Gateway To Xanadu (3 page)

Which, although calculated, was nothing but the complete truth, except for the stated reason. I wore nothing of clothing on the trip out because I was born and raised on one of the only two nudist worlds in the Federation, and I revert to going natural every time I can. Val’s face had taken on an appalled, desperate look, as though he were trying to imagine living with a naked woman for two months without touching her, but I made sure not to notice that look either. I turned away from him and headed for the galley, humming happily in a soft voice.

“It’s going to be great having someone to talk to,” I enthused over my shoulder as I stopped in front of the food synthesizer to refill the mug I’d left there earlier with coffee. “I enjoy my own company well enough, but there’s such a thing as too much of that sort of enjoyment. How about a cup of coffee?”

Without waiting for an answer I filled a second mug, then carried them both back to the salon area. Val was still sitting, on his couch, one big hand rubbing at his face, a harried expression in his eyes. He waited until I’d put the mug into the slot meant for it in the front of the couch’s armrest, shifted a little on the couch, then cleared his throat.

“Diana, you’re not being fair,” he said, no more than a trace of the hoarseness left in his voice. “I’m trying to be considerate of you, but you’re not doing the same for me. I promised I’d do nothing to make you feel it necessary to defend yourself, but I wasn’t picturing you walking around like that. You have to put your clothes back on.”

“Why?” I asked, sipping gingerly at the hot coffee. “It isn’t as if you’ve never seen me naked before, Val.

You’ve seen me naked lots of times.”

“I know I have,” he answered through his teeth. “I know I’ve seen you naked lots of times, but that was when I could- Never mind. Just get into your clothes.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said with sudden inspiration, laughing in delight and nearly clapping my hands.

“Instead of me getting back into clothes, why don’t you get out of yours? Then we’ll both be naked, and you won’t be bothered anymore. Come on, Val, do it!”

I was still enthusiastic as I went to my couch to put my coffee down, and by the time I turned back to him, Val was on his feet. Looking at him, it wasn’t hard guessing why he’d stayed seated so long; I was considered big for a woman, but Val was big for a man. You couldn’t quite make two of me out of him, but if you tried you wouldn’t be short by all that much. He’d known exactly how menacing he’d look to the poor little female if he was upright, but at that point he was beyond considerations of that sort. He couldn’t possibly accept what I’d just suggested, not and keep his sanity along with his word; he had to start being firm, and – those black eyes said he was more than ready.

“Stop dancing around like that!” he growled, coming toward me where I stood between the two couches.

“You’re acting as if you want to be attacked, and I’m just about ready to oblige you! Get back into those clothes, or I’ll . . .”

At that point he made the mistake of reaching for my left arm with his right hand, just as I knew he would. He’d done the same thing once before, reaching out to grab me in anger, but that lesson hadn’t stayed with him any more than the other one had. As his hand closed around my arm just above a wrist I stepped toward him instead of away, turned my hand palm upward, and moved even closer. I slipped my left hand out of the forced looseness of his grip, continued to turn his hand to the left with the added assistance of the back of my left hand fingers pushing against the trapped fingers of his right hand, and simultaneously stepped back and twisted around. With a squawk of astonishment and some small amount of pain, the great big dangerous hunter went down flat on his back, totally helpless. Before Val knew what was happening, he had hit the carpeted deck hard, and lay there with my bare heel on his throat.

“Or you’ll what?” I asked very mildly, looking down at him where he twisted a little in an attempt to ease the pressure on his arm and shoulder, his expression totally disbelieving. “The last time it was partially Bellna, but this time it’s all me, which should explain why you’re not hurting as much as you did then. If I shift my weight onto my heel you’re a goner, friend, or I could simply kick you hard enough in the side of the head to put your lights out for a while. As I said earlier, I forgot you were here; that doesn’t equate with deliberately forgetting out of desperate fear of you. If you’re smart, you’ll start considering being afraid of me. Despite many opinions to the contrary, it is possible to rape a man, and I know how. And I haven’t given my word not to.”

