Fallout (15 page)

Sambit nodded and pulled one of the drawers out of the front of the desk. Derek moved right up behind him so that when Sambit stood, he bumped into Derek’s chest. Derek grabbed Sambit’s hips, steadying him. “If you wanted a hug, all you had to do was say something.”

“I didn’t—” Sambit bit off whatever he was going to say. “Please move so I can put the drawer in the hallway.”

“Your wish is my command,” Derek said, grinding his hips against Sambit’s ass for a second before stepping back. “I’ll get the next drawer.”

“I could report you for sexual harassment,” Sambit said.

“What are they going to do?” Derek asked, pulling out the next drawer and following Sambit into the hallway. “Fire me? They’re already making me leave.” He resisted the urge to grope Sambit again as he bent to put the drawer in the corner. Maybe if he’d had both hands free, but as it was, he was afraid he’d spill the contents of the drawer, and then he’d have to deal with Lyrica.

Sambit went back inside and got the third drawer out of the desk before Derek could pin him again, but with his hands engaged with the drawer and unable to swat Derek away, Derek leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to the side of Sambit’s neck, unfazed by the smell of several days’ sweat. He probably smelled as bad or worse, but they could take a shower as soon as they had the desk and cots arranged.

“Derek!”

“Yes, Sam?”

Sambit huffed and put the drawer in the hallway. “You will not do this to me.”

“Do what?” Derek asked innocently.

“Make me want things I can’t have,” Sambit said. “We’ve discussed this.”

“I’m not teasing you,” Derek said, his voice completely serious. “I’m trying my damnedest to seduce you, but I am
not
teasing. Yes, I’m leaving. I’m brutally aware of that fact, but you’re the one who insists that has to be the end, not me.”

“So you want to do what?” Sambit asked, his voice both resigned and curious, a combination Derek would have thought impossible until he heard it in Sambit’s tone.

“It’s July 15 now,” Derek said. “Classes start, what, mid-August? Early September at the latest?”

“Late August,” Sambit said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“That’s your real job, not this,” Derek reminded him. “By late August, they have to let you go back to College Station because you have students enrolled in your courses who have the right to have you there to teach them. So that’s a month. I admit, starting a relationship and then being apart for a month isn’t ideal, but it’s a month, not six months or a year or some unspecified amount of time that might not ever end. A month. Thirty days, forty-five if they really keep you here until the day before classes start. We can stand to wait thirty days to see each other again if we have to.”

“What about the fact that I work at A&M and you work at NASA?” Sambit asked. “They’re at least two hours apart.”

“So it’ll be a bitch of a commute,” Derek said with a shrug. “Or I’ll figure out a way to work remotely part of the time. Sure, if I’m working on actually building a robot, I have to be there where I can get my hands on the machinery, but a lot of the design and redesign work can be done on any computer. I don’t have all the answers, but I don’t see that as a reason to walk away without giving us a chance.”

“I still say this is a bad idea.”

“Because we’re so different?” Derek asked.

Sambit nodded.

“You’ve seen one side of me,” Derek said, “and it’s not my best one. Give me a chance to show you the rest of who I am. If you don’t like that man, if we really are too different, at least we’ll know instead of always wondering what could have been. I hate regrets, Sambit, more than I hate almost anything else in the world. I don’t want to regret missing a chance with you.”

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?” Sambit asked.

“No,” Derek said. “You can let me have my way now or I can keep trying to persuade you, but I’m not going to give up until you’ve given me a real chance to prove how good we could be together.”

“I’m not just going to let you fuck me,” Sambit warned.

“Glad to know that’s on the table for later”—Derek grinned—“but I wasn’t talking about sex. I already know how good that will be. I was talking about everything else. I’m a hell of a cook.”

“How’s your sambar?”

“No idea what that is,” Derek said, “but let me taste it a couple of times and I’ll figure out how to make it.”

