Raven. He roused himself to look her way and she instantly sat at the table with her back to him and picked up her stylus. Scratching letters in Jotan columns across her paper, just as though she’d been doing it all this time. He was tempted to call her over, break the mask of that indifference with a few well-moved fingers, but no. She was still having her period and he, well, he had a tendency to get caught up in the moment.
“Thank you, Kane,” Sue-Eye whispered. The arm that lay over his chest, bruised and bloodied, squeezed him in a hug.
He licked at the nearest wound, her shoulder, and settled his chin comfortably on her hair. He thought of Raven, well again and ready for mating. He thought of tomorrow’s hunt. He thought of the ship that he would have when he finally got home. He smiled and he slept.
*
Daria woke up.
It wasn’t easy. Just opening her eyes brought her no closer to clarity. It only took her from one surreal setting to this one. Dan’s old room, awash in the flickering orange fire of sunset, with towers of boxes looming all around her and another man sleeping in the bed beside her. Daria stared up at the ceiling, watching shadows cast by swaying branches and wondering if she was really awake at all or if this were just some bizarre continuation of her dream.
She’d been dreaming of the hospital, or at least, of a funhouse mirror’s version of it. White walls glowing with sterility and her in the bed. She’d been fastened in place by thousands of wires and tubes; they surrounded her, constrained her, invaded her body, brought her fluids and took them away, filled her arms and her belly and her mouth. But this wasn’t horrible, for some reason, although the memory of it in waking Daria’s mind certainly was. In the dream, it was just Daria in the bed, and it was the way things had always forever-been. And Dan was there, wearing a tux of all things, complete with cummerbund and carnation, playing chess with her. She couldn’t move her pieces, of course, her arms were utterly constrained, so Dan moved them for her. She didn’t tell him how to move, but somehow he always knew which piece and how and in the dream this hadn’t seemed a bit odd.
He’d been a lot like that in real life, she remembered. Sensitive. So marvelously attuned to her little wants and needs. When she didn’t feel like cooking, he always had a way of popping up to suggest going out. When those first restless threads of desire began to weave themselves together, his arms had a way of sliding unexpectedly around her. In bed, he always knew just where she needed to be touched. It was as though there was no part of her life, no part of her body, that held any secrets from him. She’d always told him he was wasted in patent law, that he should have been an artist. He’d say he wasn’t temperamental enough, and then they’d both laugh.
But in the dream, there’d been no laughter. He was breaking up with her again. Calmly. Dispiritedly. She’d given his room away, he kept saying. She was letting another man wear his clothes.
She’d wanted to explain about Tagen, that Dan had already moved out and Tagen needed his things, but her mouth was filled with tubes. She could only look at him, mutely dismayed, and think about which pieces she should move so the game of chess could continue.
To go from that to this—to Dan’s old room, to the unstable glow of sunset, to the smothering weight of this heat—seemed a natural enough progression. Any second now, Tagen would probably sit up and accuse her of using him to replace Dan, and then maybe a nurse would walk in and start pouring oil into her eyes or something.
Why did it have to be so hot? She wasn’t touching Tagen, yet there was a heat pouring off him that was burning all down her left side just as though she was lying next to a furnace. She could feel sweat tickling its way down her skin in a dozen different places, but her mouth was desiccant. The sheet that was her only cover clung to her in damp folds and sent up a misty fume of intimate scent; it was like sleeping under someone’s tongue. It made it hard to lie still, even harder to think about moving, and her mind felt as leaden as her limbs.
The dream stayed sunk into the fore of her thoughts. She’d given away Dan’s room. She’d given away his clothes. She’d given away herself.
Daria turned, running her eyes over the half-covered figure of her alien, who was not quite snoring but sleeping very deeply here beside her. He was lying on his side, faced away and sprawling with that unselfconscious dominion that told of a man extremely used to sleeping alone. His back was broad and smooth. His sweat and the setting sun’s uneven lighting gave his skin an eerie luminescence. His hair cut a black curl into the perfect shape of him, tempting her to brush it away, tempting her to touch him at all. He really had an amazing body. A soldier’s body, carved to powerful dimensions, marked with moments of hard survival.
Watching the shadows slide across and around his muscles with every new breath should have been soothing, but it was hard to look at Tagen with the dream still heavy in her mind. Dan had been lean and workout-trim and wonderful, but there was no mistaking that body for this one. Even the feel of his skin was wholly different. She’d replaced a patent lawyer with a soldier and she’d replaced a human with a Jotan.
The thought fell into a hollow place and stayed there. Daria rubbed unconsciously at her belly, and then reached out and laid her palm against the high plane of Tagen’s back. His slow slumbering breaths never paused. She closed her eyes, feeling the workings of his body, the strange texture of his skin, the heat of him. He felt so real. She was the dream in this room.
Daria followed the shadowed line of his spine down over the sweat-slick country of his back until the rumpled sheet at his hips interrupted her. Not a light sleeper was her spaceman. She’d always assumed soldiers got conditioned to snap in and out of consciousness at the slightest provocation like, well, like the other night, when she’d burst in on him and he’d pointed a gun at her. Oh, it looked more like a flashlight than a gun, but having been on the wrong end of it, Daria could say with confidence that however it looked, what it was was a gun. And really, knowing that he’d done it once should be reason enough to let the man sleep now.
She slipped her arm around him anyway, letting her fingers play along the unseen hills and valleys of his stomach. Her thoughts drifted indistinctly from alien weapons to spying on Tagen while he got dressed, and then to Tagen undressing her and back to Dan. She wondered what he was doing with himself these days and the curiosity was not the depressing ache for an ex-lover as much as the cursory interest for an old classmate. She supposed he must have someone in his life by now, someone who wouldn’t do him the inconvenience of getting half her face burned away by acid. Maybe he’d finally taken that honeymoon in Hawaii they always meant to take, had those kids they used to talk about having. She wondered if she wished him well, decided after some little thought that she wouldn’t go that far, and then spooned up against Tagen.
He stirred at last, stretching hugely before rolling onto his back and raising up his head to look at her. He dropped back, scratching his hair into some semblance of order, and mumbled words so thickly-accented with sleep that she honestly couldn’t tell whether he’d said them in her language or his. It didn’t matter. She slipped in under his raised arm and laid her head on his chest.