More than anything else, he was annoyed with his physical response to that. Not the time or place, he thought. For a crazy moment, he felt seventeen again, walking from class to class with his books held awkwardly in front of him to hide an incongruous erection.
The Pat leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. It was not meant to be a passionate kiss; thinking back later, Irv was sure of that. Nor was the one he intended to give back. But instead of her cheek, his mouth found hers. With a sound half sigh, half groan, she clutched him to her.
There must have been some time in the minutes that followed when their lips were separated long enough for Irv to say no or stop or something of the sort. Afterward, that seemed logically certain, but he never could figure out when it might have been. Even when they were helping each other pull off boots and trousers, their mouths stayed glued together, and his still covered hers and helped quiet her moan soon after. A moment later, he made noises of his own and was similarly muffled.
Coming back to himself was nothing like the afterglow he cherished. It felt more like breaking a fever: what had just ended seemed strange and unreal, as if it had happened to someone else. But Pat’s smooth thighs still gripped him; he still looked into her face from only a couple of inches away.
I’m sorry, was the first thing that occurred to him to say. That, he knew, was wrong. He levered himself with his arms and pushed off against the floor so he sat back on his knees. “I think we’ve been stupid,” he said slowly.
Pat sat up, too, and reached for her pants. “You’re probably right,” she said as she started to put them on. “This isn’t like the last time I-wanted you, though. I didn’t expect it to happen. I didn’t even particularly want it to happen. It just did.”
“Yeah,” Irv said. He started getting dressed, too. “t know.” And what the hell am I going to do about it, he wondered. At the moment, he had no idea. “I didn’t expect it to happen, either. I was just trying to comfort you, any way I could-“ He pulled on socks. One didn’t fit. It was Pat’s. He tossed it to her.
She was nodding. “mand God knows I was looking for comfort, any place I could find it. You want to call it shared battle fatigue or something, and let it go at that?”
“That might be the best thing to do.” That way, Irv thought, we can pretend-I can pretend-it never happened at all. He wished it never had happened at all. Wishing did just as much good as usual.
“Okay,” Pat said. “I know what you were trying to do. Maybe you even did it. I guess I have to make myself go on, figure out how to go on, without Frank.” She stood up. “Right now, I’m going off to the john for a minute.” Irv winced. Pat saw it. “All right,” she said, “I won’t talk about it anymore. But this once, happening like it did, wasn’t the same as it would have been a lot of other ways.”
“Yeah,” Irv said. He watched Pat walk out, then climbed into a chair. What she said was true. It even helped. Trouble was, it didn’t help enough.
He got up, looked at himself in the glass of the microwave’s door. It wasn’t much of a mirror, but he doubted he could look at himself in much of a mirror. “Stupid,” he told his reflection. It didn’t argue with him.
He heard the airlock doors open, first the outer, then the inner. “Anybody home?” Sarah called. Irv was not an adrenaline junkie. The sound of his wife’s voice almost made him jump out of his skin. “Anybody home?” Sarah said again.
“Back here,” he answered. His voice, he thought, came out as a hoarse croak. He discovered another reason why he hadn’t cheated on Sarah before: he didn’t seem to be very good at it.
Sarah came walking down the passageway. “What took you so long?” she asked, sticking her head into the galley.
“Sorry.”
She shrugged, took off her gloves, rubbed her hands together.
“I’m going to make myself some coffee. Want any?”
Maybe he was only imagining how he sounded; Sarah didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”
Sarah put two cups of water in the microwave. Pat came in. Sarah glanced up. Irv waited for the world to fall to pieces. Sarah said, “In. I’m making coffee. Shall I put another cup in for you?”
“Would you?” Pat said. “I could use some.”
“Sure.” Sarah filled a third cup. The microwave started its soft whir. Over it, Sarah said to Pat, “You sound a little better.”
Pat nodded. “I think maybe I am, finally. I’ve got to-we all have to-get on with things, no matter what’s happened. I’m sorry I’ve been so useless. I just… needed some time, I guess.”
“Of course you did,” Sarah said. The microwave chimed. She got out the boiling water, poured in instant coffee, passed around the cups. “Here you go, folks, caffeinated mud. Real coffee is another thing I’ll want lots of when we get home.”
“Amen,” Irv agreed. “Could be worse, though-don’t the Russians have instant tea?” The idea of that drew groans from everyone.
“How’s Lamra?” Pat asked.
“You are better,” Sarah said, sounding pleased. “That’s the first time in a good long while you’ve cared about what’s going on. As for Lamra, she’s very much herself, only more so, if you know what I mean. She has this new wooden toy runnerpest- maybe Reatur made it for her; I don’t know it that she carries around everywhere. Won’t let go of it for hell. She doesn’t try to mother it, though, the way a little girl would with a doll. Not much call for learning to be a mommy on Minerva.” That comment extinguished smiles from the faces of Pat and Irv. “Not much longer now,” Irv said.
“No-we have to keep those clamps and bandage packs handy,” Sarah said. “We may need ‘era any time. I just hope they’ll do some good.”
“We give it our best shot. That’s all we can do. Having Pat he did not look at her and picked his words carefully-“ feeling more like herself can’t do anything but help.” “I hope so,” Pat said.
“Irv’s right. We might make this work yet.” Sarah looked happier at the prospect than she had for a while herself.
Irv finished his coffee. Relief almost drowned guilt: evidently he didn’t have a large scarlet A tattooed on his forehead after all. He couldn’t forget those few incandescent minutes with Pat, but maybe, just maybe, he could convince himself they didn’t matter very much.
And maybe he couldn’t, too. While Sarah slept quietly beside him, her warm breath sometimes tickling his ear, he lay awake himself most of the night. “A conscience is a useless piece of baggage,” he whispered. His, however, wasn’t listening. For that matter, not even the rest of him believed it.
IX
“They’re turning!” It was anything but the best news in the world, Reatur thought as he heard the messenger’s shout. That he had been expecting it did not make it any easier to take.
His males heard it, too. Some peered over the barricade of ice and snow on which they had been working frantically for the last few days. The Skarmer were not yet in sight. Reatur was glad the weather was staying right around the place where ice melted, so he and the males could work with both snow and water to create a sturdy barrier against the invaders. Had it been too hot to keep snow on the ground, they would have had to try to build the rampart of earth, which would have taken impossibly long.
The domain master poked an eyestalk over the barrier him self, turned another on Emmett beside him. “Soon we will see them,” Reatur said. “And then-”
The human jerked the places where his arms met his body in his kind’s gesture of uncertainty. “And then we do what we do,” he said. He had less of the Omalo tongue than the other humans.
“You will use your noiseweapon, too?” Reatur asked worriedly. It did not look like much; Emmett’s big hand almost swallowed it. But the human had demonstrated it once, with lots of Reatur’s warriors to see and hear. The roar, the flash had been much like the ones that worked such ruin on them at the edge of Ervis Gorge. “The males will be braver, knowing we can match the Skarmer.”