by Robin Banks
His gaze drops to the floor. “Alya was really pissed off. She said all sorts of stuff about me, her, my life and what I was doing with it. She was kinda harsh. She can get like that, but I knew she’d get over it. I just had to show her that I wasn’t fucking up, and she’d get on board. Raj was worse. He was just worried. He wanted to help, even if Alya didn’t agree, but he was worried. That worried me. Raj is solid. If he’s worried about something, then there’s something to worry about. But it was a bit late to do anything about it, so I just carried on. I felt like a total asshole because I owe them. They’ve been good to me. But I couldn’t undo it. I didn’t want to, honestly. I was scared shitless, but I was happy.
“It would have been kinda fucked to move her into the big house. Not really respectful to Raj’s family and weird with the rest of the domestics, and, dunno, just not right. Things are like that in Anteia, and it all happened so quickly that nobody had a chance to get used to the idea. I shouldn’t have been living there myself, anyway. I never belonged there. But Raj got me a room when I first got there and they never slung me out. They’re good people. They’ve got a bunch of annexes and outbuildings and all sorts, so Raj just found me an empty one and I moved my crap over. Nobody was thrilled about it, not Raj’s lot, not her parents, and not her, but I figured they’d all adjust. They had to.
“After a few days she brought her kid over. He was a real sweet kid, about Jojo’s age. He was into everything. Smiled a lot. I couldn’t get enough of him. It was really cool to get home and see him watching out for me. It kinda was the best thing ever. I thought she might get fed up staying at home, but she didn’t seem to. I guess it beat scrubbing someone else’s ‘freshers. I met her folk, and that was awkward as fuck because they were treating me like I was one of the posh people granting their family some kind of boon rather than a random fuckwit who’d knocked their daughter up, but I thought they would get over that. Raj’s folk were starting to chill, too. Lara, Raj’s stepmom, she’s got a real soft spot for little kids. She’d see us play in the garden and would come over for a chat. It didn’t take her long to fold. She was still not happy, but it’s hard to stay stern when you’ve got a little boy smiling at you and bringing you flowers. It was all good, even with the difficult bits. I thought I had it made.
“Then we went for a check-up. She wasn’t too keen, but she’d had a ton of complications with her first pregnancy and the birth had been a major bloodfest. When it comes to medics in Anteia, you get what you pay for, and they couldn’t pay shit. But I could and I wasn’t gonna risk it. We had a fight about that. I won. That’s what I thought, anyway. So we left her kid with her folk and we went down to the med bay. It was supposed to be simple. Everything else was going so well, you know? It was just a formality. Just to make sure.”
He closes his eyes, and carries on talking. “We went in there and they started to do whatever the hell they do. They started off happy, but then they started to look confused and then I could see that they were worried. They carried on doing their shit, though. I’d read up on it some but I still didn’t know what half of what they were doing was about. It seemed to take a long time. Then the medic called me out.”
I’ve got a horrible feeling I know where this is going. We lost our first, when I was Luke’s age. It was early on, we hadn’t been trying, and we’d only just found out about it, but it was still awful. That can’t be it, though. It wouldn’t explain why the girl is not in the picture anymore.
His eyes flick open and he looks up at me.
“What do you know about blood types? Rh factor?”
I was half spacing out, remembering those days we spent tumbling through space in a ship overflowing with grief, so the question takes me by surprise.
“Not a lot. I know all our blood types, just in case. We’re all O positive.”
“She wasn’t. She was negative, and Rh-sensitized. The baby was positive. That was not good news. They needed to monitor them. She was going to be fine, but the baby was at risk of some really bad shit. They could deal with that, though. They could have done with catching it sooner, but there was plenty they could do to stop it getting real bad. That wasn’t why they called me out.”
He goes back to staring off into the distance.
“They’d checked my records. I’m negative too. I knew it, but I didn’t know what it meant. Basically there was no way in hell the baby was mine. It just wasn’t possible. There I was, with this medic explaining it all to me, and then explaining it all again because I couldn’t process it, and I just had to get the hell out. I didn’t say anything to her. I didn’t say anything to anyone. I just walked out. I needed to…” He trails off and squeezes his temples.
“I was gone a while, I guess. A half hour, an hour, maybe longer. I don’t know. I just couldn’t be there. Then I got my head around it, and I went back, and they were gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah. Well, no. Better than that. She was gone. The baby was still there, in a biomass recycler or taken apart for spares or whatever the fuck they do with them. Turns out that when they’re that little it doesn’t take much longer to unmake them than it does to make them. All you need is access to a decent med bay, and I’d given her that. I’d given her that and I’d bailed out on her, and she made her decision and just went for it.”
“Gods.”
He looks right at me for a moment with an eerie smile on his face.
“I went home, because I wasn’t thinking and I thought she might be there, but of course she wasn’t. Then my brain switched on and I went to her parents’, and of course she’d gone there instead. She’d gone there and picked up her kid and cleared off. They didn’t know where she was going, or they knew and they didn’t want to tell me. Either way, it was obvious she didn’t want to see me. And that was that. I had to go home and explain to everybody what had happened. I had to go and tell them that and watch their faces and deal with their reactions. I owed them that much. Alya nearly ruptured herself trying not to explode at me. She was so fucking furious…” He trails off.
