The Administration Series (51 page)

"An accident." After a couple of seconds, she nodded. "Well . . . accidents happen, I suppose."

"Yes. They do." The memory of that morning at I&I, of watching Marian die, left a sour taste in his mouth.

"So, does Ash know you're seeing him?"

"I'm not
seeing
him. I told you that already." He couldn't keep the irritation out of his voice. "It's purely sexual, so there's no reason to tell her anything. Or anyone else. It's not as if anyone's ever going to meet him."

Except, of course, they had — here, at SimTech, when Toreth had come to use the sim. Even though the private sessions had been out of official hours, there was no way to keep them secret. For one thing, it would be breaking the rules he required others to follow. He wondered now how many people knew, or had guessed, and what they were saying about it.

"So,
does
Ash know?" Cele asked again.

"Probably. I didn't send her a memo, but I don't smuggle him in here under a blanket, either. However, Asher knows when to mind her own business."

Cele was, predictably, utterly unabashed. "You're beginning to sound awfully defensive about this. Sure you want to stick to 'purely sexual'?"

"Yes. Absolutely."

"Fair enough. Have you told Dilly?"

No point hedging around it. "No."

"She's back soon."

"In a fortnight, yes. I'll tell her about it when I see her. I'd rather you didn't mention it if you speak to her before then."

She nodded slowly. "Are you going to tell her everything?"

"I don't really see that it's any of your business."

Her eyes narrowed. "Don't give me that shit. I've known you too long."

"Very well. What I do with Toreth —" he tapped the fading bruise, "— is something apart from the rest of my life. I don't want you, or Dilly, or anyone, to get involved with it. Dilly doesn't need to know, and I don't want you to tell her. Clear enough?"

"Crystal, but I don't like it."

"I'm not expecting you to. " Time to play his best card. "I'm just asking you, as a friend, not to tell her that one thing."

Cele hesitated, and then said, "She'll see the bruises."

"There won't be any by then."

She shrugged. "Okay. I won't mention it."

"Thanks."

"But —" She held her finger up again — a warning this time. "If she notices anything herself and she asks me about it, I'm not going to lie for you. Not to Dilly."

No more than he'd expected. "And I wouldn't want you to. Would you like some coffee?"

When she nodded, jewellery ringing musically, he rose and crossed to the coffee machine.

"Biscuits?" he offered. "Homemade. There's ginger or shortbread."

"I'd
love
some. Both kinds. Hey, does this mean you're baking again?"

He frowned at her over his shoulder. "Baking again?"

"Yeah. I mean . . ." Her expression turned speculative. "You haven't done much baking in years. Since Mel left, in fact."

He looked away. "I cook all the time."

"Not to the extent of leaving tins of biscuits scattered around the place. I had to practically get on my knees and beg for the last lot of gingerbread."

True, he supposed. "What on Earth does that have to do with anything?"

"Nothing, nothing. Ignore me. Just thinking out loud."

Obviously not true, but he didn't feel like pursuing it. He picked up the jug of coffee. "So, to change the topic, how's
your
love life? Did you genuinely mean you were a lonely single?"

She waved her hand. "I exaggerated. Single, but not lonely. I've put my second lesbian phase on hold and I'm having a celibate year. Avoiding distractions."

It was only when Cele exclaimed, "Whoa!" and pointed that he realised the coffee had overflowed into the saucer while he stared at her.

Cele laughed. "Lord, it's nice to know what your friends think of you."

He poured the coffee carefully back into the jug and tapped the saucer on the edge. "It doesn't, ah, seem quite like you, that's all."

"Well, after the first three months I thought I'd make a virtue out of necessity. But really I haven't got time to look, never mind to get down and do the dirty."

"You should make time. It's worth it."

She shook her head, smiling, and took the offered cup. "Listen to you. The man who leaves work only to sleep and shower."

