Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (13 page)

“It's a matter of aesthetics.”

“In that case, give me the extra-lean, low-salt roast beef, please.” Valens grinned when Georges turned back to the refrigerator and produced a package of roast beef and a
“you-can't-blame-a-man-for-trying” shrug. “They fed us well on the
Montreal
. Not a powdered egg in sight. Patty's going to do fine, Georges—”

He stopped talking as Georges slid a plate down the counter to him, frowning hard.

“Are you sure you're doing right by her, Fred?” A blunt question, with enough of an edge on it that Valens knew Georges had been biting it back for a long time. And not the question Valens had been expecting.

Valens paused with his hand on the sandwich. “Can I trade this tea in for a beer?”

“After you eat,” Georges allowed, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed.

Valens, knowing the look, drank his tea and ate, standing bent over the counter, sprouts crunching between his teeth. “That wasn't a rhetorical question, was it?”

Georges looked up from putting the mayonnaise back into the refrigerator. “I'm concerned that Holmes is rubbing off on you a bit. This isn't what I'd call ethical, what you're doing—”

“Unethical was telling you anything about it,” Valens replied, rinsing crumbs from his plate. “But that's beside the point,” he continued, when Georges raised a hand as if to interject. “It's irresponsible, certainly. Reckless. Which is how great progress gets made—”

“You can't make an omelet without smashing a few atoms?” Georges didn't sound convinced. Valens tugged a breakfast stool away from the counter and hoisted himself onto it, hooking his toes around the lowest rung. Georges returned with two beers and gave him one.

They leaned on their elbows over the counter, shoulder to shoulder, until Valens edged sideways and bumped Georges lightly. “Desperate times,” he said. “And it wouldn't be any less ethical to let Alberta go unsupervised. She's not so much a corporate raider as Attila the Hun—”

“All too true. But it's
Patty,
Fred.”

The heart of it,
Valens thought, and glanced over his shoulder at Georges. “Love,” he said. “Do you think I would ever take chances that I didn't share?”

Georges took a long swallow of his drink and set it down on the counter, where he stared at it for a moment before he answered. “No,” he said. “Come on. Let's go to bed.”

6:30
AM
Thursday 9 November, 2062
Bloor Street
Toronto, Ontario

Elspeth's skin was soft as brushed cotton, the curve of her hip fitting the palm of his hand as if made to go there. She leaned forward, stretched as luxuriantly as a cat, and spread her weight across his chest. “Ow,” she said, as he reached to pull the covers over her shoulders.

“Ow?”

“Bit my lip.”

It was still barely dawn outside the window, but he heard the smile in her voice. “I could kiss it better.”

She laughed like a much younger woman. “You're welcome to. How's Jenny doing?”

He let that hand slide up her waist, across her back. Considered the complexity of emotions that touch raised in him, the softness of her flesh, the cleverness in her hips and wit and fingers.
I could find myself in an awful lot of trouble if I'm not careful here.
“Better than I expected. If you're asking—”

She shivered at the touch, pressing her body against his. “Gabe, you couldn't hide that if you wanted to. Trust me, everybody east of Lake Superior has it figured out: you touch her and she just about glows.”

“I don't want to hurt you, Ellie.”

A deeper shiver. “Would it help if I told you I wouldn't let you?”

“Would you be lying?” Water ran in the bathroom, Genie's door banging open to the accompaniment of Leah's sleepy complaints. He would have thought the girls would be begging to stay home from school.
I wonder if it's a plot
. Then he chuckled softly.
They're becoming teenagers
. Everything
is a plot.

“Gabe.” Her small hand on his face. Toes curling beside his thighs, she lifted herself and shifted her weight, slid to the side to lie curled in the crook of his arm. Her hair was wiry, dark as a black sheep's wool—and falling straight tonight. It had been like rivers of black water in his hands. She must have ironed it before he and Jenny got home. “I don't know. I was never good at commitments. Or risks. And this is complicated, and—I figured I was going to spend the rest of my life in a box. You decide to let go of things.”

What would you do if you had to choose?
He wasn't ready to answer that, but it led him to an easier question. “Ellie. Do you think this can work?”

She chuckled and rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “My official medical opinion?”

“Yeah.”

