Devil His Due, Part 2
(Continued)
“No use begging, Rinusha. The answer is still ‘no’.”
Father took my hands off his lathe and gently pushed me out of his workshop. I was five and already crazy in love with his tools, his lathe, and the magic he made with both. I braced my heels against the threshold and planted both hands on the jamb, resisting my eviction.
“Please.”
“No.”
I woke, senses swimming in the dark, and couldn’t move. Panic ripped through the heat that wrapped me. I pulled against the restraints and my shoulder stabbed me for my trouble.
A male voice not my father’s said, “Lie still.”
“Lie still. Learn to like it.”
The Lieutenant’s weight shifted and I kicked free, tangled in my clothing. He grabbed my hips and dragged me back.
“Learn to like it or I’ll bust you so far down you’ll never set foot on a ship again.”
I exploded, thrashing.
A crash, a shout, a sudden spark of fire on my neck.
Then nothing…
“I’m sorry, Poppa. I didn’t mean to break it. I just wanted to see how it worked.”
Father looked up from his ruined lathe, its exposed innards smoking, his face and clothing blackened from putting out the fire. He set the extinguisher aside and opened his arms. I ran into them gratefully.
He held me tight, so tight.
“Don’t cry, Rinusha. We’ll fix it. You and I. We’ll fix it….”
“Listen to your Dad, Irina. It's good advice.”
The Universe changed and startled I looked up.
“Mike?”
My father was gone. Mike held me now. I was naked and so was he, surrounded by the high mountain pasture of his family’s spread, the sky overhead filled with stars. As in the nature of dreams, the memory of that three-day ride poured into me and I caught up. I was sore from the trip and getting cold from the night’s chill. We lay on the blankets he’d spread out and I put my face to Mike’s chest and breathed in the scent of him.
“What advice?” I asked, my bare arms shivering in reaction to his heat. God, why was I so cold? It was supposed to be midsummer, I should have been warmed through from lovemaking and yet I was freezing. Mike sat up, pried me away and held me off. I clutched his arms, my fingers going to ice, and started to shake.
“Ask for help. Take it when it’s offered. You don’t have to do it alone.”
“What?” The cold had me now. Nothing made sense. “Where are you going?”
He’d risen with his words and stood instantly clothed—not in the ranching duds from that dirtside trip, but as he’d been when he shoved me off his ship for Ariel: Kitted out in harness and geared for war.
“You can’t stay, Irina. It’s time to go back.”
“Misha…?”
I woke with my head clear and my body packed in ice and immobilized, strapped to the bed in medlab.
“Not Misha,” Christian said as he rose from his chair. He undid the restraints one at a time. “You’ve been asleep for almost twenty-four hours.”
“Damn,” I said, the cold and the lingering remnants of my dream robbing me of tact. I could use some warming up right about now. Ice packs against my neck held my head fast so I could only follow Christian with my eyes as he unstrapped me. I started to shiver, hard racking shakes that made it hard to speak. “Um...got... coffee?”
“Hospital,” Christian reminded me. “You were stupid. Worked too hard.” He picked up a blanket off a chair by the door, shook it out, and covered me to my waist.
“Yeah....Well, I’m...known for that.” Freed of the restraints, I started peeling the ice packs off me, starting at my neck and working my way down as I rose. My shoulder felt unnaturally heavy and twice its size. My arm still worked, if stiffly, and it buckled as I levered myself up. The sheets fell away and that’s when I noticed certain aspects of my dream hadn’t been strictly imaginary. I snatched the sheets up again. The air hit my bare back and the shakes worsened. “Clothes?”
“You won’t be using that bra again. Arden cut it off. The rest have been washed and put away in your room.” Christian answered. He took the ice packs as I peeled them off and set them aside, then resumed our odd parallel conversation. “When you crippled yourself, who was going to finish up work on the ship’s systems so we could escape this rock?”
Anger blazed through the shakes and I bit my tongue on my initial response. The man had a point. I pulled the blanket he’d given me around my shoulders to buy myself time to think. What could I say? I’d been abominably stupid, thanks to my stubborn pride, and I had put everyone at risk of stranding.
Or worse.
“You’re right,” I admitted. “I was stupid. Although I have to say it wasn’t exactly my original plan.” With the ice gone and the blanket around me, I was finally warming up and my extremities let me know it as my blood started flowing again. A vicious case of pins and needles ensued. I bore it, thinking if it was the only penance I paid, I’d gotten off lightly. I gave my injured shoulder a shrug and was rewarded with a hard stab and a twinge. Not so lightly then.
Fair enough.