"Not any more." Warrick checked his watch again. "I'm seeing him tonight, in fact, so . . . "

"Hey, far be it from me to get in the way of the kink-a-thon." Cele set down the cup and opened her folder, bringing out a stack of large sheets of creamy paper. "Did you get the copies? I brought the originals anyway. I always think paper looks so much better than screens."

"Luddite."

She grinned, unrepentant. "Do you want some cheap, autogenerated computer pretties, or do you want Great Art?"

While she spread the sim room designs out on his desk, he stared into his cup, thinking about the coming evening.

A lover he wanted to keep away from everyone he knew.

A man who smiled while he hit him.

A murderer.

What the hell
am
I doing with him?

Strangely, Marian's death was part of the answer, an unbreakable link between them, something that he could never walk away from. Refusing to see Toreth wouldn't bring Marian back to life, or undo the part Warrick had played in her death.

Better to keep Toreth an enclosed, secret part of his life, as segregated as he could make it.

Not as segregated as it had been, though. One more person who knew now — a friend, not a colleague — and Dillian was returning soon. The only certain way to stop this slow blurring of the line was to tell Toreth it was over, and that was simply unthinkable. It was too good to give up.

He'd find a way to handle it, and to keep things in their proper places.

Then he turned his attention back to work.

Toreth found Warrick waiting in one of the side booths. He'd already bought them both drinks, and Toreth knocked back a third of his before he sat down, or even said hello. Warrick looked at him enquiringly.

"I've had the most fucking awful day," Toreth said with feeling.

He slid onto the bench opposite Warrick and leaned back against the smooth wood of the booth, closing his eyes. "From the second I arrived it was one bloody thing after another. Sara went home sick and she managed to double-book me a room and lose half my files before she left. And, if you can believe it, Chevril offloaded two case's worth of prisoners onto
me
, as if I didn't have enough to do with the investigation. Tillotson is a complete fucking idiot. And they were both real bastards, impossible interrogation requests from Justice, no leeway at all for results. And I have to go back in tomorrow morning to finish the fucking job. Fucking Justice interrogations, on a Saturday! Sometimes I think . . ."

A certain icy quality in the silence coming across the table finally pierced through his monologue and induced him to open his eyes. Warrick regarded him with an expression that might charitably be described as unsympathetic.

"I'm not interested," he said bluntly.

Toreth sat up, belatedly remembering where he was. "I was only —"

"You were talking about your job. Specifically, about interrogation. I don't want to hear about it." Warrick took a small sip of his drink and then set the glass carefully in the centre of the coaster. "You know I don't want to hear about it. I've told you that before. Several times. And yet you keep doing it." He looked up. "Why?"

"I . . ." Toreth tried to think of an answer which wouldn't sound stupid, then gave up. He shrugged. "I forgot."

"Mm." Warrick stood up, and picked up his jacket without putting it on. "My sister is arriving back from Mars tomorrow. I'll be busy for the next few days, so don't bother to call."

And then he walked out.

Toreth stared after him, too taken aback to react. He'd had the whole evening planned out, and the sudden wrench off course threw him utterly. When the fuck had
Warrick
started being the one who could walk out? By the time he'd started to stand, Warrick had pushed open the bar door and left without a backwards glance.

So much for a nice stress-relieving evening's fucking, the prospect of which had been all that had kept him going through the afternoon's interrogation. At least Warrick hadn't finished his drink before he left. Toreth pulled it across the table and drank it. Then he leaned on one arm, watching the ice melting against the side of the glass. For a couple of minutes he tried to be angry, but he was too tired and generically pissed off to focus his resentment on Warrick. It was the perfect fucking end to his day.

Toreth finished his own drink and thought about going home. But, quite frankly, he couldn't see the point. Even looking for another fuck seemed like too much effort. So he had another drink, and then another, and so on until the very last one just before the bar closed, when he was surprised to discover that the tab was larger than it usually was when he was drinking in company.

And that he was pissed. Very pissed. Very, very pissed, in fact.

