by Tasha Black
Bond smiled widely, then kissed the top of her head.
The pieces clicked together and for a moment Rima couldn’t believe she hadn’t figured it out on her own. Posey had switched to decaf pumpkin spiced lattes, she was looking tired in the mornings, she kept trying to go to the store alone, most likely to get a pregnancy test.
“That’s wonderful,” Rima told her friend sincerely. Posey would be a great mom and Bond would be by her side all the way. Their baby would be well loved and cared for.
Georgia squealed and Rocky laughed.
“Now, I think we have some folic acid in the medicine cabinet from when I was pregnant with Rima, I wonder how long it stays good for,” Dr. Bhimani pondered. “In any case we’ll get to the store tomorrow, Posey. You should be eating fresh spinach, whole fat yogurt, and plenty of water to drink.”
Magnum suddenly pushed his chair out and stomped out the door.
Rima should have been used to it by now, but somehow the timing of it broke her heart.
She knew he didn’t want to make a family with her. But why did he have to ruin the happy moment by reminding her that he didn’t love her.
She bit her lip hard and looked down through her brimming tears at her dinner swimming below her.
“Rima,” Posey said. “Go to him.”
“He doesn’t feel that way about me,” Rima said, her throat burning with the unshed tears. “He wants distance.”
“I think you have it backwards,” Posey said. “Go find him.”
Maybe it was the glow of the pregnancy, but somehow Posey looked wiser than usual tonight.
Rima pushed out her chair and ran after her man. Again. This was starting to become a habit. At least she didn’t trip this time.
14
Magnum
Magnum rushed away from the dinner table, out of the observatory, down the stairs and into the cold of the moonlit field.
He marched through the tall grass, past the pond without looking at the stars reflecting in it. He would allow nothing to break his resolve.
When he was almost halfway to the cattails he heard her following him.
Rima.
His heart sang and it made him furious.
“Go home, Rima,” he shouted without looking back.
“No,” she yelled.
He stopped in his tracks. Rima never stood up to him. She always catered to what he wanted. She catered to everyone. It wasn’t his favorite of her traits, but he knew it came from a sense of wanting to help.
“Stop running and talk to me,” she said to his back. “If you don’t want me then say so. You’ve been playing games and I’ve had enough.”
“I’m dangerous, Rima,” he said. “Go home and forget about me.”
“No,” she said.
Damn it.
He turned around.
She stood before him proudly, black curls shining in the moonlight, dark eyes wet with unshed tears, tall grasses swirling around her.
He was speechless, transfixed by her beauty.
She apparently was not under the same spell.
“If you don’t respect me enough to talk to me then do it out of respect for my mother. She sacrificed her career, her life, to give you the opportunity to be a part of our world.”
Magnum opened his mouth but not a sound would come out.
“And another thing, how dare you kiss me and touch my body without making your intentions clear? I’m not a toy, Magnum,” she spat. “You think you can stomp in and out of my life without a word to say for yourself. Well guess what? You can’t. I wanted to talk to you about it first, but clearly you won’t talk to me. So I’m leaving. I’ll help my mother find you another bride, god help that poor woman, whoever she is. I hope you fucking well treat her better than you did me.”
There was a turn-on-the-heel finality to her last words that gave Magnum all the impetus he needed.
Since his mouth wouldn’t cooperate with his brain, perhaps his body would.
Magnum strode across the field and took his beautiful angry woman in his arms.
She slapped him hard across the face.
It stung, more on the inside than it did on his cheek, but he deserved it.
He waited to see if she might like to slap him again.
Instead she covered her own mouth with her hand, as if in horror at what she had done.
He peeled her hand off her mouth so that he could kiss it. He leaned in slowly, so as not to take her by surprise. After all that she had said, she might not want to be kissed. But something in the way she relaxed in his arms told him otherwise.
Sure enough, she did want to be kissed. She even tilted her chin up to accept him.
Magnum tasted her honey lips slowly and felt her melt against him. He had never known anything in the universe could be so sweet.
She pressed her breasts to his chest and he felt his body respond, so ready to take her, to mark her with his seed, fill her with his child.
Oh, the agony of finding her, only to leave.
He pulled away, hoping he would be able to find the words to make her understand.
“Rima, I want you, so much it hurts,” he told her. “I have since the first time I saw you.”
“Then why do you pull away?” she asked.
“Because staying with you would be selfish, and dangerous to you, my brothers, and your friends. You’re young and beautiful and smart. You’ll find a man, have babies…” He couldn’t continue. The idea of Rima carrying another man’s child cut him like a laser.
“Are you still thinking about leaving?” she asked, incredulous.
“We didn’t get through today,” he told her. “We tried your idea, a very good idea, and it didn’t work. Aerie has not replied. Now your government is after us too, not just mine. But when I leave tonight they’ll see that something took off from here and you’ll be out of trouble with your government. I’ll go back to Aerie and you’ll be saved. This is a simple decision - the shortest distance between two points. Anything else is just me making excuses to stay here, to risk everyone’s existence over a few more days of loving you.”