“How are the….how’s Arden?” I clutched the blanket tighter and waited out the shakes.
“Busy.” Christian dragged his chair to the end of the bed. “It wasn’t just pride. Or stupidity. You’re driven. You need to work. I understand that. I just wish you talked to us about it. We could have found work that wouldn’t kill you.”
Unable to say anything for or against the truth, I just sat there and looked at him.
Christian smiled and uncovered my feet. “Time for your therapy, anyway. We can’t do a regular massage. Your shoulder needs more time to heal. Fortunately, the human foot has close to eight thousand nerve endings. There are forms of acupressure and acupuncture that deal entirely with healing the human body through the stimulation of those nerve endings.”
“Not fair, Christian, molesting a woman when she’s sick. What would your mother say?” I sketched a grin at him, a weak attempt at humor. In truth, I didn’t want a massage--foot or otherwise--but Christian needed to help people the way I needed to fix and tinker. So I lay back, gripped my blanket, stared at the ceiling and let him do it.
“My mother would say it was about time. She thinks you’re very pretty.”
Christian’s smirk was clearly audible in his reply. His fingers began working and I had to concentrate hard to keep still. An interesting thing: the foot is amazingly sensitive and I’ve heard it said that with the right pressure point you can put someone in agony. Or ecstasy. It wasn’t hard to imagine Christian being good at the ecstasy part. His fingers found the arch of my foot and I jerked.
“Your mother,” I said, forcing myself to relax. “Is an amazing woman and I owe her a lot—for Mike’s sake, if not for mine—but it’s statements like that one that make me wonder if you’re just yanking my chain.”
Christian grinned as he worked.
“I’m not sure you’re ready to hear about my household and how I grew up. It might corrupt you.” He used not just his thumbs like some, but all his fingers, working the pressure points.
“I’m not a nun, Christian.” I levered myself up, despite my shoulder, and scowled at him. “If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.”
“I don’t have anything to say. I’m just chatting. You need to relax. Not every discussion is life or death.” Christian drew his thumb up over the pad under my big toe, then pressed lightly into the flesh just beneath.
I couldn’t help it. I arched back against the mattress and moaned.
“Bastard,” I gasped, biting back the sounds his fingers forced out of me. “You fight dirty, you. Talk to me.” I was going to need help if I was to keep it together. “Tell me about your mother.”
“She’s beautiful. You know that. Insightful. You know that. She was born on Osiris.” Christian worked slowly, taking his time. Making sure he hit those pleasure points. Doubtless as a way to relax the body and the soul. “Her parents were poor. They sacrificed all they had to get her prepared for the Guild entrance exams. She passed. Grew up. Made sure my grandparents lived comfortable lives until they died.”
His fingers worked as he talked. Pleasure shot through me, jolting up my leg and lodging in my groin. Coupled with my dream of Mike, I endured several uncomfortable minutes as Christian worked my foot over.
Christian glanced up and then down again. His work gentled, still pleasant but no longer pushing the more erotic buttons quite so much. A relief. He continued, “My mother, as you may have guessed, is not limited to my father for sexual partners. Over my lifetime she’s had a few boyfriends and girlfriends, some long term, some short term.”
“Thank you,” I breathed when he let up on the acupressure. My thighs trembled from the strain of lying still and as I recovered I thought back to Osiris and Delilah drawing Mike off for a moment alone. And wondered again if perhaps she’d done something more with Mike than simply talk. Given the good she did for him, did it matter if she had? Given what Christian was able to do with just his fingers on my foot, pursuing the program I’d agreed to, did it likewise matter what he did to me so long as we arrived at our goal?
I thought back to Mike’s words—Ask for help. Take it when it’s offered.—and was torn. The nature of the help and the form it took...that was the cause of my unease and I admit I took the coward’s way out. I lay there and did nothing, and waited for whatever would happen next.
“So...Your father didn’t mind?” I thought of my parents and their relationship. However extravagant my mother was, no matter her highs and lows as an operatic prima donna, infidelity was a line she refused to cross. And had my father crossed it, it would have been over between them.
Christian’s hands stilled and I lifted my head off the pillow. His eyes roamed from my foot to my face, taking in my body language, my expression. I wondered what he saw there. Shock? Disbelief? Puzzlement? I felt them all and being the lousy liar that I am, I’m certain most of it showed.
“No,” he said, his fingers moving again, tracing the lines of the bones on the top of my foot. Feathery touches. “My father had his lovers as well. They shared lovers, sometimes together. Sometimes apart. They love each other. They know they love each other. They understand their dedication to each other and are confident in it.”