Out in the street, he leaned against a post and waved at passing taxis, and tried to recall the last time he'd drunk so much. He couldn't remember. Actually, he could barely remember his own address. Funnily enough, he found he could remember Warrick's easily, even though he'd never been there. He'd read it in his security file. And, of course, it would be in the old investigation files. So it wouldn't matter if he turned up uninvited. Not that he was going to. Warrick wouldn't want to see him. They'd had an argument, sort of, he thought, although the exact details lay drowned in whiskey. It had definitely been Warrick's fault, anyway.

And Warrick had no right to walk out, either. No right at all.

When a taxi finally stopped, Toreth wasn't quite sure whose address he gave. Luckily, or perhaps not, the taxi was new and the voice-recognition well up to the task of deciphering slurred directions, so he only had to give the address once. Since he didn't recognise the building it stopped at, he assumed it must be Warrick's. Quite a nice building, in what looked like a nice bit of the city.

Nice.

The first problem was that the building was large, and consequently had a large number of flats. Through the reinforced glass door, he could see a guard watching him, but he didn't feel like trying to explain what he wanted. There was a comm screen on the outside, though. After a couple of minutes trying to focus, he entered what he hoped was the number of Warrick's flat and pressed the button. No answer. He tried again. Hadn't Warrick said something about going away somewhere?

Toreth leaned against the wall above the screen, resting his head on his forearm. Then he put his finger back on the button and held it down while he tried to remember what Warrick had said. Yes. He was going to see his sister. Oh, fuck.

The cool night air had chased some of the alcohol from his mind, but his body was as pissed as it had been when he left the bar. More pissed, indeed, because the drink he'd had before he left would be filtering into his bloodstream faster than the earlier drinks were filtering out. Sober, Toreth was good at calculating drug clearance rates. In the state he was in now he was still trying to remember how many milligrams of alcohol the liver could process per whatever when the comm screen flickered into life.

Toreth realised he still had his finger on the button, and released it. Luckily, he could see the screen from where he was. Letting go of the wall suddenly felt like a very bad idea.

The screen showed nothing other than the number of the flat he had been buzzing for the last however long it was, but he couldn't mistake the voice over the speaker for anyone else.

"What the hell are
you
doing here?"

He couldn't see Warrick, but clearly Warrick could see him. Which sounded very metaphorical. Or something.

"I —" His tongue felt as though someone had injected an extravagant amount of local anaesthetic into it. "I jus' wanted to say, you don't have any right . . ."

"Oh, for God's sake." There was a long pause. "Stay there. I'll be down."

Toreth nodded mutely, then rolled round so that his back was against the wall. The full moon above swam in and out of focus. He had bed-spin, and he wasn't even in bed. Very slowly, he slid down the wall.

Oh. Fuck.

By the time Warrick opened the door, Toreth had managed to rally slightly. He looked round, which wasn't so bad if he did it slowly, and smiled.

Warrick stood in the doorway, completely and carefully dressed. He'd even taken the time to brush his hair, Toreth noted absently. Even so, he looked less than thrilled to see Toreth.

"Since the odds are very heavily against my being able to carry you upstairs, you'd better stand up," he said icily.

Toreth eventually managed to struggle to his feet as Warrick watched impassively. Once they were inside, he deigned to lend aid to the extent of an arm around Toreth's waist, waving the guard away when he approached.

The silence as they went up in the lift was deafening, and continued until they reached the flat. After they went inside, Warrick propped him carefully against the wall while he closed and locked the door. Then he took hold of Toreth again and pointed down the other end of the hall.

"What?"

"The toilet is over there."

"I don't —"

"Toreth, I have unpasteurised curd cheese in my fridge which is less green than you. If you throw up on my floor, you are going back out of that door. Now, move."

He nearly began a protest, but whether it was the power of suggestion, or the change from the cold outside to the warm flat, or simply the night catching up with him, Toreth realised Warrick was right. He made a grab for Warrick's shoulder and missed. Warrick caught him before he fell, muttering something Toreth didn't catch, but which sounded uncomplimentary.

"I think I'm —" Toreth put his hand hastily over his mouth and swallowed heavily.