Lewis glanced desperately about, feeling himself shunted to the wrong track. He wanted to talk to Abby, but she and Norse had disappeared. He was alone with temptation.
"Life is good, isn't it?" Gabriella asked over the music.
"What?"
"Being alive and not dead!"
He nodded, hypnotized by her body. She was grinning at him.
"I feel more alive at the Pole," he slurred. "But more dead, too."
She ground against him, mocking him. "Not that dead."
Lewis felt embarrassed. "I'm getting too drunk. I've got to sit down." His reentry into the group was going too fast. He hadn't sorted out his feelings for everyone.
"Sure." She took his hand again, both their palms moist. "But not here."
He thought again about Abby. She was with Norse! The man she'd said had saved him! Pictures flickered though his mind of the two dancing, talking, whispering. He felt humiliated by the psychologist. Dominated. Irritated. Somehow he'd barged into Lewis's life. "Okay."
They slipped out of the galley module, getting a quick blast of cold air under the icicles of the dome. It sobered him. Was she taking him to her room? Would he regret it if she did? No, they ran into the heat of the communications building. She led him up the steel stairs to the library and glanced inside. "All clear." She pulled him in.
It was dark, the air musty with that faint paper-and-paste smell of books. There was a couch they bumped against and he jerked to a stop, dizzy. She kissed him, quickly and hard.
He broke away. "In the library?"
"There's no one here. They're all at the party." She kissed him again. "I like it in places like this."
"What if someone comes?"
"I like the danger."
He glanced around. What the hell? He kissed her back this time, letting his tongue glance off her lips, her teeth, her tongue. He could feel the sting of alcohol there. His head reeled with the smell of perfume and perspiration and musk. "Jesus."
"It's not good to hold your feelings in. It backs up on you." Her hands were running from his chest to the back of his thighs. "Then it blows up, like Tyson."
"Gabriella, I like you, but I'm not sure this is a good idea yet…"
"I want you, Jed. I want you to want me."
He wanted it, too, even though he felt nothing for this woman. It was just that she was a woman. Her beauty inflamed him. She crossed her arms and lifted off her top in an instant and then, with a twist of her wrist, dropped her skirt. The lace of her underwear revealed shadows, of her nipples and delta of hair. Lewis groaned. She was pulling at his own long-sleeved thermal shirt and he helped pull it off. They kissed again and he unfastened her bra. It slipped away, her nipples like tarnished coins, the tips engorged and hard. He was just as hard and she pushed against him excitedly. Then she broke free and turned, looking back at him coyly, and slowly wiggled her panties down. It was dark but he could see light reflected off the curve of her hips. A topography of shadow led to the darker mysteries beyond.
"Take me on the couch," she whispered, crawling over the arm of it.
He thought of Abby as he swayed unsteadily. She was the one he liked, dammit. "I'm not ready for this," he tried, slurring the words.
Gabriella twisted onto her back, reached up, and snagged the end of his belt, tugging her to him. Her hand brushed his jeans. "Yes, you are."
He let her pull him as if on a bridle. He didn't know this woman! But he wanted her, wanted her badly. It had been a long time.
She reached up to grapple with his pants. He was fearful he was going to simply explode. She was gorgeous, a chocolate candy melting in the dark. He felt himself starting to plunge toward the pool of femininity beneath him.
Then there was a gasp.
He jerked around, Gabriella's hand still at his belt. Abby was in the library doorway, something bright on her cheeks, a tear that glistened in the dim light. She looked wildly from Lewis to Gabriella, taking in the moment.
The other woman looked at the intruder angrily, her knees up, her thighs parted. "We're busy."
Abby gave a low moan. "Why didn't you wait?"
Then she vanished.
"Abby!"
There was a hand on his leg. "Forget her, Jed. She's gone."
But he was jerking away, awkward in his drunkenness, suddenly frantic to break free of this woman holding his leg. He didn't want this!
"Damn you, take me!"
He pushed Gabriella's nude body back down to the couch, his hands marveling despite himself at the smoothness of her skin, every fiber of his being screaming regret. Her hands slipped along his forearm as he pulled away and suddenly she looked despairing at his abandonment, her act broken, her seductiveness punctured, her knees pressed together. "Please…"
"I'm sorry."
"Don't leave me like this…" There was a hollow hopelessness.
"I have to go!"
"I just want…" It was a groan. She was pleading.
But he'd already lurched out of the room in his bare feet, banging down the cold metal stairs and stumbling out the door into the chill of the dome. The snow burned his soles. Like a drowning man, straining for breath, he whirled around looking for Abby. Nothing! Frantic, he made his way to the berthing building where she slept. Everything was terribly wrong.
"Abby!" The call echoed down the corridor. What did he care what people thought?
Her tried her knob but her door was locked. He hammered on its surface.
"Abby!.."
But if she was behind it, she didn't answer his mournful pounding.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Amundsen-Scott base came awake with a collective hangover, wrung out from alcohol, the temperature extremes of the Three Hundred Degree Club, and emotional depletion. Clouds had moved back in, the outside was ink, and the temperature rose to eighty-nine below and settled there. Norse sent a message to Washington, D.C., explaining that Tyson had disappeared and that the base was in the process of recovering its emotional equilibrium. Some of the research would slip for a day or two. In his professional opinion, the survivors could still endure the winter. Personal e-mail and satellite telephone messages were still on hold until the group completed its catharsis.
Their mood was fragile. They needed time.
Lewis lay awake for most of the night and then fell into an exhausted sleep that lasted until early afternoon. He woke feeling wearier than when he'd gone to bed, and he scratched morosely at the frost of the Ice Room. He supposed that with four people gone from the base he could move to an interior berth, but the thought of occupying the space of a dead man seemed ghoulish. He sat on his bunk, euphoria replaced with depression. I have no friends. Norse had undercut him by pursuing Abby. Abby he had betrayed. Poor Gabriella he'd abandoned.
He dressed and went to the galley, dreading meeting either woman. Fortunately, neither was there. He ate a few leftovers without appetite, his mouth like cotton, and then went outside into the dark, hoping to assuage his guilt and regret with the rote labor of collecting data. The cold was bracing, a sharp reminder of where he really was. The surroundings were so black that the meteorology building looked like a hovering spacecraft as he approached it. He climbed the stairs, shed his parka and boots, and duly recorded every decimal point: a robot on assignment. Lewis wished he had the control of a robot. He'd been welcomed into the fold only to drunkenly embarrass himself in front of the person he cared about most. Now that he'd made the club, he'd become a fool.