“You never know until you try.” The shower cut off. A door opened. Water started running again. “You should have gotten a two-bath apartment. Have you thought about what you're going to tell the girls?”

He groaned. “The doctor believes it would be nonconstructive to just pretend there's nothing going on.”

She bit. “She seemed unhappy when she left.”

“Leah?”

“Jenny.”

“No, she didn't seem happy.” And that was half the tightness in his chest right there. “She seemed scared.”

“Call her.”

“What if she wants to be left alone?”

Elspeth raised her head from his shoulder, rising light catching in the gold-green bands of her irises. “Then she won't answer the phone.”

0700 Hours
Thursday 9 November, 2062
Marriott Inn
Toronto, Ontario

Face has left, the sun's coming up around the edges of Toronto, and I'm opening the grille of Boris's cat carrier when my phone buzzes. I pick it up: Gabe. No preamble, just, “As-tu besoin de moi?”

“Oui,” I say. “I need you.”

He closes the connection, and twenty minutes later he's at my door. I open it and he steps inside. “Everything okay?”

“I'll live. Where's the doc?” Half bitterness and half relief.
You're too old to go around owning people, Jenny
. Oh, yeah. But it would be nice to try, wouldn't it? Carve my initials in his arm—

“With the girls.” He puts a hand on my left shoulder, where I can halfway feel it, and leads me to the bed, pulls me down against his chest, and makes me lie with my head on his shoulder while he smoothes my hair. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I just found out some old friends didn't make it. Calisse de crisse. I should be used to it by now.”

“Never get used to it,” he says.

There's something achingly satisfying about just playing house this way. I won't say it beats the sex, because the sex is pretty goddamned amazing. But it's even more amazing, some nights, just to be held. His finger traces a spiral behind my ear and I sigh. “Penny for your thoughts, Genevieve.”

I poke at them and reply, surprised. “I'm happy.” I'm not really lying. Despite Barb, Mitch, Bobbi, Leesie, and the whole big fucking world. I wonder if I did the right thing telling Razorface to go to the cops. If it will damage the
Montreal
project just as surely and deeply as letting him and his pet terrorists blow the hell out of the lab. The whole idea is so fragile, so foolish. And I won't let the Chinese get there first. Not after thirty years of expansionist policy.

“Pourquoi es-tu heureuse?”

Yeah, I know, Gabe. I just told you my friends were dead. Crazy, huh? “J'ai tout que j'ai voulu.” And that's not a lie either. “Toi. Moi. Les jeunes filles, Elspeth. Presque comme une famille.”

“A family? That's all you want, love?”

And just like that, into the realm of all the things I never thought Gabe would ever have to know. Boris jumps up on the bed beside us and bumps my steel hand with his head. I chicken out and go for the joke. “Well, maybe just a dog.”

He ignores my feeble attempt at a redirect. “Pourquoi n'as-tu jamais des enfants? And where did the cat come from?”

I mumble something noncommittal against his chest and push the cat away. Boris goes, purring. There's no light in the room but a funeral-parlor style floor lamp beside the reading chair—the kind that casts a circle of light on the ceiling to reflect softly downward and make everything in the room look sickly green. “It's my cat. From Hartford. My friend brought him up.”

Bulldog Gabe presses me. “You'd've made a wonderful mother.”

The redirect isn't working. Frontal assault. “Are you proposing to me, Gabriel?”

He blinks. “Would it work?”

“Wouldn't be fair to the doc, now, would it?”

“Developing a taste for fidelity all of a sudden?” He kisses me on the head to take the sting out of his words.

“I—” Elspeth isn't a threat. If anything, she's better for Genie, at least, than I am.
If only I didn't like you so damned much, Doc.
I won't let the girls see us fight over their father like a couple of alley cats. No matter how good it would feel to not be a grown-up once in a while.
And there's certainly enough of Gabe to go around
. “Ask me in a year, mon ami.” It's a little weird to say that, because I'm even halfway sure we'll both still be around that long.

He nods, and we lie there for a little just listening to each other breathe. “That was a bad question I asked you earlier, wasn't it? It's none of my business. I'm sorry.”

“No,” I answer, and he tenses in my arms. “I mean, you have the right to ask me anything, mon ange. But you will not like the answers to many of your questions.”