“What did you do?”
“What the fuck could I do? I went and sat in my house with all her stuff and her kid’s stuff still in it. I sat there a couple of days, I think. I don’t know. Then I bundled it all up and took it over to her parents’. I went back there a few times, but there was nothing doing. I left some credit for them, ‘cause I figure they’d need it. I never saw them again.”
I’m trying really hard not to cry, because Luke’s showing so much restraint that collapsing in a pile of snot and wails doesn’t seem appropriate. I’m struggling, though.
“Thank you for telling me.”
He whips around to look straight at me, fury in his eyes.
“You think you’re getting some kind of wonderful insight into my life, don’t you? Some kind of special prize? You need to wise up. You’re gonna get yourself hurt thinking that kinda shit.” He looks away again.
“What?”
“I told you the story, right? Now it’s out there, you can’t use it against me. I’ve disarmed it. And anyway, this is crap everyone knows. Everyone I know, everyone who knows me. It’d have made the coms if people weren’t so scared of riling Raj’s family. Though I’m not sure what the title could have been, because ‘stupid boy does stupid shit’ is hardly newsworthy.”
“Don’t call yourself names! And what’s stupid about falling in love?”
“Nothing. I knew going in that someone like her wasn’t gonna be interested in someone like me unless there was something in it for her. I just didn’t know what it was, but there had to be something. It didn’t matter, anyway. She didn’t tell me she was knocked up when she started fucking me: big whoop. She treated me right enough from that point on. I had no right to ask for more.”
“Maybe she didn’t know that when she started out with you.”
He looks straight at me again. “Gods, Quinn, grow the fuck up. Of course she knew it. That’s why she did it. She alrea
dy had a kid she could barely support. She would have had to stop working when she started to show. Raj’s folks are nice, but they don’t go around sponsoring unplanned pregnancies. I should have seen it coming. But things were so good with us that I forgot, for a while. I managed to believe that she was in it just for me. That was stupid. But that’s not the issue. It’s not that I was a meal ticket: it’s that I couldn’t even manage to do that properly.”
“What?”
“I should have stayed with her in the med bay. Instead I had to go and get all dramatic and shit, and I killed a baby.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did. If I’d stayed put, she wouldn’t have done that.”
“She still may have, if you weren’t going to support them.”
“I would have. I’d already decided.”
“In the heat of the moment…”
“It wasn’t like that. I’d decided way before. None of it was news to me.”
“What?”
“I’m not bright, but I can count. Even when I’m happy, even when I’m getting laid, I can still count. Everything was happening way too quickly. I reckon she was gone six weeks when she started out with me. Maybe more. I figured it out, and I figured that what she did before she met me wasn’t my business or my problem. Nor anyone else’s. Well, his, whoever he was, but if he wanted to stick around he could have.”
“But the baby…”
He interrupts me. “Was gonna be mine. I was gonna raise him. Fuck only knows what a father is supposed to do, because it’s not as if I’ve ever seen a proper one, but I’ve got an idea in my head of how things are supposed to be and that’s what I was gonna do. I was gonna be there for him. And at the first fucking hurdle, I fucking failed them both. Failed all of us. All because a medic was looking at me with pity in her eyes and I couldn’t stand it. I was too fucking proud to stand there and be told something I already knew because the person who told me felt sorry for me. So I fucking ran out on them, and I killed a baby, and I lost my family, and I deserve all of that.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Tell me a part of this story that’s fair on anyone. Everyone got hurt. It doesn’t matter whether I try to do the right thing or not: things get fucked and people get hurt. And now I told you, and you’re hurt too. Don’t tell me it’s not true. You were better off not knowing. Now you’re carrying an extra load and I’m still carrying mine. You still think that me opening up is a good idea?”
“Yes. Of course I do.”
“Tell me that this experience has improved your life. Tell me that you feel better now.”
“I don’t. I feel fucking awful. But it’d be worth it, if you felt better.”
“What?” He growls, plainly furious. “Who the fuck do you take me for?”
“What? What did I say?”
“Why the fuck would I feel better if you feel worse?”
“I didn’t mean that! I meant you may feel better for getting it off your chest. For being heard. I don’t know. I just know that people feel better for talking about their stuff, sometimes. That’s why they do it.”
“People might. I don’t. I feel like shit for spreading my crap around. So now we had our little moment, and we both feel worse for it. Which kinda is how it goes around me, in case you didn’t get the fucking hint. Look, I know you mean well. I just wish you didn’t. This was a bad idea. All of it.”
He looks exhausted and very, very young. It suddenly hits me that this is only the start of us working it all out. The fact that he’s here, that he stayed with me, doesn’t mean a damn thing. Well, no, it does, but it doesn’t mean that we’re home and dry yet. This is only going to be home for him if we manage to make it so. That’s why he’s so scared: he jumped, and he has no idea yet if I can or will catch him. The fact that he’s so terrorized of me letting him down, or him letting me down, is only going to make everything harder.
