Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Tagen closed his eyes, took a breath, and opened them again. “It has been,” he said quietly, “a very long time since last I was called liar to my face.”

She stared at the floor.

“I know that I do not trust you,” he continued. “I suppose that it is reasonable you do not trust me. However, I know one thing in advantage of you. I know that I am not a liar. And I think perhaps you are not, either. So.”

He stood up, and she raised her eyes to look at his knees.

“So,” he said again. “My mission here is certain to be difficult enough without us warring at one another. I shall pretend to believe you when you say you will not attempt to run from me.” He moved to the door, pulling the hammer from his belt, and removed the broken halves of the restraining board from the jamb. He set them next to the pieces of broken furniture from yesterday’s battle, and then turned to face her.

“I can…pretend to believe you when you say you won’t hurt me,” she said. She gave him half a smile. “There,” she said. “Now we’re both liars.”

Gods, that was almost funny. Tagen rubbed at his eyes. “So we are.”

She got up and started gathering the little pile of debris into her arms. “Do me a favor before the grocery guy gets here,” she said. “In the laundry room…er, in the back of the house where you cornered me yesterday?”

“What of it?”

“You’ll find a little basket with some pairs of socks folded up in it. Put some on.” She nodded at his feet, and then went outside.

Tagen followed her out onto the porch and watched her carry her broken pieces of wood over to a standing container nearly as tall as she herself. She began to unload, wedging bits of furniture and board down amidst bulky black sacks. She didn’t even look in the direction of her groundcar.

“I’m starting to think I’m a better liar than you,” she called, without looking up.

Tagen caught the beginnings of a rueful smile before it could fully form and retreated into the house. He looked down at his feet. Socks, she’d said. The word was unfamiliar. Talon caps, perhaps? Such were worn by civilians, of course, but as a military man, he was expected to keep his claws and talons as well-maintained as any other weapon. Was he damaging her floor? He hadn’t noticed, but if anyone would, it would be her. He glanced outside again—she was already coming back to the house—and then set off down the hall to the utility room.

She’d been cleaning in here. He found the ‘basket’ by process of elimination. There simply weren’t that many open containers around, and she had specifically said the socks would be inside the basket. Socks, as it turned out, were fabric footcovers. Most of them were clearly meant for Daria’s small feet, but near the bottom of the basket were some sufficiently sized to cover his own. Tagen put them on, took a few careful steps on the newly-slickened floor, and tried not to feel as ridiculous as he knew he looked.

When he returned to the front room, Daria was waiting by the stairs. “That’s better,” she said, eyeing his feet.

“Is it?”

Her lips curved up at his sour tone. “You only have to wear them until the grocery guy leaves,” she said, and looked up through the ceiling to the floor above. “Feel like giving me a hand in your room?”

She wanted to move her belongings back to their usual places. Including, no doubt, her knives.

‘She really is a better liar than you,’ he thought bitterly. He nodded once and followed her upstairs.

“I know I’ve got another coffee table in here somewhere,” she muttered, and began to prowl her way through the close jumble of cargo. “Just take everything you brought up here yesterday back downstairs. Dump it all in the kitchen for right now. I’ll make sure it gets back where it all belongs.” She started unstacking boxes.

Tagen picked up a jar of something red and held it in both hands, watching her. Everything in his nature was telling him that it was very wrong to allow a female to labor like this. It was menial. She was human, but still…

She glanced his way after a moment or two, and then straightened up and pointed at the many objects piled on the crate at his elbow. “Take everything there,” she began, speaking very slowly and clearly.

He clenched his jaw to keep from baring his teeth at her, and said, “Thank you. I understand.” He gathered everything he could hold into his arms and went stiffly downstairs.

She was human. He’d seen hundreds of humans recovered from every sort of base labor, from mines, from refineries, from processing pits. The only special consideration a female received was that she might be forced to do her labor in a sex-house. And that was deplorable, of course, but it was not shocking. What in the hell had made Tagen hesitate to watch his human moving her cargo?

Because she wasn’t a slave. She was still her own person, or she would be, if Tagen weren’t here.