“Oh.” I expect him to withdraw. He pulls me closer. “Would it help to talk about it?”

I know what he's thinking. Battlefield rape, or the casual boyfriend I sent to a life sentence—and a short life sentence at that—or maybe childhood sexual abuse. He's thinking he'll hold me and dry my tears and make a show of telling me it wasn't my fault. And that I'll somehow feel better, after. Gabe strokes my hair. The silence has gotten too long. I close my eyes.

Richard?

“I hear you, Jenny.”

Hold my hand?

Richard laughs, but he's right there. “Brave girl.”

“Gabe, before I was in the army . . . I was a runaway.”

“Oh. I think I understand.”

I lay my steel hand flat on his chest, feeling warmth and a distant sort of pressure, the tremble of his heart in the cavern of his chest. “No,” I say again. I've never told anybody this.

Anybody.

“Je pense que tu ne comprends pas, Gabriel. I was a runaway. A—une peau.” His whole body contracts as if from a belly blow.
A skin,
but that's not what it means in the gutter. “A street-corner whore.”

It's not sinking in. I can feel it in the enormity of the silence that fills the room.

“Gabe?”

“Merci à Dieu,” he gasps. “Putain de marde. I guessed a lot, Jenny, but that—I never—”

“I never wanted you to.” Feeling the stiffness in his body, I wait for him to pull away. Peddling it is not high on the list of things nice girls do where Gabe comes from. “I . . . it wasn't my choice, exactly, and—”

And then he whispers into my hair and splits my heart from branch to root. “Tu as fais ce que tu devais faire, chérie,” he whispers.
You did what you had to do.
“You lived. You're here. Quel est mauvais avec cela?”

Gabriel. I never have had enough faith in you.
“Je t'aime,” I say against his neck, and feel him smile. “And it
was
pretty terrible.”

“So you decided not to have kids because of it?”

“Non.” The third denial. “Chrétien. Mon maquereau.”
My pimp
. “He decided it for me. Do you know what quinacrine is?”

“It's an antimalarial. I've taken it.”

“Yes.”
Me, too.
“It's also a caustic agent. Administered internally, with phenol, it's a cheap way of performing a nonreversible sterilization. It causes”—I continue over his comprehending gasp, because now it's in my mouth and I have to spit it out—“massive scarring. Like a really bad case of the clap.” My voice—clinical, level—ends in a silence he doesn't fill. “I'm barren. I never have to worry about birth control.”

“Brave girl,” Richard whispers one more time inside my head before he vanishes.

Gabriel, my angel, pulls me so close I can feel him thinking. “That's—” His vocabulary fails him, which might just be an international first. Gabe had a pretty sheltered childhood, by my standards, but he does have a knack for the colorful turns of phrase.

“Just as well. If I had had a baby, Gabe, I'd be dead by now. I never would have gotten away from Chrétien. Army wouldn't have taken me.”

“But later. You could have—”

“Had a test-tube kid? I'm old-fashioned.”

“—adopted.”

I sit up, away from him, fold my legs under me and grin down. He smiles back, reaches up to pinch my nose. I bite his finger. “You stupid shit. I did. Or didn't you notice?”

He laughs. And then the gentle touches grow considering as he strokes the faded places where my scars were washed away by Charlie's wonderful machines. “Jen?”

“Hmmm?”

“Maybe we should think about taking precautions anyway. Given”—and he touches smooth skin where shiny scars once gleamed—“how completely the rest of your scars have healed.”

“I . . .” Shit. I never thought of that. Never had to think of that before. “I'm getting to be an old lady, Gabe.”

Not quite old enough not to have to give it a thought. But old enough that if I wanted a baby, it would most likely involve a romantic interlude with a fistful of technicians.

“Million-to-one shots happen,” he says.

I know that. I'm alive. And it's an ugly world. But it was an ugly world when I came into it, too. “Would you think me irresponsible if I declared myself open to a miracle?”

He sits up, too, and pulls me into the circle of his arms. “I wouldn't promise not to press you on some other things we talked about tonight, is all.”

“Don't make any damned assumptions, Castaign,” I tell him, grabbing for the distance I've utterly lost.