Or maybe being mesmerized was just her default state around him now. It certainly seemed so, when he abruptly held out the gun to her. Her hands wanted to take it, but they didn’t seem to be working right. They’d gone as floppy as the rest of her, in the face of his extreme competency and his slightly wounded staring.
Why was he staring like that? Why was he wounded?
She didn’t know, and of course he wouldn’t say. He couldn’t even tell her why it was her turn now, but after a long, awkward moment of meaningful stares and possible gestures, she managed to make her hands work. She took the weapon and shouldered it just as he had, before aiming it at some random tree in the distance.
She could do this.
She was good at this.
Or at least, she was good until he abruptly spoke.
“Seen your file,” he said. “Impressive.”
Then of course she sent the shot wide. Of course she did. He’d just praised her for her shooting ability, and in response she fired at the fucking moon. She could have kicked herself, and would have done if she hadn’t been too busy reloading immediately. The shot was an easy one and she could make it as long as he didn’t speak in that low drawl again.
So naturally he went one worse.
He leaned in and then drawled. By God, he practically whispered in her ear. “You aiming for the forked one?” he asked, and for one dazzled second she wasn’t sure what she liked better. The tone of his voice or the way he clipped the start of his sentences. He always clipped the start of his sentences—like a complete one would give too much away. He had to keep himself pared down to near nothing, in case feelings slipped out.
But she could sympathize. Her feelings were currently splashing paint around the forest. She fired again and still didn’t hit her tree of choice, and all because he was leaning over her. What sort of person missed because of leaning?
Though even as she was thinking it, she knew she wasn’t telling the whole truth. He wasn’t just leaning, at all. He was so close she could feel his breath ghosting over her suddenly sensitized ear, that big body like a cupped hand around her own. His shoulder was nearly touching her shoulder, and his arm was almost in line with hers, and when he quite suddenly clasped her elbow she nearly screamed.
What was he doing?
Was he trying something on? It kind of felt as if he were, but then after a second of unbearable tension he said, “Slide your hand over here a little, it kicks to the right.” Which didn’t sound like a song of seduction. He clearly just thought she was struggling with a pretty shoddy weapon and wanted to help out. And if helping out meant almost touching her with his entire body and whispering in her ear at periodic intervals, and occasionally touching her elbow in a way that made her feel as though her elbow was a vagina, well…
Well, maybe he was trying it on.
He was trying it on in his own weird, I-don’t-want-to-be-doing-this-but-can’t-seem- to-help-it sort of way. He had to be. She could feel those vibrations happening between them again, so intense they seemed to be making his teeth chatter. And when she turned her head just the tiniest millimeter of a fraction, he didn’t move his.
He just let his parted lips nearly graze over her cheek, instead. She felt his breath there against the side of her face, and the heat of his mouth almost touching her, almost touching her. It made concentrating on the weapon she was currently aiming very hard, but then maybe that was the point.
Maybe he didn’t want her to be aiming the gun at all. Maybe he just wanted her to turn her head a little more and a little more until finally…oh yes finally her lips were nearly on his and his eyes were all low and heavy-lidded and he was just kind of stirring the air between them in this slowly rocking way that made her think he’d been hypnotized. He probably had been hypnotized.
How else to explain his sudden snap to attention? He seemed to realize what was happening all in a rush, then jerked away as though he’d been stung. He even put a hand to his mouth, like he expected to find something blistered and bloodied there—yet oddly, his words didn’t match this reaction.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as though he’d stung her. It made her want to tell him that no one had stung anyone, but by the time she got around to it he was voicing more unnecessary concerns. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
She suspected he meant more than a kiss he hadn’t given her.
In fact, it was obvious he meant more than the kiss he hadn’t given her. You couldn’t take the blame for something you didn’t even do. But you could probably take the blame for dry humping someone before fleeing the scene of the crime. Yeah, he could definitely blame himself for that—and he clearly did. After another agonizing moment he finished his thought, in a voice as grave as a funeral.
“It was unprofessional,” he said, clearly expecting her to nod sadly over his terrible transgression and completely agree. She couldn’t comply, however. She was too busy bursting with glee over an actual and real explanation.
He really was worried about some work-based boundary. That was his concern when it came to touching her or kissing her or fucking her. And it was good concern too. She couldn’t deny that. It had bothered her deeply at first, and in truth it still sort of did. Office romances were never easy when in an actual office, never mind while fake married to someone you had to pretend sleep with every night.
She could completely understand his issue, and went to tell him so. Only when she did, something happened. She held out a hand, which was probably a bad idea to begin with, and started to speak through a smile that felt way too warm. Her whole face felt way too warm, in truth, like some giddy sunbeam reaching out toward him.
