Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance (22 page)

Brant pulled her to her feet.

“You look stressed,” she said.

“I just reminded myself of something I
had forgotten,” he told her. “About trust and risk…and other
things.”

Lilly frowned. “You’re not making a lot
of sense.”

“Maybe this will,” he said and kissed
her.

Coming home had never tasted so
sweet.

Hunger and the faint noises from Brant’s
room, next to hers, finally drove Catherine to the common room, in
search of food.

Bedivere looked up from the bowl he was
eating from, almost like he was startled.

“Have you stopped eating since you woke
up?” she asked him, heading for the dispenser. “If you’re not
careful, you’ll get fat and have to live with high blood pressure
for the rest of this body’s useful life.”

“I’ve been in the gym as much as I’ve
been in here,” he said quietly. “I had absolutely no muscle tone. I
could barely lift anything.” He leaned down and picked up the heavy
steel chair next to him by the bottom of one leg and lifted it
without effort. “I’m working on changing that.” He put the chair
back down and patted it—an invitation. “You’ve been sleeping?”

“Trying.” She hit the lucky button and
waited for the meal to produce. “But Lilly and Brant are in his
room and we’re going to have to do something about soundproofing
the interior walls a bit better.”

Bedivere smiled. “Lilly and Brant.
That…has symmetry.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Catherine
thought it was an oddly poetic way of describing the pair. Her meal
dinged, so she lifted it out and dumped the bowl on the table and
sat down.

Bedivere reached behind her and snagged
a fork and handed it to her.

“Thanks.”

He nodded and returned to his own
bowl.

Catherine ate, barely noticing the
food. It was just calories. She was more aware of Bedivere sitting
to her right. She still couldn’t quite take it for granted yet.

Bedivere put his bowl aside and sat
back. “If Lilly and Brant are together, that just leaves you and
me.”

Catherine jumped. She lowered her fork.
“What are you saying?”

Bedivere threaded his fingers together
and rested his knitted hands on the table in front of him. It
looked casual and disarming. “You’ve thought about it. Don’t tell
me you haven’t.”

Her heart thudded. “You mean sex?”

His smile was small, but his eyes were
alive with…something. “You have very few hang-ups about sex left.
But you won’t let yourself think too hard or far about having sex
with me because you lived through the era where computers were
almost wiped out by the Sinnikka as mechanical evil personified.
That bias has stayed with you ever since.”

Was that true? Catherine stared at him.
“Are you calling me a bigot?” she asked.

“I’m calling you human. I kissed you
once, Cat. Did you like it?”

The quick replies, the changes of
direction, were confusing her and giving her no time to think. That
only ever happened when she talked to Bedivere. She was always left
stumbling along in his wake, trying to keep up.

“You didn’t
hate
it, did you?
You didn’t find it repulsive like you thought it would be.” His
voice was lower and it seemed like he was leaning closer.

“No, I didn’t hate it,” she said
truthfully. Truth was the only defense with him. He always saw
through any dissembling she tried.

“And you’ve thought about maybe another
kiss. Just to see if it was as good as the first, or if you just
imagined it all.” He really
was
closer now. He’d turned on
the chair so he was facing her and he was leaning in, his breath
warm against her neck.

Her heart zoomed. But she couldn’t
answer. She couldn’t possibly answer.

“Every time I took someone into my room
and shut the door, your imagination started to work, didn’t it?” He
was so close now, he was whispering. Catherine stayed absolutely
still. She was afraid to move. Afraid to break the moment. She was
frozen, but her heart was racing.

“Call it an experiment, if you want,”
he said softly and now she could feel the heat from his body
leaning over her. “Satisfy your curiosity. Kiss me and see.”

She couldn’t move.

His big hand lifted and the long
fingers pressed under her chin, turning it, so that she was looking
at him.

“Kiss me,” he whispered.

She pressed her lips to his—she barely
had to lean forward to do it. The lips were the same. He tasted the
same. She tossed away thought and just enjoyed the kiss. Someone
sighed and she realized it was her. That made her blink and pull
back.