She opened her mouth as if to speak, but shouting erupted from the field behind her and they both turned to see what it was.
15
Rima
Rima ripped her eyes from her beloved.
What could possibly be happening to interrupt them? Now, that he had finally shared his feelings. Now that she needed more than ever to convince him to stay.
“Rima, hey,” the voice yelled, the figure was a bit closer now. His voice was familiar.
“It’s me, Earl Road,” he hollered across the field.
There was no love lost between Rima and Earl. But he had kept to his word after the Fall Festival. And when Georgia was in trouble, he had rushed to help her. He had also apologized to Rima personally for making her life a living hell. She wasn’t about to add him to her Christmas card list, but it was a start.
Rima looked at Magnum, who shrugged back at her.
Earl arrived in front of them, panting.
“I ran up from Jane Billet’s place. Didn’t want them to see my truck up here,” he gasped. “Dang, that driveway is longer that I remembered. Anyway, I’m here to help you. Those agents, they know where your ship is.”
“How could they know?” Magnum breathed.
“I have no clue, but we need to get it out of there, now,” Earl said.
Rima had a pretty good idea.
You are trash, Rima Baloney, and you always will be. You won’t get away with this.
Gretchen’s words echoed in her head. She should have expected as much.
“We can’t get it out,” Magnum said. “Not without flying it. And now that they’re on to us…”
“You go to the ship,” Earl said. “I’ll get the others and we’ll meet you there.”
“Yes,” Magnum agreed.
Earl was already hightailing across the field back to the observatory.
“Let�
��s go,” Magnum said, grabbing Rima’s hand.
They dashed through the grass and into the cattails until they reached the area where the ship…
There was no ship.
Rima’s heart dropped into her stomach.
Magnum bent over and stood back up, pulling a motorcycle with him. He pushed it into the grass and motioned for Rima to join him.
“I thought the ship might become a problem after this morning,” he said. “Earl helped me hide it at the park this afternoon while you were sleeping. He loaned us the bike so we can get to it fast when we need to.”
“The ship’s not here,” Rima said slowly, taking it all in. “That’s brilliant.”
“Exactly. Except that someone must have seen us moving it today, someone who doesn’t want us here,” Magnum said, handing her the lone helmet. “Let’s go.”
Rima pulled on the helmet and hopped on behind Magnum wrapping her arms around his waist.
The engine roared to life, then they were flying through the field, down the drive and out to the park.
With the wind in her hair, the statistics about fatal accidents on motorcycles faded away, and Rima just enjoyed the warm feel of Magnum in her arms and the hum of the pavement under the bike.
The boxwood hedge blurred by and she closed her eyes and rested her cheek against his broad back.
He couldn’t leave her, not really. She was sure of it. So although they were speeding toward the ship he was determined to fly away with, she felt no dread, only a sense of wonder that her love for this man had brought her out from behind her books and into one wild adventure after another.
It wasn’t magic school, but that was okay with her.
16
Magnum
Magnum tried to focus on the road ahead and ignore the press of Rima’s breasts against his back and the feel of her arms around him.
Too quickly they arrived at the old amusement park.
He steered the motorcycle as close to the entrance as he dared, then stopped and turned it off.
Rima was fast to dismount and he followed her off. She slung her helmet over the handlebars, and he wheeled the bike into the trees so that no one approaching would see it.
There were no other vehicles in the parking lot. That was a good sign. It meant the agents hadn’t arrived yet.
He turned to find Rima already heading for the gate. Good girl.
She was becoming so brave - blossoming from the shy young woman he had met just a few moons before. Her words tonight had been electrifying.
Magnum jogged to catch up to her. They unlocked the gates and stepped through them together.
He locked them again. It was unlikely that a locked gate would slow the agents down much, but they needed any advantage they could get.
Rima held out her hand to him, her dark eyes sparkling in the moonlight.
He took it and they moved quickly around the corner, toward the deserted amusements.
The park was closed now for the winter, but the group of friends had spent plenty of time here around Halloween. The haunted amusement park concept had taken off and people not only from Stargazer, but from other towns, some very far away, had come to wander the park and search the sky for spaceships from other planets.
But the only alien ship on this planet had been hidden in the cattails behind the observatory until today.
They passed Orbit the Sun, the ride the women described as having made people vomit by spinning them.
Next was Ground Control, the picnic and cafe area. That had been a fun place to eat and relax. If he closed his eyes he could almost see Bond eating hot dogs one after another and Posey bent over laughing at him.
At last, they rounded a bend in the trail and he saw the silhouette of the Ferris wheel reflected in the swan boat pond.
All three swans were still afloat in the murky water. Only a regular to the park would discern that they were all pushed to one side of the pond now.