It wasn’t a surprise when he stepped back. But it was a surprise to see him do it so violently. He almost fell on his ass in an effort to get away, as though she’d poked him with a sharp stick instead of offering him her hand. And he didn’t stop at a couple of strides, either. His fumbling away became a walk, and then his walk became a slow jog, and when she called out his name in a great burst of confused frustration, he actually broke into a run.
He was gone before she’d even had a chance to properly process what should have been fairly obvious before.
It probably wasn’t just professionalism.
Chapter Seven
She could hear him in there. People in Brazil could probably hear him in there, so if he thought he was being normal and subtle he was quite possibly crazy. The walls were shaking, for God’s sake. It sounded as if he were trying to destroy their very nice home gym with his bare hands, and maybe his teeth.
No one could have mistaken this for an ordinary workout—though for a while she tried to buy into the premise. She had to try to buy into the premise. If she didn’t, she was likely to go in there and accidentally make him run through the nearest wall, and she didn’t want to do that. A cooling-off period was best, where he could resolve things through punching gym equipment, and she could resolve them by working until her eyeballs fell out of her head.
By the time she emerged from her lair her right hand had cramped into a claw. She had to messily gulp seventeen pints of water at the sink, because somehow she’d forgotten to eat or drink for about eight hours, and the whole world had a kind of fuzzy gray quality that probably wasn’t a good sign.
And yet he was still in there.
He was still in the middle of his cooling-off period, in a way that made her think cooling-off period was probably the wrong term. Slow death march sounded more appropriate, if she was being honest. If she’d just almost killed herself with a computer, he had to be on the brink of disaster in there.
Unless he could just keep going and going forever. Maybe he was like a camel, storing massive amounts of denial in order to make it across his desert of feelings. Whenever his muscles started to fail, he simply shored them up with more refusal to face reality.
Hey, it was possible.
But it was also possible that he was going to kill himself to death with exercise. He’d al
ready almost done it once. And though her efforts at helping him the last time had been pretty pathetic at best, she couldn’t help wondering if there was an approach that would work.
Not berating him for failing to follow policy would probably be a start. And then once she’d done that, she could segue into something casual—maybe ask him if he fancied watching something on television. They had dehydrated pizza in their stockpiles, and soda that almost tasted like real soda. They could make a night of it and have some kind of movie marathon, like normal people.
If he actually liked movies, and enjoyed pizza, and didn’t mind soda. She wasn’t really sure on all three counts, despite all efforts to glean what information she could about him. She’d sort of surreptitiously watched him from the kitchen the other day, when he’d actually picked up the remote and aimed it at the TV.
But he’d just flicked it off Newsertainment and carried on with his business—a fact that told her absolutely nothing. No one liked to watch Newsertainment these days. If the flashing colors and constant threat level updates weren’t bad enough, the images of mutilated clones were. She didn’t know why they’d ever started that send in your pictures of captured rebels segment, but she did know how it made her feel.
It made her feel as if someone were cranking a machine inside her, tighter and tighter and tighter until she could hardly stand it. It made her not want to go up there and do her job, if this was what her job led to. And most of all—it made her remember Sergei’s face when he’d looked at those endless sleeping beauties, all so perfect and impossible.
Until someone caved their heads in for daring to run away or state an opinion or maybe just look at a human wrong. Did it bother Sergei that they killed clones for looking at someone wrong? She suspected it did, but wasn’t sure what she’d based that on. A change of the channel, a look of wonder, a flicker of his eyelids?
That was all you really had to go on with him, and it made negotiating interactions hard. It made them impossible, in fact. She was still by the sink thirty minutes later, considering and discarding ways to get through to him. In the end she just had to erase all concerns from her head and go for it, as though that choice had gone really super well the day before.
Instead of leading to something very like this—her in the doorway of the gym with her mouth faintly agape, and him continuing to punch things until they were pulverized to a fine paste. He didn’t even pause when she opened the door, or look up to see if she was an intruder intent on murder. He just kept on hammering at the enormous weighted bag in the middle of the room until the chains that tethered it started to creak and groan.
Any second now and it was going to fly across the room. She could already see the bolts straining to keep it attached to the ceiling, and after a punch that looked like a fiery freight train actual dust appeared to sift down.
Though it wasn’t the dust she was really paying attention to. She knew it wasn’t, and barely even felt bad about that. No one could have felt bad about staring at him, doing what he was doing. He probably needed studying, in the interests of medical science. People needed to know how his muscles made the shapes they were making, because certainly she’d never seen anything like it before.
His biceps seemed to sort of roll as he delivered each blow. She could almost see the raw power in them flowing down his arm, before ending in a bone-shuddering blow. And his shoulders…oh she didn’t know what to do with his shoulders. They each had this little groove between bone and sinew, so unnoticeable on everyone else in the world but so stark and clear on him.
She could have rested her chin on it.
She wanted to rest her chin on it. She wanted to just go up to him and climb, and not purely because of the muscles and the lunging and all the other nonsense. They were a big part of it quite obviously, but she knew they would never be enough on their own.
