His behavior didn’t do a thing to alleviate her concerns.
He blew hot and cold so regularly that she couldn’t decide what to think. Days would go by when he would merely watch her with a brooding expression on his face, erecting a wall between them that she couldn’t seem to breach even when she was desperate enough to try to initiate sex herself. And then he would make an about face and behave as if he couldn’t get enough of her, making love to her over and over with a fierce driving need that sometimes felt almost more like punishment—though she couldn’t tell whether it was her he was trying to punish or himself.
On top of that, the discovery that she’d lost half a day in time bothered her. Try though she might, she couldn’t remember anything, but there was a sense that, behind that closed door, was something horrendous. She’d felt weak and achy for almost a week, bruised, jumpy—not entirely herself.
She couldn’t simply dismiss it, but in time the anxiety over it diminished.
* * * *
I’ll get use to this, Gaby told herself every time she looked at the man that wasn’t Anka, but some unfortunate soul that had caught his interest.
I can do this … for him. There’s no other way that he can enjoy the things we take for granted.
The man won’t remember later. What’s the loss of a few days, after all? If he’d had the chance to choose, he might even have welcomed it. Anka had told her he enjoyed the sex, too. When else could a person enjoy such a weird and crazy kinky three way?
She clung to those thoughts with grim determination for days on end, a week, two weeks, wringing every ounce of pleasure she could from the time they spent together, lavishing him with the carnal pleasure he craved.
She couldn’t keep the world out forever, though, no matter how hard she tried, or salve her conscience no matter how much salve she applied, or even get used to seeing a stranger’s face when all she wanted was Anka.
She’d never rode such a wild roller coaster of emotions in her life. She felt like weeping at least as often as she felt deliriously happy. The rest of the time she was just plain scared, afraid that the CIA, FBI, state and local police and maybe even the military would show up at her doorstep any day and haul her in for ‘drugging’ the guy and using him as a sex slave.
Her own lapse in memory, she thought, was what finally tilted the scales. If she hadn’t experienced that herself, she might have been able to continue lying to herself right on. Under the circumstances, she couldn’t, because she reached a point where she could no longer bury her head in the sand and merely accept.
As much as she felt for Anka, she knew he could not feel anything like that for her. He used people without any regard for their sensibilities. She didn’t condemn him for it. She accepted that he was simply not human and couldn’t fully grasp that what he was doing was just wrong. But that made her realize that she had to include herself in the category of ‘unimportant’. How could she mean anything at all to him if no other human did?
She was almost relieved when her boss called her into his office to speak to her.
This, she knew, meant the end. Her life was about to change again, and she was almost as fiercely glad as she was devastated.
It wasn’t at all what she’d expected, though. She’d been so distracted by thoughts of Anka when she was supposed to be working, so anxious to leave work each day and return to him, that she was instantly certain when she was summoned that she was about to be fired.
It penetrated her mind fairly quickly, though, as she settled in a chair across from his desk, that Dr. Mendoza was struggling with excitement not anger.
“Dr. Sheffield gave me a call last evening. He’s asked me to send you down to the dig site again. They’ve found something.”
Chapter Twelve
“I have to go,” Gaby said, tension in every line of her body as she dragged her bags from the floor of her closet and set them out to pack. “Dr. Sheffield wants me back at the dig and my boss will send Paul if I don’t go.”
Anka/the dark stranger, was sprawled on her bed, watching her with interest, his arms propped behind his head. “Then let Paul go,” he responded coolly.
Gaby sent a glance in his direction, but she didn’t actually look at him.
She hadn’t gotten used to not seeing the Anka she knew. She was never going to get used to it and she’d gotten to where she almost hated the sight of the stranger. He was a constant reminder that she was just as guilty of using him as Anka was … more guilty really. Anka didn’t understand that it was wrong. She did.
He rolled onto his side. “This man who dwells with me is completely satisfied with the arrangement. You’ve no reason to feel any guilt.”
Gaby glared at him. “I wish you wouldn’t read my mind!” she said testily.
His expression relaxed. A faint, indulgent smile curled his lips. “If I did not, then I would not know what was going through your mind. You will not say. You will only look at me as if I have hurt you or offended, and you will not say how.”
Guilt jolted through her at the comment, and pain. She struggled against feeling them, wondering if he’d been hurt by those things he’d sensed or just annoyed.
Annoyed, she suspected.
What did she really know about him, after all? He wouldn’t tell her anything. Any time she asked, he would either ignore the question all together, change the subject, or tell her something cryptic that she couldn’t make heads or tails of.
She was as tired of trying to batter down the solid walls he’d erected around himself as she was of pretending she was content to live a lie.
It was a lie, regardless of how Anka perceived it. He was there, yes, but in a stranger’s body and she was aware of it every moment she was with him—that she was with him, but with someone else. As hard as she had tried to convince herself that it was ‘cool’ and ‘kinky’ she just felt guilty about it. Even when she was thoroughly enjoying herself—especially then—she felt like she was being unfaithful to Anka.