He glanced over at Rima, but she hadn’t noticed.
“What is it?” she asked, when she realized he was studying her face. “Why are we stopping?”
“The ship,” he said. “It’s here.”
Rima looked around. She studied the trees, the Ferris wheel, the covered picnic tables.
Then she looked at the pond, and he saw her eyes move back and forth between the swan boats.
“No,” she whispered.
“Yes, I sunk it. It is the perfect hiding place,” Magnum told her proudly.
“But, won’t that damage it?” Rima asked.
“The Ethereal Twelve is designed to withstand fire, liquid submersion and sand, as well as the extreme temperatures in the vacuum of space,” he told her. “In a hostile enough environment, the bio-components go into hibernation and waking the ship becomes more complicated.”
“Do the bio-components hibernate with extended time underwater?” Rima asked worriedly.
“Right now the ship is in stasis,” he explained. “But she’s perfectly safe.”
“Incredible,” Rima nodded, a smile curving the corners of her mouth.
He wanted to kiss her, or to talk more science with her, or to eat hot dogs until she laughed.
But there was no time.
“Help me bring it out,” he told her instead.
Her eyebrows lifted with excitement as she headed to the water’s edge.
He could tell by the way she moved that she had forgotten Bond’s contribution to the park.
Bond had fitted an old metal alien decoration from the park’s early years to a spring, modeled after the seat ejector in the ship. It had a motion sensor and when someone came close to it, as Rima was about to do…
Magnum watched as the world seemed to slide into slow motion.
Rima stepped toward the pond.
The sensor activated.
The metal monster flung itself out of the murky water.
Rima screamed like she was on fire and hopped backward.
The muddy surface of the bank made her slip and she landed on her bottom and slid back to Magnum’s feet, screaming bloody murder all the way.
The juxtaposition of their serious situation and the outlandish nature of Rima’s behavior struck him.
A strange feeling came bubbling up from Magnum’s belly. One moment it was tickling his ribcage, the next it drew a straight line up his esophagus, fizzed in his sinuses as if he had been drinking soda pop, and exploded out of his mouth in convulsions of sound.
What was happening to him? Was he dying?
Rima stopped screaming to look up at him.
Then she smiled and began giggling.
“Magnum, you’re laughing,” she said in happy wonder.
He was laughing.
Dear god, it was funny.
He laughed harder because at last he understood.
The laughing was not because his bride had fallen down.
It was funny because usually people did not fall down, especially at such a serious moment, and because she was okay.
He was not glad that she was frightened.
He was tickled because a small thing had startled her so greatly, out of proportion to any real danger.
The Earth seemed to explode around him now with funny things. It was as if he had been seeing the universe drawn on paper and it had just popped out into three dimensions, like Roger Rabbit.
Suddenly, Magnum wished to re-watch Roger Rabbit, which he had thought was terrifying and inappropriate for small humans. Could it be that Roger Rabbit was funny also?
“What did the farmer get when he tried to cross a sheep and a tiger?” Rima asked him, her eyes dancing.
A joke.
“I don’t know. What did he get when he tried to mate his tiger to his sheep?” he asked, wishing he could guess the answer, but excited at last at the prospect of how a joke might make him feel.
“A new sheep,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
A new sheep? Why would he get…?
“Oh,” M
agnum said, understanding dawning on him. “Because the tiger has eaten the sheep. It is funny, because the sheep has been eviscerated.”
She nodded and he felt his insides bubbling again. Oh, silly farmer, rife with hubris, trying to mix a tiger and a sheep. And silly Magnum, thinking there could be a sensible answer. And silly Rima to learn such a joke and repeat it for him. The giddy nonsense of Man filled his chest and he felt more human than he ever had.
He decided to repeat the joke.
“What did the farmer get when he mated a tiger with a sheep?” he asked.
The significance of the words began to sink into his mind.
“I don’t know. What did he get?” Rima asked, playing her role. When he didn’t respond right away, she asked again. “What did he get, Magnum?”
Magnum wasn’t laughing anymore.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I am the tiger,” he said. “And you are the sheep.”
17
Rima
Rima stood before her man. She wondered how many times she could be jerked from joy to sadness on this night without actually going crazy.
“Magnum, that’s not true,” she said.
“You’re young, innocent…”
“Compared to you?” she asked, incredulous.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.
But there was a commotion coming from the direction of the gate before she could point out that she might seem less experienced than her friends but he was an alien in a new world.
They both turned to see Special Agent Diaz dashing through the recreation area. Clutching her clipboard to her side, she leapt over picnic tables as if it were an Olympic event, then dashed the last few feet over to Rima and Magnum.
“Sykes is right behind me,” she gasped. “We don’t have much time. He knows it’s here but he doesn’t know where. If one of you runs the wrong way, we’ll pursue. It will give you a few minutes to move the thing.”
“Are you… helping us?” Rima asked.