Bedivere was smiling. It was one of his
little smiles that just tugged on the corner of his mouth. “You
started to think it through again,” he said. “That’s no good.”

“What do you want from me?”

“A kiss. That’s all. A kiss freely
given, with no conditions attached.”

“The world doesn’t work that way—” She
muffled a little shriek of surprise as he tipped her chair back, so
that she was lying in it, looking up at him. He held the chair up
easily and shook his head. “The world works whatever way you want
it to. You’ve always known that, Cat. You’ve wrenched your life out
of it and shaped it the way you want, but for some reason you won’t
apply that to me.”

“Let me up.”

“No.” He kissed her again. She had
experienced kisses aplenty, but this was different. It was as if
Bedivere was throwing his whole heart and soul into it. Into
her.

With the chair tipped back, she
couldn’t break the kiss. She couldn’t do anything but accept
it.

Then he brought the chair up, dropping
it back on its feet and stood up. “If you want another one of
those, come and find me.”

Catherine watched him walk out the
door, her thoughts scattered and her nerves sizzling.

She found him on the flight deck,
sitting in his navigator’s chair, studying the readouts and status
reports.

“The tether will give you all that
data, won’t it?” she asked.

Bedivere smiled. “I like doing it the
human way.” He turned the chair to face her. “Still can’t sleep,
Cat?”

“Why aren’t
you
sleeping?”

“I’m benefiting from one of the side
effects of a new body that you hinted at. Lots of energy. I’m wide
awake.” He picked up her hand and drew her closer, until her knees
pressed against his. “Back for another kiss, Cat?”

She swallowed. “You’re playing some
sort of game, aren’t you?”

“No game.” He shook his head. “I like
kissing you. I’d like to do more of it, but first we have to get
rid of this ancient prejudice you’re carrying, that even you don’t
want anymore.”

“I’m not prejudiced.” She didn’t like
that label.

“You are, or you would have kissed me a
long time ago. You’re always taken what you wanted, even if it
takes twenty years of sweat and worry.”

“You’re talking about the tether? You
worked just as hard for that.”

“You taught me how.” His hands settled
around her waist and he lifted her onto his lap and brushed the
hair out of her eyes. “Do you want that kiss or not?”

“Yes….” She breathed it out.

His lips met hers and this time she was
glad he’d sat her down first.

The next time they passed in the
corridor, Bedivere pushed her against the wall and held her pinned
against it while he made her body limp with wanting. His lips
trailed over her flesh and his hands followed. Catherine couldn’t
put a coherent thought together.

He left her there, clinging to the wall
for support, her body throbbing.

Wondering when he would kiss her next
kept her fluttering and anxious. Her mind kept wandering. When she
realized how thoroughly he had hijacked her thoughts, Catherine
stalked to his room and banged on the door with her fist. There was
no danger Brant and Lilly would hear her. They were a whole deck
away.

Bedivere opened the door and stood
leaning against the frame. Casual. Almost indifferent. “It’s about
time,” he said, his voice low.

“I came to…” But she couldn’t finish
the thought. Instead, she reached up and kissed him. His arms came
around her and she was lifted off the floor and carried. When he
laid her on the bed, she was more than ready and raised her arms up
to him.

Another prejudice died in the next
little while. She realized she had assumed that because he was who
he was, Bedivere would perhaps be clumsy and hesitant. Instead, he
played her body like an instrument, eliciting responses from her
she hadn’t experienced in hundreds of years…and some, never before.
She became lost in the novelty, the sensations and the raw, earthy
joy of sharing.

Afterward, Bedivere chuckled and kissed
the nape of her neck. “And now I understand the other benefits of a
new body.”

“Being…?”

He pushed against her shoulder,
pressing her back against the mattress and leaned over her once
more. “Stamina,” he breathed in her ear, the burr in his voice
thick and sexy, as his hand swept over her tingling flesh.

