Smoothly then she shed the robe, tall and black and beautiful as some sea creature… slid into the water and let it roll over her skin with a deep sigh. In the next moment she submerged and surfaced, hair glistening… still pigtailed: with that propriety alone, she could answer a security call naked as she was born, with never a sign of ruffled dignity: she had done so, on occasion, and so had he, and so had his staff. There was no mystery left, but there was admiration for what was beautiful, there was expectation. One didn’t say lovein dealing with atevi, as one didn’t say friendor any of those human words… but bodies knew that despite differences, there was warmth and welcome and comfort. She might technically be on duty; there was a gun with the bathrobe, he was relatively sure.
But she pursued his welfare here, strong, graceful arms keeping him warm, when all at once he felt the chill of too much air-conditioning above the water surface, and the heat of an atevi body beneath. The water steamed in the refrigerated air, made clouds around them, steamed white on Jago’s bare black shoulder, and on her hair.
Large atevi bodies chilled less rapidly than human, absorbed heat and shed it slowly, simply because they werelarger; and tall as she was, she could pick him up and throw him with not an outstanding amount of effort. But that wasn’t in their dealings, which were mutual. The dark blue walls reflected him more than her. She was always warm, and he was chronically cold. Across species lines, across instinctual lines, their first engagement had been a comedy of misplaced knees and elbows; but now they had matters much more smoothly arranged, and had no difficulty in a soap-slippery embrace. Hands wandered, bodies found gentle accommodation under the steaming surface. She enjoyed it; he did. He was recent enough from Mospheira that he was conscious of the alien, and fresh enough from converse with Jase that he still had his human feelings engaged.
And not knowing to this hour whether these interludes with the source of her man’chi were permissible for her or a scandal to her Guild, he still found no personal strength or reason to say no. He found a gentleness in the encounters that never had been with Barb… his weekends with Barb had been more intense, more desperate, less satisfying. He didn’t know which of them had been at fault in that, but he knew that what he and Jago practiced so carefully respected one another in a way he and Barb had never thought about. There was humor; there were pranks; there was never, except accidentally, pain.
He struggled not to let his heart engage. But his heart told him what he and Barb had called a relationship hadn’t been the half of what his heart wanted to feel. He had asked, or tried to ask, whether Banichi and Jago had their own relationship; and Jago had said, in banter, Banichi has his opinions; and Banichi never managed to take him seriously… never quite answering him, either; and it was not a question he could ask Tabini—how do atevi make love.
He was not about to ask the dowager, who—he was sure—would want every salacious detail.
It was sure above all else that Banichi would never betray his partner, that she wouldn’t betray Banichi, not under fire and not in bed.
It was sure between him and Jago that the man’chi involved, the sense of association, flowed upward more than down, and that no human alive understood atevi relationships in the first place—
But the more he involved himself in the atevi world, the more he knew he wasn’t in a pairing. He’d assumed a triangle; and then knew it wasn’t even that, but deep in some atevi design, a baji-naji of their own convoluted creation, and deeper and deeper into feelings he knew he wasn’t wired to feel as atevi felt, not feeling as they did, only as he could.
God help him, he thought at times, but she never asked a thing of him. And they went on as formally and properly in public as they’d always been, always the three of them, she and he and Banichi, and four and five, if one counted Tano and Algini, as it had been from the time Tabini put them together.
He’d been in love in his teens, when he’d gone into the program, with the foreign, the complex, the different.
She certainly was. God, she was… pure self-abandoned trust, and sex, and her exotic, heavily armed version of caring all in the same cocktail.
They rested nestled together till their fingers and toes wrinkled, while the heater kept the water steaming.
They talked about the recent trip to Mospheira…
“Barb came to the airport,” he said.
“Did you approve?” she asked.
“Not in the least,” he said.
They talked about the supper with the dowager.
“Cenedi looked well,” he said.
But she never talked business in their interludes. She had, in whatever form, a better sense of romance than he did, twining a wet lock of his hair about her finger. She’d undone his braid. Her tongue traced the curve of his ear and traveled into it.
A shadow appeared in the doorway, above the steam.
Banichi.
He was appalled. “Jago-ji,” he said; she was aware… surprised, but not astonished.
“Nandi.” Banichi addressed him, incongruously, in the formal mode. “Your mother has called, requesting to be patched through wherever you are. She says it’s an emergency.”
Banichi had been exposed to his mother’s emergencies. He himself certainly had. He was remotely aware of the rest of his body, and simultaneously of the rest of Jago’s body, soft and hard in all the right places, as her arms and her knees unfolded from him.
He probably blushed. He certainly felt warmth.
“I regret the untimely approach,” Banichi said, “but she says she’s calling from the hospital.”
“Oh, damn.” He was on his way out of the water as Banichi procured him his robe.
Jago gathered herself out of the water as he slipped into the robe. He had the presence of mind to glance back at her in regret for the embarrassment, whatever it was, and knew that, in a Situation, Tano and Algini being absent with Jase, Banichi had left the security post rather than send servants into the bath to pull him out.
Bren yanked the sash tight on the robe, on his way out the door. His mother had had her spells before… had had surgery three years ago, one they thought had fixed the problem with her heart as far as age and life choices let anything fix the problem.
At least shewas calling.
God, could anything have happened to Toby or Jill? He had enemies, and some of them had no scruples. He’d cleared Kroger to call the island. Word of the mission could be out, no telling where, and he’d not been in contact with Shawn, to advise him to tighten his mother’s security, that hewas on this mission.
Banichi had reached the security station near the front entry, that place which, with its elaborate electronics, held the phones.
“The ordinary phone, nadi,” Banichi advised him, and Bren turned a swivel chair and settled onto it, picking up the phone that looked like a phone.
Banichi settled into the main post and punched buttons. Bren heard the relays click. “Go ahead,” he heard the atevi operator say in Mosphei’, that deep timbre of voice, and the lighter human voice responding: “Go ahead, now, Ms. Cameron.”
“Mother?”
“Bren?” There was the quavering edge of panic in his mother’s voice, real desperation, and that itself was uncommon: he knew the difference.
“Mother, are you all right? Where’s Toby?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Bren, you’ve just got to get back here. Tonight.”
“Mother, I’m sorry. I can’t just—”
“You have to get here!”
“Where’s Toby?” Had there been a plane crash? A car wreck? “Where are you?”