She hated that.
She hated the way it made her feel about herself.
She let out a huff of irritation. “How do you know he doesn’t mind? Do you listen to his thoughts, too?”
“Yes,” he said calmly. “He has been graciously compensated for the use of his body, and he is satisfied. I do understand the way of your world, regardless of what you seem to believe.” His tone was chiding. It really irritated the hell out of her when he spoke to her as if she was a mere child.
She was thirty five years old for god’s sake! Sure he was older, a lot older—she was never going to know how much older, but that didn’t mean she was less mature. She had more life experience than a hell of a lot of people did!
Gaby plunked her hands on her hips. “How has he been compensated?”
Anka shrugged. “He enjoys fucking you as much as I do. And I have helped him obtain the position that he wanted. He is in no great hurry for me to leave. He knows he will have to keep his position without my help once I am gone.”
The first comment distressed her in a way she didn’t even want to contemplate, especially knowing that Anka delved into her mind whenever he pleased. She felt slightly mollified by the last, though. She stopped what she was doing and studied him intently. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
“Yes, but it is also true.”
Gaby let out a relieved breath, feeling a great weight drop from her shoulders.
“So, now you do not need to go.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Yes, I do, because I need my job and I’m not about to let that snot Paul take it. As you pointed out, it’s the way of my world. I have to have money to live and I’ve no desire to play underling to Paul, or look for another position.”
“Why do you not like this body?” he demanded abruptly. “This is a very good body.”
Gaby felt a knot of misery well in her throat. “It isn’t you!” she said angrily.
“The image you hold in your mind
is not me either,” he said tightly, coming off the bed.
She looked at him sadly. “I know. In my head, I know.”
He looked at her strangely for several moments, his anger vanishing abruptly. Finally, he closed the distance between them. Reaching her, he settled his palms on her shoulders. “But in your heart, Moonflower?”
She did not want to talk about her heart! Or the pang it gave her to have to face the truth. He’d begun life as he was, not as a human who’d become something else. She realized she’d thought of him that way, though. She’d wanted to believe he was really the same as her in every way that mattered. The out of body thing was just a … special gift he had that made him seem different when he really wasn’t.
But the way she’d first seen him was Anka to her. Even though, on an intellectual level, she knew her perceptions were faulty, she couldn’t separate the being he was from the image she held of him.
And she couldn’t accept that she could never really be familiar with anything about him beyond his personality. It was the essence of what made a person that really mattered—their thoughts, their personality—without that the body was nothing but an empty shell. But in her plane of existence, the laughter, the loving, the warmth of a touch, the sound of a voice—all of those things were just as necessary, just as much a part of the person as the spirit that dwelt within.
She drew in a shaky breath, forced a smile, though she didn’t meet his gaze. “It doesn’t matter. I do understand. I just have to … accept.”
“Accept what?” His hands dropped from her shoulders as she turned away.
“That some things just can’t be changed, no matter how much you’d like to change them. I have to go. This is important to me, important to my career.”
She hesitated, unwilling to say what she knew she needed to say. She busied herself with dragging first one thing and then another from her chest of drawers and shoving it into the bag. “I need for you to accept and understand me, too,” she finally said. “You won’t find what you’re looking for with me. I’d like for you to go, please. I’ve always heard there’s someone for everyone. You just have to look. I’m sure you’ll find the right woman if you just look.
“But I’m not the one. I’m not. And ….
“You could be pretty much anyone you want to be, can’t you? If you just looked around, I’m sure you could find some gorgeous idiot just waiting to throw his life away … there are always lots of them, addicted to the thrill of cheating death ... or just addicted to drugs—race car drivers, actors, singers—pretty much anybody with enough money to self-destruct. And then you’d have a perfectly good body that you wouldn’t have to share. It’d be yours by default, you know?”
She closed her eyes when he came up behind her and she felt his hands settle on her arms, pulling her back against him. She resisted, resting stiffly against him and fighting the urge to just turn around and burrow against him.
She wanted to, but she couldn’t pretend anymore that everything was going to work out all right. She couldn’t continue to delude herself that he would stay with her.
Why would he? She was nothing special. She couldn’t even give him the child he wanted.
And where would they live? How would they live? She had a good income, but it wasn’t enough for two, and there weren’t many people in the market for fertility gods, she thought a little hysterically.
Anka stared down at the top of her head and the little of her face that he could see, feeling things he had never felt, pain like nothing else. She was right, he realized, feeling ill. They could not go on as they had. He had willfully ignored the possible consequences to her because of his own desires and because of that he had nearly lost her.
Coldness swept through him as he recalled how close it had been, how nearly he had failed her completely. For all his powers, the fight to keep her spirit within her body had nearly depleted him.