Tagen began to wonder uncomfortably if he was seeing her more as a female than as a human just because she wasn’t the sort of human he was used to dealing with. There was a complication he didn’t need, particularly with the temperature as high as it had been. He made several trips up and down the stairs, grimly determined not to examine that too closely.

“Oh, and look! Dan’s clothes.”

Tagen paused in the act of collecting dishes and looked at her. Her voice had started out exclamatory but had slipped down into something wistful and sad. She was looking into a box now, her expression difficult to read. He could see folds of fabric beneath her hands, but she didn’t seem to be searching through them, merely holding them.

The sense of her as female grew even stronger, for all that she looked so alien to his eyes, and he was loathe to interrupt her, or even to be here as her witness. Her hand crept up and lay along the left plane of her cheek. She stared into the box, and the single eye that Tagen could see was unfocused.

Tagen forced his gaze down to the dishes scattered atop the crates. He added another one to the stack in his arms.

“I hate this room,” Daria said.

He said nothing.

She picked up the box of folded fabric and put it on his bed. “If there’s anything in there that fits you, you’re welcome to it,” she said. She bent, picked up the low table that had been beneath that box, and carried it away without another word.

Tagen did not watch her go, but once she had vanished down the stairwell, he straightened and looked after her. Some dark emotion sat like a stone in his stomach and would not be moved. So short a time ago, he had sat comfortably in her kitchen and thought he knew what it felt like to have a slave. Now he realized that he was brutally close to making one. There was something very wrong with his human, and his presence here alone was only making it worse.

He should leave. He doubted, unreasonably but intensely, that the human would report his arrival here to anyone. He should leave now and find himself another. If he stayed, there was a very good chance that his time here would end with her mind broken.

Tagen picked up another dish. And then another.

There were no guarantees in life. Earth was hot and its terrain was rough. A single human in a house in the middle of nowhere was the very best that Tagen could have hoped for. He’d never find another so perfect to his needs. Lindaria Cleavon would just have to endure.

He wasn’t going anywhere.

*

Daria arranged the coffee table in front of the sofa and tried not to think too hard about how it made her feel to see it again. She still remembered Dan bringing it home. Garage sale. Two bucks and could she believe it? Yes, she could, actually. It had been such an ugly little thing, beat up and badly-painted, with a loose leg. But Dan had insisted it would be perfect in her living room, it just needed a little love.

He sanded it for three days. Once with the machine, and the other two days by hand, sitting in the grass under the summer sun and stroking long and slow as the shadows lengthened. She’d thought he looked so sexy, flecked with sawdust and muscles rippling, all his attention on his work. And he was right, once it was properly stained and had a few coats of varnish, it was a thing of beauty. Pure beauty. It was the first thing she’d taken upstairs, the thing that hurt the most to have to sit and see every day when it finally sank in all the way that he wasn’t coming home.

But the living room looked better with a coffee table in it, and at least now her alien would have something to put his feet on while he was wearing Dan’s clothes and watching Dan’s favorite show.

Maybe she was wrong about the whole alien-angle. Maybe she’d really died and then gone to Hell. She didn’t think she’d been a very bad person in life, but she hadn’t done too much church-going, and so now she was in Hell and instead of being disemboweled by pitchforks for all eternity, she was being forced to watch a complete stranger slowly usurp the void Dan had left in her life.

It wasn’t that it hurt so much just to think of Tagen in Dan’s old sweats. What hurt was the fact that it didn’t hurt. For six years, she’d been living with all his stuff in his old study, shut away where she didn’t have to look at it because she knew it would be too painful to bear. Now she had another man living in there, and the ugliest thing about it was that somehow, somewhen, somewhere, she’d gotten over it anyway and hadn’t even noticed.

The thought was physically nauseating. She turned her back on the coffee table and went down the hall to make a pitcher of iced tea. It was going to be another scorcher. She didn’t know how her alien could stand to wear long sleeves.

As she was measuring out tea bags, Tagen came into the room with an armload of plates and bowls. “We are not alone,” he said.

Her thoughts were still in extraterrestrial places; his statement hit her with more significance than she thought he really intended. Warily, she said, “We’re not?”

The doorbell rang.

“Oh. The grocery guy.” She drew a centering breath and moved resolutely for the door. “This’ll just take a minute.”