It was the other stuff that really made her ache to go to him—the stillness and the restraint and the running away. The way his face looked now, so determined not to look at her but so obviously wanting to. She could almost see the strain in his neck muscles. He’d made a mean line of his mouth, but the mean line kept sort of wavering, as though his words were forcing themselves against the gates.
He was the strangest person she’d ever met.
But that also made him the loveliest.
“I just wanted to see if you were okay,” she said, because suddenly she could. It was easier, once she’d realized just how awesome he was. Awesome people deserved all the good things, and she wanted to give them to him.
Somehow, she wanted to give them.
“I’m fine,” he said after a second, but oh what a liar he was. He practically froze when he heard her voice, and went even stiffer when he had to answer. And even if those things hadn’t explained the situation adequately, there were other signs.
His knuckles were bloody, for one. His fists kind of looked like lumps of raw meat, red and mottled and definitely not in any kind of good shape. How could he say he was fine when he’d punched a bag until his hands turned into hamburgers?
He couldn’t.
“I hate to say it but…you don’t really look fine.”
“Uh-huh. So what do I look like?”
She hadn’t expected that. It was the kind of thing she would say—in fact, it was the exact thing she’d said the other day, which made her wonder if he was doing it on purpose. Maybe he was trying to throw her off guard, or challenge her in some way.
But if so, she was oddly up to the task.
“I don’t think I can really tell you in any kind of detail. Censors would probably delete it,” she said and had a full thirty seconds of feeling kind of proud of herself. She hadn’t backed off, the way he’d wanted her to. She’d grown bold and strong…and also maybe stupid enough to say something that had a double meaning.
Oh God, it had a double meaning.
“I mean…I meant that in a violent way. Not in a pornographic way. They would delete it because you’re all bloody and angry and kind of like a murdered cow, you know. Not because you… Not because of your…glistening, half-naked body and your…eyes that are looking at me like that.”
And now she’d made things worse. Not only had she just implied that her thoughts were so rude they needed censoring, she’d also just used the word “glistening”. What on earth had compelled her to do such a thing? He looked like she’d just punched him in the face—both amazed at her gall and amused by the puny effort.
It was a hard expression to stomach.
Doubly hard because it was on him. He didn’t even have expressions, most of the time, but somehow she’d forced him to have the worst possible one. And to top it off, he wasn’t saying anything. Of course he wasn’t saying anything. This was the problem with trying to talk to him in any real way.
She babbled and he maintained a dignified silence.
“Sorry about…all of those words I just said.”
It was her only option. Swift apology, then on to more reasonable things.
Or at least, on to weird things that he wanted to suddenly say.
“Don’t be. You’re very good at it.”
“Good at what?”
“Good at talking.”
He couldn’t be serious. Was he serious? He kind of looked it, but then again seriousness was pretty much his default state. He could have put on clown makeup and still seemed as grim as fuck, and that left her with very little to work with. She had to just go with a rather cautious, “I don’t think I am.”
But he just rolled right over it.
“Sure you are. You just called me a murdered cow.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
It didn’t seem like a good thing. It seemed even more embarrassing coming out of his mouth than it had out of hers—and yet his answer was just as firm as the last one.
“Yep,” he said in a way that brooked no argument. She didn’t know how a yep could possibly brook no argument, but somehow he managed it. He turned t
he P into a punch, and hammered it into her body. And just in case that wasn’t amazing enough, he then followed it with lots of other words. “Makes me want to ask you what you mean, even though I never want to ask anyone what they mean. And you did the same thing in the labs too. Made me want to ask you.”
Had he really just said all that? Did someone pull a string on his back?
She was speechless for a moment, which seemed like some kind of irony. He started talking and she shut up, as though only one of them could ever be the speaker. The other had to just stand there looking stupefied. It took her a full minute to say anything back, and even then it was just down to burning curiosity.
“Ask me what?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but he was lying again. He did know. He had something all primed to go, she could see it. It wrestled behind his eyes and made him fiddle with the cuff of a shirt he wasn’t wearing, and when he finally managed to speak it was in a tone she didn’t recognize.
“You really think I’m not just a grunt?” he asked, and then she realized. She didn’t recognize the tone because it was amusement. He was amused at the idea, as though it was just too ridiculous to take seriously. He had to serve it with a side of incredulity, or never swallow it down.
And that fact made her sharper than she intended to be.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Well—”
“I’m here trying to work out your face maze, while you talk about things no other man would care about, after you’ve just tried to murder a punching bag to distract yourself from complicated feelings I can’t even guess at.” She paused to take a big gulping breath. “And you’re still wondering if I really don’t think you’re a grunt?”
There was a long, long silence after that. Probably because neither of them had ever said so much in one go to the other person, but also due to the content. The content was apparently giving him an aneurysm. When he finally spoke it was in fits and starts, and coupled with an expression that looked almost horrified.
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