The mesh tether meant that Bedivere
could slip out of the body when it slept and roam the ship as he
had once always done, long ago, when no one had known he was there.
But with Cat lying in his arms, he didn’t want to. He preferred to
stay right here, even if that meant he couldn’t remain conscious to
experience the sensations of her naked, warm and soft body against
his, or listen to her quiet breathing, or feel the brush of her
hair over his skin.

As sleep took the body and the moment
when he could withdraw arrived, he deliberately ignored it and
passed into the blank state that was “sleep”.

Except it wasn’t a blank place.

There was light there. Voices. Images
seen from the corner of his eye, only to be snatched away when he
tried to look at them longer. He heard Cat speaking his name and
reached out for her, but the aural illusion faded, leaving him
alone in this wild, unpredictable place.

He wandered, trying to make sense of
it. Logic was his defining mode—he understood that need in him as
clearly as he understood his origins and his essential nature as a
computer. As mathematics could be used to describe the world and
everything in it, he clung to that certainty as he moved through
the alien landscape of sleep.

Until he found the shadow plain. It was
ahead, a calm place that beckoned. He moved there slowly, wary of
anything he did not understand. But the plain opened up to him and
he
did
understand. This was a non-human place. Only he could
understand it....

“Bedivere! Wake up!”

He woke, much as he had woken in the
new body, blinking and emerging from a blankness of the mind, which
forced him to reassess instantaneously the state of everything
around him. He did it in a heartbeat.

Cat. His room. Heated wanting.

Catherine was leaning over him, her
hair a dark red in the single light in the room. “You were having a
nightmare or something. You were rigid and barely breathing.”

“Nightmare?”

“You know what they are, right?”

“I’ve read about them.”

“Well, I think you were having
one.”

He frowned. “I don’t think so.” What he
had felt and seen didn’t fit with the psychological torture that
nightmares put humans through.

“Anyway,” she said as she moved away
from him. “The proximity alarm went off a few minutes ago. We’re
closing in on the gates.”

Bedivere sat up. “We can’t be. They’re
a week away yet.”

“Check the data yourself, silly.”

He did, reaching through the tether for
the most up to date readings. She was right. “Emergence in
twenty-three minutes, but I don’t know how this can be.”

“Maybe in all the panic going on when
we jumped into this hole, you made a mistake?”

“I don’t make mistakes.” It simply
wasn’t possible for him to make mistakes. Not of this sort. Human
errors were possible. Faulty judgment of the always precarious
human emotions…those were the errors he could afford to make, that
he
must
make, in order to hide among them and keep Cat safe.
But not a simple navigation error. It was worrying.

Catherine was dressing rapidly and he
made himself sit up and reach for his clothing, even though he
really wanted to stay where he was.

“Do you get to wake Lilly and Brant, or
do I?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Already done,” he told her, for he had
sent an alarm to Brant’s room just after checking the navigation
status.

Catherine gave him a small smile. “I
don’t suppose you can reach out and tell the kitchen dispenser to
whip up some coffee, too?”

He got to his feet and drew her back
against him and kissed her because he simply couldn’t let her go
without one. “It’s already half-done. If you stop there on your way
to the flight deck, it should be ready.”

“I don’t know what I did without you,”
she said, smiling at him. He understood it was a small joke, a jest
that held a kernel of truth. But after the utter loneliness of dark
plain he had just visited and the fear in Cat’s dream voice, he
couldn’t even smile back.

The Ivory City, Cathain City, Cathain
III. FY 10.070

Kare took the heavy coat the aide was
holding out to him and threw it on as one of the guards led him
through the private wing, which was dark and still and silent at
this late hour, down to the lower levels of the city.

Down on these levels where Kare rarely
visited were the service corridors and workrooms that kept the city
running smoothly. The floors and walls were utilitarian and the
ways narrow. Like the upper levels, the service areas were also
gripped by the stillness of the night, held hostage by the human
sleep cycle and the absence of the sun.