I turned him loose then, taking my heel away from his throat so that I could step over him on the way to my couch. I sat down and got a cigarette out of the couch-arm dispenser and lit up, then picked up my coffee mug to sip at it, only then noticing that Val was still on the deck. When he saw my eyes on him he sat up slowly, rubbing at his right arm with his left hand, a strange expression in his deep black eyes.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been told a woman wasn’t afraid:. of me with quite that much conviction before,”

he muttered, raising his knees so that he could hang his forearms on there. “I assume I’m to take it that if I do something you don’t like, you’ll let me know about it. Do you think you can catch me with that sort of thing more than once?”

“There’s a lot more where that came from,” I snorted. He seemed to be relieved that I wasn’t afraid of him after all, but he hadn’t liked being roughed up in the proving of it. My previous good intentions were down the drain, but I’d had to settle the question of fear the most direct way possible. Some men turn protective around women who are afraid of things, and Val and I were slated to work together. If he did his job slap-dash because he was worrying about me, it could get us both killed.

“What happens if I do manage to get the upper hand?” he pursued, perversely trying to dent the lack of fear he had been so relieved to see. “Once I have you in a position where you can’t do me any harm, what’s to stop me from doing anything I like to you?”

“Nothing,” I admitted calmly, exhaling smoke at him.

“You’re bigger than I am, stronger than I am, and you just might manage to take me before I could finish you off. But if you did, you’d have something of a problem. You would not be able to let me go afterward, because if I ever got free I’d have your heart-and a couple or three other things to keep it company. To avoid that you’d have to finish me, and then you’d find yourself all dressed up with no place to go. At the other end of the course tape is my Federation, a volume of space you don’t know your way around in. Assuming you have the proper coordinates you can always turn around and head back to Absari space, but once you got there your people would start asking about that conference they’re expecting to have with my people. No matter which way you turned you’d have problems, and all because of your resentment against my harmless little demonstration. If that’s the way you want it, go ahead and take your best shot.”

“Harmless little demonstration,” he snorted. “If that was a harmless little demonstration, I’m a-” He broke it off and stared at me for a long minute, then snorted again with something more like amusement.

“You think you have it all figured out. What would happen if I did take you-and afterward you discovered you liked it? Instead of coming after me, you’d end up begging not to be turned loose.”

“If you were curious to know how likely that would be, you should have checked with the Tildorani slavers before we left,” I said, giving him a grin with a lot of wolf in it. “After I lost my patience with them, they couldn’t hand me over to Clero fast enough. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not very good slave material. ”

“That you definitely are not,” he agreed with sudden pleasance, picking himself up off the deck to stretch. “And now that we have that settled, you have a choice to make, too.” He stepped over my legs to sit down next to me on the couch, then looked down at me. “You can either get back into your clothes, or start showing me how much you know about raping a man. I can tell you right now that if you don’t do one or the other, I won’t be responsible for what happens. I’ve- discovered that looking at you does something strange to my normal restraint, which was the reason I started this in the first place. In a situation like this, with only the two of us here and a lot of empty time ahead of us, it’s best if we both know where we stand.”

“I don’t think I understand you at all,” I said with a good deal of confusion and total honesty. “How could you not know where we stand after all the time we spent together? We weren’t playing cards or swapping jokes during that time, Val. Why would things be any different now?”

“We were in the middle of the base with a lot of other people around us then,” he answered gently as he smoothed my hair with one big hand. “It so happens I was in this general situation once before, sharing a bed with a woman among other people, then suddenly being alone with her in a place where no one could interrupt us and neither of us could walk away. The first time I put my hand on her shoulder, she had hysterics. ”

My first reaction was to tell him he was making that up, but one look at the flinching vexation in his eyes told me he wasn’t. You hear a lot about women’s traumatic experiences; it looked like some men got raked over the coals just as badly.

“She must have been a neurotic,” I decided aloud, pretending I hadn’t noticed the way he’d sighed. “I’ve never heard of anything that mindless.”