If she remembered, would she despise him as he despised himself for it?
He did not know, but he did know that he was not willing to take more risks with her. She was too fragile, too precious.
There was only one thing that he could do that might make him worthy of her regard, but he would be risking all and he was not certain that he could do it.
Regardless, he had to try, but he could not even do that until he had gained the strength to confront the task.
He released her after a moment, much to Gaby’s sorrow/relief. She stood perfectly still where he’d left her, listening to his tread as he walked away, listening as the door to her apartment opened and then closed again.
Her shoulders slumped when he’d gone. “That was easy,” she muttered, swallowing with an effort around the hard knot of misery in her throat. She stared dully at the shirt she held in her hands for several moments and finally knelt down and dragged everything out of her bag again to see what she’d packed.
* * * *
She’d forgotten how ungodly humid the place was, Gaby reflected as she wearily climbed down from the plane on the landing strip. A truck, of the type generally used by the military, moved off the grass that verged the narrow landing strip and shot toward the plane. Gaby’s heart clenched uncomfortably in her chest when she saw the military uniforms and guns of the men stationed at each of the four corners of the back of the vehicle. It didn’t settle much even when she recognized the man seated on the passenger side of the cab.
Mark climbed down when the truck skidded to a halt that shot dirt and small rocks into the air. “Dr. LaPlante!” he called by way of greeting as he started toward her. “Glad to have you back!”
Gaby nodded uncertainly. “It’s good to be back,” she lied automatically because it seemed appropriate, not because she really was.
“The government’s taken a keen interest in the dig, as you see,” he murmured when he reached her. “Officially, they’re here to protect us and the site from looters and/or guerrilla’s who might take the notion that some of the artifacts could finance their cause.”
Gaby nodded again, averting her gaze from the soldiers as they leapt down from the truck and hurried to collect her baggage and stow it in the truck. The implication from those comments, she realized, was that, unofficially, the government didn’t trust the Americans not to make off with something valuable.
She wished that someone had thought to mention the situation to her before she’d agreed to return, although she supposed it wouldn’t have changed anything. Her position wouldn’t have allowed her to make any other decision but the one she had, but she would’ve liked to have prepared herself.
Mark helped her into the cab of the truck and she settled uneasily between the soldier driving and Mark, who’d taken the window seat. She hoped the show of military strength didn’t indicate the possibility of snipers, or attack by rebels, but she didn’t like to pump Mark for that sort of information within their hearing. Chances were none of them spoke English, but she’d rather not find out the hard way that they did.
Instead, as they headed out along the narrow jungle track, Mark focused the conversation on generalities. She struggled for a while to keep the polite conversation going but she wasn’t sorry when Mark finally gave up the effort and she was allowed to retreat into her thoughts.
Not that they were pleasant by any means, but the jouncing progress of the four wheel drive along the horribly pitted road made it pretty impossible to focus on anything beyond trying to stay in her seat. At that, she could see some work had been done at improving the track. The first time she’d come the jungle had encroached so closely upon it that anyone outside the vehicle ran the risk of being slapped from the vehicle by limbs and fronds, and that time she’d been picked up by an open jeep. This truck was far larger, indicating the narrow track had been widened considerably, and it looked like the pits in the track had been formed by a good number of similar vehicles where before it had only been exposed roots and washouts from the rain that had made riding along it an exercise in torture.
Her first trip had been miserably uncomfortable and unnerving because she wasn’t accustomed to sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag or the sounds of the jungle at night, and her awareness of the wildlife hadn’t helped one iota. This trip retained all the same elements but added to that was the anxiety that they could be attacked by rebels or the soldiers with them might take it into their head to take advantage of her since she was completely at their mercy. She tried not to think about the fact that Mark, who probably didn’t weigh any more than she did and was only about twenty six, was all that stood between her and the men. It would be all too easy to gang rape her and then dispose of both of them and report them as casualties along the way if they felt the inclination.
She didn’t like the looks she encountered from time to time. She was acutely conscious of the fact that men in most countries outside the US, particularly the predominately Catholic South American countries, viewed American women as whores because they actually had civil rights. And the looks and that knowledge together combined to make for sleepless nights.
The only bright side was that she couldn’t spare the time to wallow in her misery over Anka, but she discovered once they reached the dig site that that was no longer the case.
The military was strongly in evidence at the site, as well, but the American enclave had nearly doubled since she’d left and now included a half a dozen more specialists and their assistants.
Her stomach seemed to take a freefall when she got her first good look at the city that was emerging from the mountainside like Atlantis rising from the sea. Dwellings, many of them almost intact, dotted the landscape around the temple, but it was the temple itself that commanded attention. The government, apparently impatient to uncover the treasures of the ancient city, had sent a significant number of soldiers to add to the work force removing the bulk of the soil, and even some heavy equipment to hurry things along.
Alien's Concubine, The Page 15