle, but then his shirts were pressed against each other to make room for a dozen blouses, skirts, and dresses.
An irrational part of his brain wondered if one of the girls from the bar had snuck in and tried to move in with him without him knowing about it, but those clothes were Cassie’s.
They just… weren’t.
The skirts were tight and dark, made of thick materials that would emphasize her shape. The dresses were bright, loud and scant, and the blouses made the dresses look modest. He took the red dress down and held it out in front of himself.
“Cassie?” he called.
“Dinner’s ready,” she answered.
The fabric felt like skin, cool and slippery under his fingers. He’d danced with that dress before. A dozen times. Different girl every time, different design, different color, but that dress, all the same. It was a dress that belonged to the woman who owned the room. She wouldn’t go home with just anyone. More than that, it wasn’t about being choosy. It was about the control. Men begged her with their hands, with their gifts, with their mouths, and she turned them all down with a laugh and a wave of her hand.
They went home with Troy because of his hands.
It wasn’t some hard-fought knowledge. He’d just always been like that. He put his hand on the inflection of the curve of her waist, there resting on her hip, and they both knew.
And they both approved.
He knew that dress.
He couldn’t imagine what Cassie would look like, in it, but he wanted to see it.
He put the hanger back on the rail and pulled his shirt down, putting it on, his breath catching as he made the decision between two buttons and three.
Her fingers on his skin, starting at his collar bone and drifting down his chest…
He swallowed again, feeling the trickles of sensation rolling toward his belly. Forced his eyes to see out again, and buttoned the third button. He pulled a pair of soft slacks out of a drawer, then went back into the main room.
Cassie was curled, feline, against the back of the couch, sitting with her feet tucked under her. There were plates on the coffee table, and candles. The lights were out.
Her eyes indicated the couch next to her, and he was almost afraid to get any closer. She put her face down onto her hand and waited, watching him. He watched the way her breasts rose and fell, just vaguely obscured with red lace, as she breathed.
“How was your day?” she asked again.
“It was good,” he said, not thinking. He took one step, and then another, and then he was sitting next to her. Low, orange light showed him every shape and curve of her, and he turned away, picking up his dinner.
“Smells good,” he lied. He wasn’t aware of anything but what his eyes could see and what his imagination could do with it. She smirked at him and reached for a glass of wine.
His fingers were shaking.
He looked harder at her, waking up a bit with the sense of unreality that came from watching his best friend slink like that.
“What happened to you?” he asked. “I saw the dresses in the closet. You don’t wear that stuff.”
She shrugged, putting her drink back down and loading her fork, bringing it to her mouth slowly, then closing her lips over the fork and drawing it back clean. She watched him, knowing, knowing things Calista du Charme had no business knowing, then set the utensil down and shifted, tucking her feet under and behind him on the couch. His hand found her knee out of a simple sense of fit, the skin there just as it had been the night before, warm, soft, perfect. He let his thumb drift a slow arc across her knee, just watching that he could touch her. He’d never touched her like that. Not before.
“Lots of things happened to me,” she said.
“Are you moving in with me?” he asked, looking down at his plate then back up at her.
“Yes and no,” she said. “When I’m here, I need a place to stay, and I don’t want to go all the way out to my house. It’s so far away from anything.”
Her little house was in a tiny little satellite community most of thirty minutes away from the base. If it hadn’t been for her long normalization to the barracks, it would have suited her perfectly.
He was running his fingertips down the length of her shin, to her ankle, and back up. Cassie didn’t even wear shorts, not in the dead of summer. The next time up, he kept going, sliding his palm down the outside of her thigh.
“What did you do all day?” he asked.
“Shopped. Went sight-seeing. Avoided the base.”
“You have to come back,” he said. “We have to get you un-dead.”
She shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Troy. That isn’t going to happen. Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
She pressed her lips and shook her head, then reached for her wine again.
“Is that really what you want to talk about tonight?”
“Why? What’s special about tonight?”
She gave him a look, and he knew exactly what it meant. If he’d been five years younger, he would have blushed.
“I won’t always be here, Troy,” she said.
“What does that mean?” he asked, his hand suspended, still. She met his eyes for a long moment, then smiled and shook her head.
“It means that I am going to disappear again. And you shouldn’t try to look for me.” She pressed her lips. “I blend in here. I can go anywhere I want.” There was a small laugh. “I have a driver’s license.”
He had no idea what his face said. She laughed and leaned away from him.
“Eat your dinner and don’t worry about it so much,” she said. “I want to have fun.”
She reached for his plate and handed it to him, but he had no appetite. He wanted answers and, reviewing, she hadn’t given him a single one. Not to anything important.
