Thursday 9 November, 2062
Marriott Inn
Toronto, Ontario
Face has left, the sun's coming up around the edges of Toronto, and I'm opening the grille of Boris's cat carrier when my phone buzzes. I pick it up: Gabe. No preamble, just, “As-tu besoin de moi?”
“Oui,” I say. “I need you.”
He closes the connection, and twenty minutes later he's at my door. I open it and he steps inside. “Everything okay?”
“I'll live. Where's the doc?” Half bitterness and half relief. You're too old to go around owning people, Jenny. Oh, yeah. But it would be nice to try, wouldn't it? Carve my initials in his arm—
“With the girls.” He puts a hand on my left shoulder, where I can halfway feel it, and leads me to the bed, pulls me down against his chest, and makes me lie with my head on his shoulder while he smoothes my hair. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I just found out some old friends didn't make it. Calisse de crisse. I should be used to it by now.”
“Never get used to it,” he says.
There's something achingly satisfying about just playing house this way. I won't say it beats the sex, because the sex is pretty goddamned amazing. But it's even more amazing, some nights, just to be held. His finger traces a spiral behind my ear and I sigh. “Penny for your thoughts, Genevieve.”
I poke at them and reply, surprised. “I'm happy.” I'm not really lying. Despite Barb, Mitch, Bobbi, Leesie, and the whole big fucking world. I wonder if I did the right thing telling Razorface to go to the cops. If it will damage the Montreal project just as surely and deeply as letting him and his pet terrorists blow the hell out of the lab. The whole idea is so fragile, so foolish. And I won't let the Chinese get there first. Not after thirty years of expansionist policy.
“Pourquoi es-tu heureuse?”
Yeah, I know, Gabe. I just told you my friends were dead. Crazy, huh? “J'ai tout que j'ai voulu.” And that's not a lie either. “Toi. Moi. Les jeunes filles, Elspeth. Presque comme une famille.”
“A family? That's all you want, love?”
And just like that, into the realm of all the things I never thought Gabe would ever have to know. Boris jumps up on the bed beside us and bumps my steel hand with his head. I chicken out and go for the joke. “Well, maybe just a dog.”
He ignores my feeble attempt at a redirect. “Pourquoi n'as-tu jamais des enfants? And where did the cat come from?”
I mumble something noncommittal against his chest and push the cat away. Boris goes, purring. There's no light in the room but a funeral-parlor style floor lamp beside the reading chair — the kind that casts a circle of light on the ceiling to reflect softly downward and make everything in the room look sickly green. “It's my cat. From Hartford. My friend brought him up.”
Bulldog Gabe presses me. “You'd've made a wonderful mother.”
The redirect isn't working. Frontal assault. “Are you proposing to me, Gabriel?”
He blinks. “Would it work?”
“Wouldn't be fair to the doc, now, would it?”
“Developing a taste for fidelity all of a sudden?” He kisses me on the head to take the sting out of his words.
“I—” Elspeth isn't a threat. If anything, she's better for Genie, at least, than I am. If only I didn't like you so damned much, Doc. I won't let the girls see us fight over their father like a couple of alley cats. No matter how good it would feel to not be a grown-up once in a while. And there's certainly enough of Gabe to go around. “Ask me in a year, mon ami.” It's a little weird to say that, because I'm even halfway sure we'll both still be around that long.
He nods, and we lie there for a little just listening to each other breathe. “That was a bad question I asked you earlier, wasn't it? It's none of my business. I'm sorry.”
“No,” I answer, and he tenses in my arms. “I mean, you have the right to ask me anything, mon ange. But you will not like the answers to many of your questions.”
“Oh.” I expect him to withdraw. He pulls me closer. “Would it help to talk about it?”
I know what he's thinking. Battlefield rape, or the casual boyfriend I sent to a life sentence — and a short life sentence at that — or maybe childhood sexual abuse. He's thinking he'll hold me and dry my tears and make a show of telling me it wasn't my fault. And that I'll somehow feel better, after. Gabe strokes my hair. The silence has gotten too long. I close my eyes.
Richard?
“I hear you, Jenny.”
Hold my hand?
Richard laughs, but he's right there. “Brave girl.”
“Gabe, before I was in the army… I was a runaway.”
“Oh. I think I understand.”
I lay my steel hand flat on his chest, feeling warmth and a distant sort of pressure, the tremble of his heart in the cavern of his chest. “No,” I say again. I've never told anybody this.
Anybody.
“Je pense que tu ne comprends pas, Gabriel. I was a runaway. A — une peau.” His whole body contracts as if from a belly blow. A skin, but that's not what it means in the gutter. “A street-corner whore.”
It's not sinking in. I can feel it in the enormity of the silence that fills the room.
“Gabe?”
“Merci à Dieu,” he gasps. “Putain de marde. I guessed a lot, Jenny, but that — I never—”
“I never wanted you to.” Feeling the stiffness in his body, I wait for him to pull away. Peddling it is not high on the list of things nice girls do where Gabe comes from. “I… it wasn't my choice, exactly, and—”
And then he whispers into my hair and splits my heart from branch to root. “Tu as fais ce que tu devais faire, chérie,” he whispers. You did what you had to do. “You lived. You're here. Quel est mauvais avec cela?”
Gabriel. I never have had enough faith in you. “Je t'aime,” I say against his neck, and feel him smile. “And it was pretty terrible.”
“So you decided not to have kids because of it?”
“Non.” The third denial. “Chrétien. Mon maquereau.” My pimp. “He decided it for me. Do you know what quinacrine is?”
“It's an antimalarial. I've taken it.”
“Yes.” Me, too. “It's also a caustic agent. Administered internally, with phenol, it's a cheap way of performing a nonreversible sterilization. It causes”—I continue over his comprehending gasp, because now it's in my mouth and I have to spit it out—“massive scarring. Like a really bad case of the clap.” My voice — clinical, level — ends in a silence he doesn't fill. “I'm barren. I never have to worry about birth control.”
“Brave girl,” Richard whispers one more time inside my head before he vanishes.
Gabriel, my angel, pulls me so close I can feel him thinking. “That's—” His vocabulary fails him, which might just be an international first. Gabe had a pretty sheltered childhood, by my standards, but he does have a knack for the colorful turns of phrase.
“Just as well. If I had had a baby, Gabe, I'd be dead by now. I never would have gotten away from Chrétien. Army wouldn't have taken me.”
“But later. You could have—”
“Had a test-tube kid? I'm old-fashioned.”
“—adopted.”
I sit up, away from him, fold my legs under me and grin down. He smiles back, reaches up to pinch my nose. I bite his finger. “You stupid shit. I did. Or didn't you notice?”
He laughs. And then the gentle touches grow considering as he strokes the faded places where my scars were washed away by Charlie's wonderful machines. “Jen?”