would sure be nice to know what’s going on in another person’s head sometimes.
It’d take away a lot of the anxiety if I knew what she was thinking … even if I found out she just thought I was a nervy kid.
He looked up at the patchy sky overhead. Through long ragged openings in the clouds he could see stars.
In two places, there were nebiculae in the sky that hadn’t been there the night before, signs of a battle still raging. The tiny false nebulae glowed in every visible color, and probably in other bands than light.
Toshio let a fistful of metallo-silicate dirt sift through his fingers onto the coals. Falling sparkles of metal winked at him like incandescent confetti, like winking stars.
He dusted off his hands and turned to crawl into his own sleeping roll. He lay there, eyes closed, reluctant to watch the stars, or to dissect the pros and cons of his behavior.
Instead, he listened to the wind-and-surf sounds of the night. They were rhythmic and calming, like a lullaby, like the seas of home.
Except once in a while he thought he could pick up, on the edge of hearing, sighs and soft laughter coming from the south. They were sounds of complex happiness that filled him with a sad longing.
“They’re at it again,” he sighed to himself “I swear, I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
• • •
The humid air kept their perspiration slick upon them.
Gillian licked a moustache of tear-like salt off her upper lip. The same way, Tom cleaned some of the sheen off her breasts. The wetness of his mouth cooled on her aureoles and nipples when he took his mouth away.
She gasped and grabbed the wavy hair at the back of his head, where his slightly balding vanity feared no tugging. He responded with mock biting that sent shivers to her calves, thighs, and lower back.
Gillian locked her heel behind his knee and levered her pelvis up against his. Her breath whistled softly as he lifted his head and met her eyes.
“I thought what I was doing was afterplay,” he whispered a little hoarsely. He made a show of wiping his forehead. “You should warn me when I cross over the line, and start promising what I can’t deliver.” He took her hand and kissed its palm and the inside of her wrist.
Gillian ran her fingers along his cheek, to touch, feather light, his jaw, throat and shoulder. She took sparse clumps of chest hair and pulled playfully.
She purred—not like a housecat, but with the feral rumble of a leopardess. “Whenever you’re ready, love. I can wait. You may be the illegitimate son of a fecund test tube, but I know you better than your planners ever did. You have resources they never imagined.”
Tom was about to say that, planners or no planners, he was the quite legitimate son of May and Bruce Orley of Minnesota State, Confederacy of Earth … but then he noticed the liquid welling in her eyes. Her words were rough, light and teasing, but her grip on his chest hair only tightened as she looked up at his face, eyes roaming, as if memorizing every feature.
Tom felt suddenly confused. He wanted to be close to Gillian on their last night together. How could they be any closer than they were right now? His body pressed against hers, and her warm breath filled his nostrils. He looked away, feeling somehow he was letting her down.
Then he felt it, a tender stroking that seemed to strive against a locked and heavy feeling inside his own head. It was a soft pressure that would not go away. He realized that the thing fighting it was himself.
I’m leaving tomorrow, he thought.
They had argued over who would be the one to go, and he had won. But it was bitter.
He closed his eyes. I’ve cut her off from me! I may never come back, and I’ve cut off the deepest part of me.
Suddenly, Tom felt very strange and small, as if he were stranded in a dangerous place, the sole barrier between his loved ones and terrible foes, not a superhero but only a man, outnumbered and about to gamble all he had. As if he were himself.
He opened his eyes as he felt a touch on his face.
He pressed his cheek against her hand. There were still tears in her eyes, but also the beginnings of a smile.
“Silly boy,” she said. “You can never leave me. Haven’t you realized that by