He ate absently, watching her. It was clear she wasn’t going to tell him.
She’d always had secrets. It was her nature. Her parents had died when she was young and she’d been given a menu of choices for how her life would go from there. Troy wasn’t certain, but he was pretty sure that the list was 1) foster care or 2) the military, training as a jumper. She’d been in the program for two years when he’d finally tested in, sent by enthusiastic, supportive parents who wanted his exceptionalism to put him someplace special. He’d known for sure that he could be a jumper. He’d been excited and enthusiastic, the worst kind of overachiever, amidst an ocean of overachiever applicants reduced down to the worst of the worst.
She’d outshone them all, and maddeningly, she did it with little energy or desire. Hers wasn’t the effervescence of youth driving her. It was an echoing emptiness that had come from being shunted into the system, and from a bedrock foundation of determination. Frightening, that. The other kids would have been mean to her, except for it. Instead, they left a bubble around her, sometimes quite literally, as she walked through the hallways and sat in classrooms or at lunch.
Troy had been drawn to
her like a moth. Something about finding the one person in his life who was better at everything than he was was fascinating, and he would spend hours talking to her, driving a conversation forward into anything that came to mind, just to hear what she had to say.
He was in love.
She didn’t understand love. She knew what it was to be loved, to be cared for tenderly, and she knew quite clearly that it was missing from her life, but she didn’t understand the heady, confusing, hard-to-breathe that came from needing to be around someone else. He wasn’t sure she ever had. But even as a pre-teen, he’d loved her, and she’d snubbed him, unintentionally but consistently, over the years.
And then he’d discovered other girls, sometime around sixteen.
She was preparing for her final tests to become a jumper, and he’d already been weeded out and was on a parallel track as technical support. His eyes didn’t adjust to darkness as fast as the requirement stated, and his vision was no longer changing enough to hold out hope that the condition would change. At that age, hormones that had before clouded his attention span, like a puppy in a park, now tightened down into real focus. He found that he could read women, the ones who wanted to be read, and that he could pick the ones that wanted the kind of attention he was eager to give. It was a careful dance, this game between himself and the women he started chasing after, but it was an ability that had just turned on, in his head, like an activated gene, almost on a single day. He worked hard at it, and he was good at it.
And Cassie had stayed easy. For years, she’d been easy. He could burn hours with her and not feel like he’d worked at anything at all. She was his best friend, and it worked.
Easy and familiar as she was, though, she’d always been strange. Always kept things to herself. Liked to work alone, when she could, often only coming to him in celebration when something was done, and even then, she would often only tell him that it was important and that she’d done well. It was her nature, and it was the nature of the program.
He was used to her secrets. He even respected her for them. They made her mysterious and aloof, and ever more attractive to certain men in her life that she persistently overlooked. Poor Slav. But this was different. This was calculated and hidden, keeping things to herself that she definitely would have told him before, sucking the intimacy out of what they had been, despite how she dressed and acted, sitting on the couch next to him.
And yet.
His plate was empty.
And so was his glass.
The first glass of wine was two back and he was feeling that first rush of buzzy softness that came when inhibition left. Need. The feel of air in his lungs, her breath on his skin.
And his shirt was gone. And her mouth was on his.
And she felt so good, something so often imagined, so often wanted, and never had.
He woke up the next morning on the floor next to the couch, hungover and alone.
*********
Jesse was getting weirder.
And that was hard to say. He’d always been weird.
And secretive.
And stubborn.
And damned difficult.
Troy had to remind himself why he had let himself get drafted as Jesse’s liaison in the first place, and most days the answer was that it had started being for Cassie, but this last time, it really had been a simple draft.
Worse, he liked the guy.
He was different from a savant. He didn’t know things through mysticism or magic. He knew them because his world was simply that much smarter than Troy’s, and he was constantly impatient that Troy hadn’t yet caught up.
And Troy was too distracted to really keep an eye on him, right now, because he was still doing his best to not give away that Cassie was back.
For four days, she’d been at his apartment every night when he got home from work. They’d spent the weekend driving along the foothills of the Rockies for as far as they could make it, then he’d taken Monday off to spend the day in bed with her. That evening when they’d showered together and he was washing her back, he’d noticed it.
“Did you spend all of that time at a spa?” he’d asked.
“Why do you ask that?” she answered without turning.
“Your skin is… perfect.”
When he’d stepped back, mentally, and really looked at her, it wasn’t just the lack of wear that all jumpers showed. She had no scars. None of the tell-tale formations of broken bones. She’d laughed.
“What did you think would happen when I got out of my last body?” she asked, washing her hair. “That everything would just come back? Your DNA doesn’t remember that stuff.”
“I never got to ask,” he said. “What was it like?”
