Spin the Sky (21 page)

She isn’t really sure what.

Whatever it is, she’d found it two out of two times and those were pretty good odds. She’s never been interested in seeing anyone else naked except for her husband and he’d been quite good at sex too. After some practice, anyway.

Penelope figures it was just her luck to fall in love with one of the few men good in bed and then he went and abandoned her here for whatever reason. But she could have sworn Cesar really loved her. Or maybe what she thought was love was only lust? It certainly felt like the real thing. Or at least, at the time she couldn’t imagine wanting anyone or anything else more. Perhaps that was simply lust though.

Right now all she wants to do was wake up this mystery man and explore some long held fantasies. That sure sounds to her like pure lust. Penelope lies on her back and stares into the sunless sky above her. She obviously doesn’t pick men based on their ability to stick around and make a life together. If that were the case, she’d have married Wilhelm Asner or Mr. Finomus or half a dozen stable, successful men who have been interested in her over the last fifteen years.

She must have terrible taste in men, because instead of any of them here she is with this drifter. Someone she knows nothing about.

Penelope turns to look at her sleeping mystery man as he lies on his side, turned away from her and snoring softly. Penelope admires the curve of his biceps and softness over his belly and hips. She molds her body to his back, pulls her arm across his chest, and stops thinking. He sighs and rolls over to pulls her into his rough embrace without opening his eyes.

Any thoughts she had about sending this man away could wait for another day, Penelope decides. Already her mind turns to likely spots for future trysts. The ranch house is tricky. Her room is private enough, but too many people could see him coming and going. This little grove is lovely and outdoor sex is fun, but a girl does like a bed.

There is the room she shared with her husband. She locked that door the day he left and it’s been closed ever since.

No, she isn’t going back in there now and definitely not with a new lover. Penelope sighs and abandons thoughts of anything but right now as he turns over and draws her to him again.

A few hours later, they walk back to the elevators grinning like fools. Once, Ulixes stops to brush grass out of her hair and steal a kiss. Later, Penelope helps him straighten his collar in the elevator and runs her hands down his body.

He pulls her close and whispers, “Let me come to you tonight.”

She blushes and agrees, pulling away from him before the doors open.

Back at the ranch, Ulixes slips away to help Argos. But not before he gives her one last lingering look as she heads into the house, carefully not watching him walk away. Penelope showers quickly, smoothing her hair and trying to scrub the glow from her cheeks. Then she goes to help Lupe with dinner.

Lupe looks her over and sniffs loudly, but says nothing. Nothing in English anyway. She mutters in Spanish about people trying to get away with things they shouldn’t. Penelope decides to ignore it as Lupe bangs pots and pans, punishing them for her worries.

How she gets through the rest of the day, Penelope never knows. The hustle and bustle and warm good cheer of dinner is like a distant parade to her. Thankfully, Ulixes shows up only briefly to collect a plate of food that he takes back to his bunk without looking at her.

Penelope hears Lupe say something rude to him, but she knows that if she even looks in his direction, she’ll give everything away. Penelope always thought of herself as a good liar when lying was required, but this feeling is too big to keep inside. It’s like a fire radiating heat out of her very pores. She almost asks Argos, sitting next to her, if he can feel the warmth of it.

Penelope excuses herself as soon as she can, mumbling something about a headache. She goes to her room and flops down on her bed, fully clothed. Pulling out her customary braid, she finger combs her hair, spreads it across the bed, sighing at the pleasure of letting it loose.

Wouldn’t it be nice to let go of all the other bindings of her life? No, this is a good life. She knows that. Others have it much worse.

She has her son, friends, work she likes and plenty to eat and relative safety. Whatever bindings chafe her, they aren’t that bad. And yet… This life is so far from where she started. She could have ended up so many other ways. Penelope’s mind turns to the choices she made to get to this most unlikely place.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

D
uring the Worlder Wars, a debutante in San Antonio lived as sheltered a life as a girl can lead on a thousand acre ranch run mostly by robots. Half the time, Penelope was sneaking off to help her brothers break horses, brand cows and castrate steers. Not that they ever actually did anything more than watch the robots wield the lasers while they chewed stolen wads of Daddy’s new-baccy and spit and pretended to be real cowboys.