I don’t think he gets it yet. I honestly believe he doesn’t understand how I feel about him. That’s something I can fix, at least.
“Luke, do you trust me?”
“What?” He looks straight at me for an instant with terror in his eyes.
“It’s a simple question with a simple answer. Do you trust me or not?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not simple.”
“Ok, then. Give me the non-simple answer.”
“I trust that you’re a good person. That you don’t hurt people for kicks.”
“But you don’t trust me not to hurt you.”
His face goes blank. “I trust that if you did it, it wouldn’t be for kicks. Do we have to talk about this?”
“No. We don’t. We don’t have to talk at all.” I stick my hand out between us. He looks at it in with a mixture of yearning and fear, as if he wasn’t sure whether I am offering a lifeline or a trap.
“I can’t do that.”
“You’ve done it before.”
“It was different before.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t about us.”
“Ok.” I pull my hand back. “If you ever change your mind, the offer stands.”
“You mean that?”
“Of course I do. I want to be with you. That’s one of the ways in which I can be with you.”
“No, I mean, it’s really ok? If I can’t?”
“If you’re not comfortable doing that, I don’t want you to do it. It’s not complicated. I could hardly enjoy it if you didn’t want to do it. That applies to, well, everything, by the way.”
His eyes flutter. “What’s the catch?”
“What? There’s no catch. What catch could there possibly be?”
He frowns and hugs his knees.
“I don’t want to be less… I want to do everything with you that you do with Asher and Gwen.”
That makes me snort. “Then you’re shit out of luck, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“Unless you’re stashing a vagina somewhere, there’s going to be stuff I do with them and not with you. You’re going to have to live with it.”
He freezes for a moment, then his face explodes in a blush.
“That’s not what I meant!”
I know it’s probably mean, inappropriate, and unhelpful, but seeing him so flustered makes me snicker. He looks at me askance, but that just makes me laugh harder, until I’m rolling around on the floor guffawing. I know that most of that is just nerves after the ups-and-downs of the last few minutes, or the last few weeks, but that doesn’t make it any easier to stop.
It takes him a while to smile, and when he does it’s only the tiniest of smiles, but it looks real.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
“I’m just trying to keep up with you.”
He lies down on the floor next to me. I’m still snickering on and off, but he’s not frowning anymore. After a few minutes I’ve calmed down enough to just lie there next to him. It’s nice. I still don’t quite believe that it’s really happening, but it’s nice.
When I first feel his hand touching mine, I don’t quite believe that either. I stay really still, in case it got there by mistake and he wants to pull it back, but he doesn’t. He just leaves it there, on top of mine. When I spread my fingers, his find their way between mine. I still don’t do anything, though. I don’t want to mess this up.
He squeezes my hand. “Come on, then.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. But fretting isn't helping.”
“Ok.” I open up the tiniest channel between us. “When I tell you that I love you, this is what I mean.”
25. Alya
When the bump comes I’m expecting it, so it doesn’t scare me in the least. It doesn’t piss me off either, but admitting that seems poor form, so I answer the com with an “Asher, you cast-iron double-dyed no-good asshole…” and stop abruptly when the face on the screen turns out to be Osh’s. He’s in the pilot’s chair, with an older man I recognize but don’t know as co-pilot. He
looks like one of Kolya’s relatives. Then again, around here that ain’t saying much.
“Holy crap on a cracker. Osh, was it you who nearly smashed into my ship right now?”
He nods in response, blushing fiercely.
“Hi, aunt Alya, uncle Raj. I passed my test last week. Doing patrols now. Pulling a full share.”
What the hell do you say to a kid who’s not yet twelve, who’s doing a potentially lethal grown-up job, and who just outflew you?
“Osh, you little twerp, hear me now and hear me good: just because you’re playing with the big boys it doesn’t give you the right to fly like a jackass. Do this to me again and I’m going to rip your tongue out of your mouth and make you buff my ship with it. You grok?”
He tries so hard not to giggle that he ends up snorting instead.
“Yes, aunt Alya.” His expression switches to eagerness. “Do you need cover for your landing?”
“Not really. We’re here on official business, bold as brass.”
His face sinks and Raj grumbles at me under his breath. It’s a damn conspiracy. Two pairs of sad eyes are two more than I can bear. I stifle a groan. No point in making them know that they won.
“I need to make a really smooth landing, though. Slow as I can without crashing. So I guess you best cover me, in case of space monkeys or something.” Osh’s smile lights up so quickly that he looks like a different boy, a boy who’s not too busy protecting his planet to find fun wherever he can. I’m glad he’s not lost that yet. Flying with Asher, maybe he never will. It’s still all damn hard to accept, though. “Get on with it, then. Try not to scuff my paint, ok? I like this ship. Damn kids.”
Osh nods and switches off the com. Raj stretches to stroke my shoulder.
“You have a way with young men, you know.”
“Locking them in a cellar with no food or drink until they get it all out of their system is frowned upon, unfortunately, so my options are limited. Raj, I was sure it was Asher in there. The kid’s good. Really good.”
“Maybe we should get Asher to have a word with our trainers at home.”