“Do you even like Indian food?” Sambit asked.

“I love it,” Derek replied, “but that doesn’t mean I’ve had every dish out there, or maybe I’ve had it and not known what I was eating. The menus aren’t always in English, some of the places I’ve gone with my friends. They order, I eat, I pay my part of the bill.”

“I’m never going to win an argument with you, am I?” Sambit asked.

“I’ll let you win any other argument you want,” Derek offered impulsively, “as long as you let me win this one.”

“I ought to hold you to that,” Sambit said, “but I know you better than that. You’ll keep arguing just to keep me in the room with you.”

“Would that be such a terrible thing? Being in a room with me?”

“See?” Sambit said. “You just proved my point. Let’s move this desk before Lyrica comes down here demanding to know what’s taking so long. You will not tell her about this.”

Derek grabbed one side of the desk, finding it much easier to lift, and waited for Sambit to pick up the other side. He backed out of the office, admiring the play of muscles beneath Sambit’s skin as they carried the desk to its new location. “Cots now?” Derek asked.

“Sure,” Sambit said. “Ours, at least. I don’t know that we should move Lyrica’s without checking with her. You know how women are about people touching their things.”

They went back to the break room and gathered the few belongings they’d unpacked. “Jeremiah will be happy not to have to look at your pictures anymore,” Sambit said as Derek untacked them carefully from the wall.

“Maybe I should leave them, then,” Derek said, cracking a grin in Sambit’s direction. “Aren’t those born-again guys all about self-mortification?”

“I’m pretty sure that was the medieval Catholic monks,” Lyrica said from the doorway. “Take the pictures. They make for pleasant dreams.” She looked around the room. “Where’s Fido?”

“He was here earlier,” Derek said. “I took him outside right after lunch and brought him back in here.”

“Don’t panic,” Sambit said. “Maybe he wandered into the control room with Melanie. He likes her almost as much as he likes you.”

“I was just in the control room,” Lyrica said. “I didn’t see him, although I suppose if he was under one of the desks, I might have missed him.”

Derek dropped the pinups on his cot and hurried toward the control room, calling Fido’s name as he went. No clatter of claws on linoleum greeted his voice. Entering the control room, he called again.

“Melanie, did Fido come in here with you?”

“No, I haven’t seen him since I got up,” she said. “He isn’t in the break room?”

“No, and he isn’t coming when I call him either.”

“I’ll help you look,” she said, getting up from her chair.

“You’re supposed to be working, Melanie,” Jeremiah called from across the room.

“Don’t be a prick, Jeremiah,” Melanie snapped. “I won’t be gone any longer than if I’d gone to the bathroom.”

With Melanie added to their number, they separated and spread out through the main building, calling Fido’s name. Finally, in desperation, Derek peered out the door, only to see Fido sitting patiently at the sill. He opened the door and let the dog inside. Fido was sweaty from the heat, panting a little, but otherwise seemed unharmed. “How did you get outside?” he asked the dog, running his hands over the animal’s limbs to make sure there were no injuries.

“Oh, good, you found him,” Sambit said, coming around the corner. “Where was he?”

“Outside,” Derek said, his voice flat. “Last time I checked, he didn’t have prehensile toes. Someone let him outside and didn’t let him back in.”

“That’s terrible,” Melanie said. “Is he okay?”

“He seems to be, although we’ll have to see if he got exposed to enough radiation to be dangerous, but I think it’s time for me to finish my work and blow this Popsicle stand. I’m not taking chances with someone being cowardly enough to hurt my dog instead of coming at me.”

Chapter 10

A
FTER
they found Fido, Derek took the dog with him back to the room where he was working on the robots. Sambit and Lyrica moved their cots and Derek’s things as well, in case whoever had let the dog out decided to get at Derek by damaging his belongings. When that was done and Derek had not reappeared, Sambit excused himself to Lyrica and went in search of the man who, an hour ago, had been trying to seduce Sambit into a relationship and now seemed equally determined to flee the scene as fast as possible.