He nodded once and followed her, taking up position next to the sofa and clasping his hands behind his back. He looked like the poster boy for the At-Ease command.

Daria opened her door and there was Troy, the delivery boy from G.O.D.—Groceries On Demand—standing on her porch with the invoice in his hand. He smiled at her and gave her the same sly wink he always did, but somehow, it was impossible to feel the same queasy discomfort when she had something like Tagen to worry about at the same time.

“Hey, Mizz C. Looking good.” He held out the clipboard and his gaze skipped over to Tagen. For a moment, he looked utterly thrown. Then he looked back at Daria with a knowing grin. “Say hey!”

“He’s my cousin,” Daria blurted, and was instantly annoyed with herself. She could feel her blush fanning out from her cheeks and down her neck. She couldn’t even see the signature she put on the bottom of the invoice. “Just put it in the kitchen, please,” she said in what she hoped was a frosty tone and what she feared was a nervous one.

“Sure.” To her supreme irritation, Troy tipped Tagen a wink before going back out to the delivery van.

Tagen watched him go and then slid his eyes toward Daria.

“What?” she snapped.

Tagen said nothing. He moved past her and went upstairs.

Fine. Better with him completely out of the way, anyway. Daria waited by the door for Troy to come back with his handcart full of groceries, already keyed up to damned near the verge of tears and hating herself for it.

Troy glanced into the empty living room as he hupped the cart over the threshold and grinned. “Your cousin doesn’t say much, does he?”

“I guess not.” Daria went ahead of him to the kitchen.

“Wow, look at all this junk.” Troy gave the cluttered countertops a cheerful once-over. “I never seen it look so messy in here before.”

Daria immediately started putting dishes away.

“How long is your cousin gonna be staying?” His tone was casual, but he didn’t even try to disguise the direction of his eyes as he looked her legs up and down. Troy had been delivering her groceries for six months now, and he’d been coming on to her a little stronger every time. There was a certain smirk he used each time he looked her in the face, a smirk that said he knew damned well he was G.O.D.‘s gift to lonely women. “I mean, I don’t see a car outside, so—”

“A few days.” She picked up cans and bottles from the counter and packed them into the cupboard without looking at them. She avoided reaching up too high. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

“You’re sure laying in a lot of eats for one guy.”

“He’s one big guy,” she argued. “Leave the chicken in the fridge, please.” She’d cook it up today and have a cold chicken salad tomorrow, if she ever found her big salad bowl. She wondered if aliens liked chicken. Then she wondered if she was ever going to randomly run into the perfectly innocuous human food that was horribly toxic to his people, the way it was always happening in the movies. Still, the movies weren’t exactly batting three-for-three where aliens were concerned so far.

Troy opened his cold-storage crate and started unpacking into her freezer. “Lots of cold stuff. How’s this weather, huh? I notice you got no A/C.”

“It broke.” She could feel his eyes crawling over the front of her shirt and all of a sudden, she really wished Tagen would wander in here and do some male looming.

“Pretty hot, though. What say we ditch the stiff and go sit in a cool movie theatre tonight?”

Oh Christ, and there it was. The proposition.

“Just put the non-perishables on the counter,” she said.

“Sure.” He came right next to her, just as though there weren’t fifteen feet of counter spread throughout the kitchen. She inched away, tucking cat food and chicken broth into her cupboards indiscriminately, trying to ignore him as best as she was able. She reached up to push a short stack of tuna fish onto a less-packed shelf and then it happened.

The back of his hand grazed her breast, not quite a full-on cop, but damned close. Daria jerked back as if burned, but couldn’t manage even a yelp of surprise. When a swimmer swallows that first unexpected gulp of water, the airway closes. What kills you isn’t the water, but the panic of drowning. So it was for Daria; panic closed on her all at once, and she had no breath to scream, no power to slap, no nothing. She stood there and stared at him and drowned in the open air.

Troy merely looked back at her with that smirking surprise, still holding the box of cereal he’d been setting before her. “Oops,” he said. “Did I tag ya? Sorry.”

He didn’t look sorry and he didn’t sound sorry, but at least the question gave her the permission her fear-locked brain needed to reply.