The other half, she was being sewn into dresses so elaborate they required magnetic hoverhoops to keep their shape. Penelope would complain to her mother that if she was so ugly it required anti-gravity devices to make her look attractive, then maybe she should stay home.

“Penny, you know you are pretty, you spoiled girl,” Penelope’s mother would sigh, as though her daughter exhausted her. “Why are you always complaining? You are one of the luckiest girls in the whole world. It is your responsibility to your family to attend these balls and make yourself pleasant. Charm your father’s business partners and maybe one of them will marry you. Then you can go live on their ranch where I can’t hear all your complaining.”

Penelope could never understand why her mother bought into all that patriarchal crap. It was almost the twenty-second century, for the love of God. Girls could do whatever they wanted now. Half her father’s business friends were women. Well, a quarter anyway. More than half the population was divorced, remarried a dozen times or in some sort of not-quite-monogamous arrangement. It was just her luck that Penelope would get born into one of the last families in the world that still thought getting married was the be-all, end-all point of female existence.

Just her luck.

So Penelope would dutifully paste a smile on her face and charm her father’s business partners in Spanish, English or whatever other language they preferred. She spent her young life learning to be charming and she was good at it.

Afterwards, she would slip back to her room and download another veterinary textbook. She had this elaborate and possibly nonsensical fantasy that involved becoming a certified veterinarian and traveling far away where nobody knew her father.

Penelope knew that when she grew up, she’d wear jeans and ratty shirts with fringe music bands on them for the rest of her life. She’d travel the world and maybe even visit those orbitals too. She’d stay up all night dancing and spend all day outside in the dirt with the animals.

What could be better?

Penelope knew the minute she saw Cesar Vaquero that she was easy picking’s for this boy. She might as well have embroidered a welcome mat across her chest and flung herself at his feet.

Penelope always hated the way she wanted Cesar. It made her feel powerless. It scared her. She kind of hated him for it. She was sure she couldn’t trust him with her instant and unconditional love. It was almost a relief when he finally broke her heart.

She’d always known he would.

Ever since the day Cesar Vaquero showed up with his father at one of San Antonio’s endless parties. She saw him through the crowd before he saw her. Tall and handsome, he had hair so red it practically glowed. Cesar looked around the room like he was on safari and they were a herd of giraffes.

That wasn’t what caused all the gossips to titter and whisper, though. It was his clothes—the grav boots, the spacer pants with all their pockets, expensive real-leather cowboy hat, and the gaudy shirt that he must have picked up somewhere in town, mistakenly thinking it made him blend in. It all gave him away.

He was Spacer. A real live Spacer.

Penelope knew every girl at the party and quite a few of the married women were lusting after this boy, so she felt no qualms about joining in the gossip and the sidelong glances. It was harmless fun.

In all likelihood, he’d never even see her. His father was handsome too, in the rough-and-ready way they were all used to out here on the edge of the “civilized” world. Within minutes of departing their shuttle, every member of San Antonio’s high society was gossiping about the handsome Vaqueros.

They talked about how the father, Larry Vaquero, had inherited one of the richest and oldest ranches in Texas, only to sell off everything and gamble it all on this colony in the sky. It had been a big scandal twenty years ago. Everyone had been sure that he’d come to a bad end.

Much to the disappointment of the gossips, Larry had not squandered away his wealth on a foolish dream, but instead built a Spacer empire and raised a child. Then he hadn’t done much else of interest until he’d decided to come back for a visit and bring his handsome young son with him to see the old country. The members of San Antonio high society were very much attached to the idea of being part of the Vaquero’s “old country.”

“Big hat, no cattle,” Penelope whispered to her best friend as they eyed Cesar talking to a group near them.

Her friend smothered a scandalized giggle. It used to be something people said in Texas about out-of-towners who pretended to be ranchers, but it had turned into a joke about the size of a man’s private parts, on the level of
“All talk and nothing in the sack.”