He found Derek much as he’d found him earlier, bent over the robot, but where before he’d seemed lighthearted, having fun as much as working, now he seemed grim, his full concentration on the task at hand. “So you’re just going to run away?”

“I’m not running from anything,” Derek said, “but I’m not about to let anyone hurt Fido. If they want to come at me head on, fine. I’ll fight fair. Coming at my dog isn’t fighting fair, and I won’t let him be hurt.”

“You don’t know that it was intentional,” Sambit said.

“If it weren’t, when I asked, someone would have remembered letting him outside and said something,” Derek insisted. “And before you go getting some screwed up thought in your head, this doesn’t change a word I said earlier. It just means I might be leaving a little sooner than later.”

The words shouldn’t have made any difference. Sambit should have been as distrustful of this promise as he had been of everything else Derek had said, but Derek wasn’t flirting with him this time. He was angry, ready to leave, and he was still promising to keep in touch with Sambit. Granted, he wasn’t angry at Sambit since they hadn’t been more than an arm’s length apart since lunchtime. Sambit couldn’t have been the one to leave Fido outside. Even so, he
was
angry, and Sambit already knew Derek well enough to understand the difference his moods could make in his opinion on matters. “You sounded pretty definite earlier about leaving as fast as possible.”

“I am,” Derek said, “but I’m not the only one involved in that decision. Tucker has to agree that I’ve done what the NRC is paying me to do, and someone has to be able to come get me. I have no idea what’s going on in Houston as far as recovery efforts, but it’s not like the Army is just sitting around with helicopters waiting to come get me as soon as I feel like I’ve done what I need to do.”

“True.” Relief swamped him at the thought of having Derek there for a few more days. “You have to teach someone how to operate the robots too. It doesn’t do us any good to have them if we can’t make them do what we need them to do.”

“I’ll teach you, and you can teach the others,” Derek said. “Or I suppose I can teach you and Lyrica. Right now, I don’t want anything to do with the others. I don’t know which of them tried to hurt my dog.”

“Is he still doing okay?” Sambit asked.

“Well, he hasn’t thrown up. I can’t ask if he has a headache, but he seems to be acting the same as usual,” Derek said. “I’ll take him to the vet as soon as I get somewhere that has a vet. Who knows where the one near my house is right now?”

“Are you going to go home?” Sambit asked. “Even with all the damage in the area?”

“Where else would I go?” Derek asked in reply. “The house wasn’t damaged. I have a generator and plenty of food stocked up. All my clothes are there, my bike is there. Now that I have a dog, I might have to actually buy a car, God forbid. Even if I don’t stay, I have to go back and get what I’d need to be gone for a longer period of time. I didn’t have a lot of time to pack before I came here.”

“I don’t think any of us did,” Sambit agreed. “Can I help? I don’t know a lot about robots, but I’d be a second pair of hands. Just tell me what to do with them.”

“You don’t want to make that broad an offer,” Derek said, cracking a grin, the first Sambit had seen since they’d realized Fido was missing. “You might not like where I suggest you put them.”

“I never said I wouldn’t like it,” Sambit said. “I said it wasn’t wise. Not the same thing at all.”

“Well in that case—”

“Still not wise,” Sambit interrupted. “Still not playing games.”

“I’m not playing games either,” Derek promised. “If you want to help, have a seat. You can hold things in place while I solder them.”

They worked together for another two hours before the ache in Sambit’s back and neck got to be too much.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to stop. The headache is coming back, and we have to work another twelve-hour shift tomorrow.”

“Go take a shower,” Derek suggested. “Even if there’s no pounding spray, the heat should help, and being clean will make it easier to sleep. I’m going to work a little longer.”

“That’s a good idea,” Sambit said. “I think I’ll try that. Thank you for the shower, in case no one else thinks to say it.”