“I’ll get the rest of it. You can just leave.” Her teeth started to chatter; she had to clench her jaws tightly to keep from giving in to shivers.

She could see him thinking about it as he continued to stand there, visibly weighing possibilities and potential. Then he smiled, and she knew she was in real trouble. She wanted to order him furiously from the room and stumbled back a step instead.

“You’re not a bad-looking lady, you know.” He came towards her and she kept backing up. “You’re really not. You can barely see ‘em.”

Daria’s hand flew to her face, covering her scarred left cheek. She tried to back up again and hit the wall instead. “I want you to leave,” she said, hating the shrillness that stole into her voice.

“No, you don’t. I know what you really want. Come on, lighten up a little.”

“I’ll call someone!”

He laughed at her. “I’m not even touching you!” And then he made a liar of himself by closing in and putting a hand on her hip. She tried to jump back and succeeded only in banging herself a damned good one on the counter. “But you want me to touch you,” he said smoothly. “I know you do. I can make you feel like a whole woman. Come on.”

She pushed at him, almost blinded by terror and yet determined not to give in to it like a ninny. It wasn’t like he was going to throw her down on the tiles and rape her, for God’s sake. “Let go of me right now!” she hissed. “Right now!”

“One kiss,” he said, and he even made it sound like he was being reasonable. “One kiss, and if you don’t like it, I’ll let you go.”

“Get out!”

He was stronger than her; he was pulling her to him, his hands not in the least shy about grabbing her ass to keep her from wriggling away. “Just one kiss.”

His mouth was stalking hers. No matter how she twisted, he pursued. He let go of her waist to grab her head and hold her still. “Just relax,” he was saying, still almost laughing, as though her terrified struggles were a joke she were playing on him. “Just relax, you’re gonna lo—”

And then he was flying backwards, banging into the wall and thumping to the tiles.

Daria scrambled away, whistling gasps tumbling out of her as she clawed her way to another corner. “Get out!” she screamed, but the choice wasn’t Troy’s anymore.

Tagen picked the delivery boy off the floor and pushed him into the wall at eye level. Troy’s sneakered toes hung fully a foot and a half over Tagen’s socks. Very quietly, Tagen said, “You will leave this house.”

“Yes, sir,” Troy whispered.

Tagen set him down and stood back, clasping his hands behind his back and glowering. Daria could see the claws flexing and curling.

“I was just—I was—I’m very sorry. I thought we were just playing around.” Troy grabbed for his handcart, shook the last box off it, and fled.

Daria continued to huddle where she was, checking and re-checking the lie of her clothes even though there had been no real pawing. Her adrenaline was high, her heart hammering in her ears. The sense of narrow escape, as unreasonable as it was, continued to press and claw at her.

Tagen turned to face her, his gold eyes narrowing, and something in her snapped.

“I don’t need your help!” she shouted and burst into tears.

She was furious with herself for crying, as furious as she was with him for watching her, and most of all, she was furious at the gratitude that swelled through her for him being there. Her white alien knight to the rescue, saving her from the grabby hands of Troy the delivery boy. Jesus Christ.

He watched her cry, his brows drawn together to form that faint line between them. “Then I apologize,” he said, once her private storm had turned to sprinkles. “It was not my meaning to offend you.”

“I know,” she sniffled. “God damn it.” She swiped her eyes dry, kept her palm to her cheek, and started throwing food into the cupboards entirely at random. “He’s a jerk, but he’s completely harmless. He was out of line, but so were you.”

“I am a police,” Tagen said. “And some things are always wrong.”

“It was harmless!”

“Perhaps on your world.” He didn’t bother to pretend he was convinced.

“Oh please! He’s been hitting on me for six months!”

Tagen’s hawk eyes widened and his body went rigid at once. “He has hit you?” he demanded.

“What? No!” Daria picked up a bag of elbow macaroni and then put it down again, suddenly tired. “No. Hit is one of those words that have two meanings. Look, just forget it. Forget it ever happened.”

He said nothing, emphasizing the futility of even trying to unmake memories.