“Being other species?” she’d asked.
“Yeah.”
She laughed.
“There are no words.”
But she tried.
She told him what she’d thought, and what she’d felt. And then an off-handed comment about Slav started her down a road telling stories from her days as a normal jumper. Stuff she never would have told him before.
They’d gone back to bed wet and smelling clean, and the stories had just poured out of her, one after the other. He’d laid with his arm tucked under his pillow, just listening to her, his Cassie, talk about places and people and species he would never see, and he felt the familiar, worn-out sense of jealousy, now more comforting than distracting. Her eyes were far away, reliving things that, even for him, with all the evidence he’d seen over his career, felt real for the first time.
Tuesday morning, she was gone again and he woke up groggy from too little sleep and went into work, his mind spinning with stories.
The things she’d been through.
The fights she’d been in.
It made him wonder what kind of secrets the rest of them were keeping. Slav and the other retired jumpers. Sure, they weren’t the advance guard, the ones who had to find a way to put a toehold into a civilization and establish the contacts to make a diplomatic relationship, but even without the spectacular risks, she’d led an exciting life. One he’d never dreamed of, in those kind of details.
He’d gone through the first half of his day in a dreamy half-awareness of the things he was supposed to get done, signing off on a few things without even reading them, so enmeshed was he in what she’d told him and the magic of the long weekend itself, but lunch broke his trance. He had to have his guard up as best he could around Jesse.
For his part, Jesse seemed even more distant than Troy felt. He was playing with the things on his tray, building a machine out of his straw and his fork that he proceeded to use to absentmindedly shoot peas over the lunchroom.
It was a fully-automatic peashooter, and the accuracy on it seemed remarkable, given the variation in the peas themselves. Only one person came over to complain after a few minutes.
Wrack his brain as he might, Troy couldn’t come up with a reason that Jesse would have targeted Blaise with the shooter, and he was forced to conclude that it had been a random target.
Jesse even looked surprised at himself as he dismantled it.
As Blaise walked away, rubbing the back of his head, Troy and Jesse declined to talk to each other. A few minutes later, Troy made up an excuse that even he didn’t believe, and went back to his desk, feeling like he had woken up and didn’t know where he was yet. He frowned at his desk, trying to remember what Jesse was doing today, and what he’d been up to last week, but Troy couldn’t remember.
He creased his forehead harder as he tried to pull more details out of the slurry of things that his brain was much more interested in focusing on, then shook his head.
He needed to watch Jesse closer. The Palta was up to something, and Troy was earth’s first, last, and only line of defense.
*********
He left work before the sun went down, stopping by the grocery for a dozen red carnations and a bottle of white wine, checking his hair in the rearview before he got out
of his car and standing, impatient, in the elevator.
He passed Jesse’s floor without pause, then the doors opened to his familiar hallway. He opened the door to his apartment.
The lights were off.
He could tell by the sense of cool emptiness, but he checked anyway.
She wasn’t there.
He put the flowers in water and poured two glasses of wine, believing she’d guessed he would be late, like he always was, but knowing she wasn’t coming.
She’d warned him.
The magic of the long weekend faded as the bottle emptied and the sun set.
His bedroom had a large window that faced the western sky, overlooking the wide, vast plane of Kansas, the spine of the world just around the bend of the planet and out of sight.
He’d driven the foothills with her before. After graduation from the academy, his parents had given him a car, and Cassie had been between jumps, and they’d gone north at Denver until they hit the Wyoming state line. She’d only gotten twelve hours of leave, so they’d had to turn around after lunch and get back, but it had been a nice day, a celebration. Some nights, she would stand at his window and watch the sun set, and he wondered if she was remembering that day.
He went to bed.
*********
He was alone in the morning, and the other side of the bed felt cold and undisturbed.
*********
She was gone.
*********
The first few days had been tough.
He’d found himself constantly distracted, thinking about Cassie, remembering with unpleasant surprise that she was gone and he didn’t know where. That he would be alone at night.
Certainly, he could have found a girl to take home with him.
He just couldn’t abandon the hope that she would be back.
There were flashes of remembered scent, imagined touch, and then he’d be sitting at his desk, struggling to figure out what he’d been working on when her phantom had ambushed him again.
By next the weekend, though, he felt pretty normal.
He spent his Friday afternoon plowing through a report that Slav had sent him, taking mental notes and reacting with the same elastic ability to understand that he had always had, like a martial art, weaving through the pieces of information, snagging this one and darting back to that one, putting them together to form new information, things Slav had missed - or, more likely, found didn’t fit into the main narrative of the report - and things that moved forward understanding on the knowledge the human race had about the commonalities of populated geographies.