The feather-light drawing of his fingers over my instep was the last straw. I had to sit up and take my foot back. I made a show of sitting casually, tailor-style, and leaning forward conversationally.
Nothing’s wrong, just getting comfortable, talk on....
“That’s.....” I sighed, at a loss for words. “I’ll have to take your word for it, Christian, that sex and the promise it implies is very different for Companions. I may never understand it, though I know the difference is there. I...I never got to properly thank your mother for what she did for Mike and I admit, it bothers me.”
I looked him in the eye.
“Something like that deserves more than a thank you. Proper acknowledgement was due and its payment was sadly lacking.”
“Rina, I’m not going to seduce you.” Christian said. “You don’t want it. I would never take advantage of you.” He sat back in his chair. “My mother helps people. That’s what she does. All she did was talk to Mike, in private, where he didn’t have to be nervous about hurting you. You and he made love that evening. That was thanks enough for her.” He smiled. “My mother’s a sucker for love.”
Made love? We’d done more than that, though to any casual observer it would have been hard to see. Knowing Christian was no casual observer, I didn’t bother hiding what I thought or felt about what happened that night or what I felt I owed his mother for it. He deserved to know the truth. The change she’d wrought was pretty damned significant in terms of my continued relationship with Mike and not one I could have engineered on my own. As for the rest of what he’d said, it occurred to me my problem wasn’t that dissimilar and Christian was his mother’s son.
“If you’re sure she’s satisfied, then I’m glad she got what she wanted. As for the rest of it,… what would you do if I did?”
There it was. Damned if it wasn’t the one question that had lingered unspoken between us the second he stepped on this boat. One sided on my part, I admit, but not one he would have missed seeing.
“If you asked me to seduce you?” Christian asked. He paused and honestly considered it for a moment. “I’d think about why you asked. If it would something positive for you. How it would affect our relationship. If I thought it was something you truly wanted and it was something that would help you and something that wouldn’t cost us a friendship? I would come to your room and spend an evening making you melt like butter on a stove.”
The butter imagery made a powerful argument for ‘yes’, even as self-imposed habit urged for ‘no’.
Ask for help. Take it when it’s offered. You don’t have to do it alone.
“What about Harry?” I hedged, needing to quell my doubts before I could decide. “Would she take it like your parents would? Or mine?”
“Harry,” Christian said with a small shake of his head. “No. She would understand. The truth is, she has the most remarkable sense of other people I’ve ever seen, in or out of the temple.”
“Then I need to consider it.” I took a deep breath and straightened my spine. “I don’t know if it will affect our friendship. I don’t know if it’s what I want for itself, but I do know it’s something I need to do. I said I was broken, Christian, and this is the break. Sex, once experienced, colors everything. It’s the nature of being human and my experience has been...warped. Forgive the imagery, but if my problem were a bent car fender, I’d take up my hammer and pound it back into shape. I wouldn’t just slap it back on the car with an extra coat of polish and hope the owner didn’t notice.
“Had I been Coreside, had I not been in the middle of a war, I would have gotten the help I’d needed sooner. Mike did what he could, but he couldn’t fix everything. Because of what he did, he’s the one I trust. But he’s not here and you are. And I need help getting through this. God,” I raked my hands through my hair, winced as my shoulder protested. “I know I’m saying this all wrong. You know what the problem is. You’ve got what I need to fix it. I just have to get past my roadblocks and agree to it. And that’s going to take time.”
I sighed.
“I don’t mean to be a tease, Christian, but I need to get my head around the idea before I go forward. Once that happens, I’ll go as far and as fast as you like.”
Christian sat silent for a long moment. Processing. Thinking. Watching. Feeling.
“When you are better,” he said, answering my proposal. “When you aren’t on any drugs for the pain in that shoulder. When we aren’t marooned on a world underneath a fleet of cannibals. Come to me. Talk to me again.” He rose to his feet. “And then we’ll make a decision. Okay?”
The abyss opened before me, the entire universe wheeling within it, and I balanced on the edge of one thin word. Dare I take that leap of faith and launch myself forward?
Ask for help. Take it when it’s offered, Mike’s voice whispered inside me, his drawl growing stronger. What do you need to say ‘yes’, Irina? A gorram engraved invitation?
I thought back to that night in my cabin when I’d kissed Mike and he’d gone still, of the expression in his eyes when I dared look at him. At the time, I’d thought I’d understood what it had meant. Now I knew better.
Please, God, don’t let me fail...
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
What I said of Broken holds true here, too. Like, by a factor of ten. See more of Jay's work using the timeline links below.
Go back to Devil His Due, Part 1 | Go on to And Whether Pigs Have Wings
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