“I was making you some iced tea.” She motioned listlessly toward the pitcher on the counter. “Let me just get this stuff put away and I’ll put some ice in it. You look hot.”

Tagen glanced skyward and then looked directly at her and said, “What would you have had me do, Lindaria Cleavon?”

“Daria!” she interrupted, at a full shout, and slammed both hands down on the countertops with a bang. “God! I have told you and told you!”

He backed up, plainly startled by her vehemence, and then his eyes narrowed. “It was the name you gave me,” he said defensively.

“Right, the name I gave you when you got me high!” she shot back. She yanked open the refrigerator and pulled out the chicken quarters, still frosted from the ride in G.O.D.‘s freezer, and banged that down on the counters, too.

He frowned, but didn’t look very guilty.

Daria busied herself with pulling out a baking dish and preheating the oven and skinning the chicken, all the while feeling his wary eyes on her.

“It’s just Daria now,” she said, more calmly. “Just Daria.”

“Why?”

“Because.” That answer wasn’t going to satisfy him, and she knew him. She squared her shoulders and faced him directly. “Do the names on your planet have meanings?” she asked.

He looked somewhat unpinned by the shift in conversation. “Yes.”

“What does Tagen mean?”

He was obviously expecting the question because he’d started to look irritated before she’d even finished asking it. He searched the ceiling for several seconds, formulating his reply and aligning his English. “It is…a straight line. In definition, it is the same base word as to mean ‘wind’, but it refers in fact to…to point…” He suddenly mimed the drawing and firing of a gun, so effectively that Daria flinched.

“To shoot,” she said shakily.

But he shook his head, looking frustrated. “To hit…no. To intend to hit…to…”

“To aim,” she said.

He seized on the word, visibly testing it, and finally nodded. His hand returned to his side. “Yes. Good aim.” He regarded her with his watchful eyes. “What does Lindaria mean?”

“I’ll show you.” She slammed the chicken into the oven and turned it on, and then marched from the room.

He followed her outside and around to the herb garden. It was mostly dead now, a victim to the drought and her determination not to pay higher water bills than she already had to, but there was still a little green. Some rosemary sprigs, some sage, and of course, the thing she wanted him to see, the only thing she hadn’t planted. It was growing up through the decorative rock wall, despite the weather and every other effort to kill it off.

“That’s lindaria,” she said, and grabbed hold of the ivy vine skulking into the sun. She pulled it free with a pop and showed it to him, her lip curling. “This ugly, sneaky little weed. It gets in everywhere. It chokes out everything. You can’t kill it. You can’t contain it. It’s worse than blackberry bushes, because at least those give you fruit once in a while and make a decent pie. This is poisonous. It’s just an ugly, awful, useless plant.”

His eyes went to the rock she’d pulled it from and came back to her. He said nothing.

“So don’t call me Lindaria,” she said, crushing the ivy in her fist. “I’d rather you go back to calling me ‘human’ than Lindaria. At least humans have some good qualities.”

She headed back to the house, dropping her weed into the trashcan on the way.

He was silent all the way back to the kitchen and he did not resume his place at the table. He stood behind her, his hands behind his back and that brooding line between his eyes as he watched her wipe down the counters. “I did not think it an ugly plant,” he said at last.

“Yeah, well, you’re an alien and you don’t know any better, but it is.” Her hand found a way up to rub restlessly at her cheek, and she forced it to her side in a fist. “Now can we please talk about something else? Preferably something to do with you for a change?”

His frown deepened. “What should I talk about?” he asked warily.

“What’s Jota like?”

He cocked his head. “What is Earth like?” he countered, but then rolled one shoulder in his careful, clumsy shrug. “Jota has…forests and oceans and deserts, like Earth. The trees are…similar. Somewhat. The cities…are cleaner, I think. Cleaner and quieter than those shown on your tee-vee.” He paused and ran his eyes around the room. “I was young in a house much like this. Uncivilized.”

“My house is uncivilized?”

He must have sensed her defensiveness. “Perhaps it is the wrong word. It is…apart from others. Apart from cities. Without…comforts. That is not the right word, either,” he sighed, and rubbed at his brow.

“I think I understand,” she said. “You mean I’m out in the wilderness.”