“He’s from the Ithaca colony,” her friend whispered back, pointing towards the sky. “That ranch up there. His dad owns it. He’s got lots of cattle, actually. Space cattle.”

“Figures,” laughed Penelope, throwing her hands up with mock disappointment. “Cows. Always cows. It’s too much too hope that we’d get anything really exotic, like a Spacer that builds lasers or mines asteroids with robots or something.”

Her friend’s eyes grew to the size of saucers. Penelope turned to see why and found Cesar Vaquero standing right behind her with a mischievous grin on his face.

He looked right at her and drawled in a gravely grave voice that sent shivers down her spine, “Ma’am, I can build a laser.”

Penelope blushed and that made her angry. She said hotly, “So you play with lasers while your daddy tends to business? They have dilettantes in space too, I guess.”

Then she bit her lip. That came out so much meaner than she’d wanted to be.

It was his turn to blush. “No, I don’t,” he said with a frown. “I know how to build a laser, that’s all. If that makes me a dilettante down here, then I guess the Earth is a lot weirder than I thought.”

“I’m sorry,” Penelope rushed to say, aware that she’d been rude and there were many eyes on her right now. “What I meant to say was: Hello, my name is Penelope. Welcome to Earth.”

She curtsied formally and smiled at him brightly, hoping to cover her slightly-too-rude remarks.

He laughed and made an attempt at a formal bow.

“It’s nice to meet you, Penelope,” he said with delighted civility. “My name is Cesar. This is a very nice little planet you have here.”

“Can I help you to some refreshments, Mr. Spacer?” Penelope replied in her best giving-the-visitors-a-tour voice.

When he nodded, she slipped her hand onto his arm and they stiffly walked to the refreshment room where he acquired punch for them. They both delighted in pretending to be formal adults instead of rowdy teens, loose at a party.

Penelope asked him questions about the Ithaca herd with regards to their health. Since she was interested in veterinary medicine, the differences between Spacer cows and those on Earth was a fascinating subject for her.

Penelope took no offence to his initial surprise that there was anything factual floating around in her pretty little head. She was used to that. Nobody ever expected her to have two brain cells to rub together. What stole her heart was how quickly Cesar got over it.

They plunged into a long conversation about the effects of gravity on bovine gastric motility and how to counteract the increased rates of hypernatremia found in the Ithaca herd. Later, Penelope would wonder whether it was the smell of him, his deep earnest eyes or the joy of a stimulating intellectual conversation that made her want to tear all his clothes off and run her tongue all over his body.

Whatever it was, Cesar must have felt it too because he dragged her behind a tree and kissed her thoroughly the first chance he got. She responded enthusiastically, but eventually Penelope knew she’d have to get back or she’d get in trouble.

“Is there someplace we can go? You and me?” whispered Cesar raggedly, trying to pull her back into his arms.

“Looking for a bit of fun on vacation, Spacerman? Something you can brag about to your friends back home?” Penelope asked as she gently pushed away from him to catch her breath.

She laughed to cover the reproach in her words. She threw up one of her hands and sighed, “There are Earth girls that are easy, but I’m not one of them. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding another girl in this crowd.”

“No,” Cesar said, looking frustrated. “I like
you
. I want to see
you
again. Can we go somewhere, now, just to talk? Are you hungry? Is there a place to get food or something? I only want to talk to you. You’re fun.”

He looked at her with eyes that melted her soul.

Oh, how much she wanted him, wanted to believe he could feel the way she felt!

While she was mostly busy getting caught up in the romance of it all, there was a part of her brain wildly trying to think of someplace private they could go so she could let this boy do what he liked with her. Another part was trying desperately to remember why she might want get away from the temptation he offered. In the end, they snuck out and ended up at an all-night coffee shop near the old university.

They were wildly out of place in their party finery. Over the stares and whispers of the five other people in the shop that night, Penelope and Cesar talked desperately and disjointedly, both distracted by their frustrated desire to touch each other.