“it wasn’t mindless, and she wasn’t neurotic,” he denied, a faint smile curving his lips as he looked down at me. “She was a seasoned fighter from one of the field teams, and hadn’t gotten particularly upset even the times she’d been wounded. When I finally got her calmed down, she was terribly embarrassed and insisted on explaining why she had done as she had. It seems that I had the same appeal for her that her job did, lots of excitement, lots of adventure-and lots of danger. Being in the base had been like being part of her team, the mere fact of their proximity enough to keep the danger from becoming overwhelming. Once we were alone, though- All she could think about was how ‘big’ and ‘dangerous’ I was, how I might do anything I cared to to her, and the really horrifying possibility that she might come to like that anything. She’d seen fully trained female slaves on Tildor, you see, and had been just as fascinated as she’d been repelled. Those slaves served their men’s every want and whim, and loved doing it. She was afraid she would love doing it, and that I would make her love it. She found it totally impossible to stop trembling.”

“Neurotic,” I repeated firmly to those very black eyes watching me. “So that was the reason behind all those strange suggestions of yours; you wanted to get the possibilities said and considered before I thought of them on my own. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, friend, but it’s just as I mentioned earlier: as far as slavery goes, I’ve tried it more than once and still don’t like it. Do you think you might stop watching for the screaming and fainting now?”

“I stopped watching for that about ten minutes ago,” he said with a stronger grin, letting his eyes move briefly over me. “You may not be terribly impressed with my size and abilities, Diana, but you’re the only woman I ever met who wasn’t. Do you understand now why I’d like to hear from you about where we stand?”

“Yes, I can understand it now,” I agreed judiciously. “I’ll be glad to give you a statement concerning my views.” I took a final sip of my coffee before returning it to its slot, then lifted both legs and swung them across Val’s lap. “As I see it,” I told him, “I’ve been promised that nothing would be done to me that would cause me to want to defend myself. I was told that by someone who tends to keep his word, you see, which turns out to be a very good thing. Even with the master matter converter, disposing of bodies in a ship like this tends to be hard work, and I’m not in the mood for hard work. ”

“What are you in the mood for?” he asked, and again I was struck by the difference between the softness of his words and the look in his eyes. His big hand had raised to my hip, and now stroked slowly down my thigh and leg.

“Truthfully, the thing I could use most right now is a few hours of sleep,” I answered, tucking my hands behind my head. “How’s that for an idea?”

“Lousy,” he said with that faint grin back again, both of his hands going to my waist to pull me more completely into his lap. “I have a much better idea.”

His hands moved over me as his lips lowered to mine, and it didn’t take very long before I had a better idea, too.

When Val and I woke up after indulging in his better idea, he brought out a pair of tight-fitting but flexible, cobalt blue exercise shorts, I guess you could call them-and then joined me in some muscle-loosening exercise of the nonhorizontal variety. After that the shower washed our sweat away; the air blowers dried the shower water; and then I dialed us a couple of synthsteak sandwiches and mugs of coffee, to take care of the hollows within. My ship guest wasn’t very happy with the food, which naturally led him into looking for something to complain about.

The something turned out to be the way I’d roughed him up. Accusations started flying back and forth; our words went from heated to out-and-out inflamed, and before I knew it I was being challenged to see how well l could take something of the same sort. Having no idea of what he was talking about I immediately accepted the challenge-and only then found out what a really stupid move that was.

From the very first time Val touched me, back in the base, I’d discovered that there didn’t seem to be any way of resisting him once his hands were on me. Now, Val marched me into the salon, sat down on one of the couches and pulled me into his lap, went to work on me in his usual way, and then, when I was just about out of my mind, moved me out of-his lap to sit on the deck carpeting next to his leg with orders not to move.

It took quite a few suffering, mindless minutes before I could think clearly again, and another few minutes after that before I began to understand. At first none of it made sense, but then it suddenly came to me that Val was specifically doing to me what I had done to him. I was as helpless before his expertise as he had been before mine, and rage and suffer though I might, there was nothing I could do to even the score. I’d pledged myself to do nothing in response to whatever he did to me, just as he had obviously pledged himself never to use his full strength against a woman. It was a terrible, confining feeling, a screaming that demanded satisfaction. My hands clutched his leg and my body pressed to it in dry-throated need, but I did understand what was happening.