“Wilderness,” he echoed, still frowning.

“And you grew up in a place like this?”

“Yes.” His mouth tightened. “My…father, I think you would say…moved away from the city to raise me. He believed the wilderness was a better place.”

“Lots of parents think that,” Daria said.

“Do they.” It was not a question. He watched her put groceries away. “The food is different,” he remarked suddenly. “Although the food is very different in many places around Jota, I suppose. I am accustomed to simpler foods.”

“Simpler than soup or frosted flakes?” She glanced at him and saw he wasn’t kidding. “What could possibly be simpler than that?”

“Perhaps it only feels simpler,” he said, and approximated another shrug. “Soldier’s fare tends to be so.”

“Soldier, huh?” She turned all the way around to look at him. “You said you were a cop. Were you in the army, too?”

He considered the wall behind her rather than her. “The distinction is, I think, that police are for immediate crimes and soldiers for…exterior ones? Yes, I am in the army. Or have been. The terms are served aside of each other. I am a soldier for one term and a police one term, so.”

“That’s a handy way to do it,” Daria said, and poured herself a glass of iced tea. “Soldiers don’t get too battle-fatigued and cops don’t get too bored. I imagine there’s not a whole lot of crime on your planet.”

“Not…as much as Earth would seem to have. But space is a far hiding place for criminals, and there are many conflicts.” He shrugged again. He was getting better at it. “Now I am police. I should be on Jota, but I am also sek’ta. This makes me a very special police. Like…like your Mulder and Scully.”

She blinked, the glass frozen to her lips.

“I have special assignments,” he continued, oblivious to her surprise. There was a certain rueful emphasis on the word ‘special’.

“Does that mean this E’Var fellow of yours is a flukeman?” she asked.

Tagen’s mouth quirked up in half a smile, indicating that even if he’d missed that episode, the show had made enough of an impression to make the reference relevant. “No,” he said, proving it, “But he is an alien.”

Daria laughed, startling herself.

“Your tee-vee fascinates me,” he said. “We have something similar on my world, but our programming is very different. Very.”

“Yeah, I don’t suppose you’d need so many shows like The X-Files once you actually knew aliens were real.”

“Mm.” His attention had shifted. Grendel had wandered into the kitchen and was nosing indignantly at his empty bowl. As soon as the cat made eye contact with him, Tagen walked over to the cupboard and brought down a tin of cat food.

“You’re going to spoil him, you know that.”

“Ah well.” Unrepentant, Tagen opened the tin and shook the food into Grendel’s dish, and then stroked down the cat’s back several times as Grendel noisily devoured it. “I would mind him better if I were in danger of making him fat. As he is already fat, I may as well keep him happy.”

Daria was caught out in snickers again, and muffled them against the back of her hand. “Right,” she said. “That’s kind of been my thinking all along. I tried to put him on a diet once, but the only thing he lost was his sense of humor and it only took him about ten minutes.”

Tagen smiled faintly, watching Grendel eat.

“Do you…No, I suppose you don’t have cats on your planet.”

“No, but we have something similar. Truly, we are not so different.” He gave Grendel’s ears a rub, and then looked at Daria, his eyes taking on a certain caution. He stood. “But in some ways, we are very different,” he said firmly. “On Jota, no male would do what that one—” His eyes flicked dismissively toward the kitchen door as though Troy were still standing there. “—meant to do. And no female would allow him to try.”

“Yeah, well.” Daria started wiping down the counters again, mostly as an excuse to turn her back on him. “Some guys just have a hard time hearing ‘no’. It’s not a big deal. He wouldn’t have actually done anything.”

“He made you think otherwise.”

“No, he really didn’t.” Daria scrubbed a little harder.

“You were frightened.”

“That’s my problem, not his.” She shot him a look that was partly frustration and the rest imploring. “And it’s not yours, either,” she said sharply. “So drop it.”

Tagen’s face closed with a near-audible slam. He nodded once, and then turned and left her in the kitchen.

Good. She didn’t want to have to keep talking to him, anyway.

She scrubbed her countertops, listening as the strains of Law & Order once again flowed down the hallway.

He hadn’t even tried to keep talking, anyway.

And that was good.

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