There All Along (26 page)

“Yes,” Teila said. “I did.”

He wanted her so much it was a little like dying.

“The sea brought him to me,” she said. “And I lost him after that.”

“To the sea?”

She moved closer to him again, this time so close the heat and scent of her washed over him, making him shiver worse than the night air had. “No. Not to the sea.”

“What did you lose him to?”

She was silent. There was something there, something he was missing, if only he could put the key into the lock. It eluded him. Angry, Jodah sighed.

“You’re not a widow.”

“I’ve never claimed to be a widow,” Teila said. “If you thought I am, that’s your assumption. Not my truth.”

When she kissed him, he let himself get lost in the taste of her. He let her part his lips with hers, stroke her tongue inside. He let her press herself against him. But when she murmured something that sounded like the name he couldn’t claim, he pushed her from him.

“What would your husband think?”

“He doesn’t think anything of it,” she told him. “He doesn’t know.”

Jodah persisted, holding her at arm’s length while the night wind whipped up around them. Her hair tickled his cheek. In the corners of his vision, the data stream brightened, ticking downward with a list of internal computations as his body adjusted to the temperature. She had to be cold, though he wasn’t.

“What I did in the beginning, I take responsibility for that. It was wrong. I used you—”

“I told you before,” she put in sharply, “that you didn’t force me. Stop blaming yourself for what happened when you were not aware of where you were. If anything, I should be blamed for it, since I fully knew what was going on. If one of us took advantage of the other, it was me.”

He would not bend to that, no matter how many times she said so. It would always be his fault. He was bigger. Stronger. “You couldn’t have stopped me.”

“I didn’t want to!” she shouted. Softer, she added, “If you’d forced me, Jodah, if I had any resentment toward you for it, would I be here now? Would I have made love to you again?”

The memory of her slick heat stirred him, but he pushed the thoughts away. “What happened in the beginning was wrong for one reason. What happened after is wrong for another.”

She drew in a breath. “You think it’s wrong for us to be together.”

“Yes,” Jodah said. “It’s wrong for me to be with another man’s wife.”

“I am a woman! Not just a wife,” she cried. “I was myself long before I ever knew him, and I am myself now.”

“You think it’s all right to be with me when you’re still married to him?”

“My husband was a soldier,” she said slowly. “He chose to leave me behind, knowing he might never see me again. He chose that path for the greater good, for what he believed would be his efforts toward protecting not simply Sheira, but me specifically. He chose to leave me because he loved me. He told me more than once . . .” She broke, then, and it broke him to hear it. “He told me he would do anything to make sure I could be happy. So you ask me what my husband would think, if he knew, and I will tell you that he would want me to be happy.”

He kissed her until she gasped and writhed in his grip to be set free. He knew his fingers would leave marks, but he couldn’t make himself soften. “This,” he said, shaking her a little, “this makes you happy?”

When he kissed her this time, she bit his lip. The pain, sharp and instant, was accompanied by the bitter tang of blood. He let her go. Stepped back. Already the blood had stopped. Soon the wound would mend.

“Do I make you happy, Teila?”

She said nothing. The wind whispered and sang as the sea shifted behind them. She was still so close he could grab her again, if he wanted to, but he kept his fists at his sides.

“Sometimes,” she said finally. “And sometimes, Jodah, you only make me very, very sad.”

S
he’d fallen in love with him that first day. Teila could admit that now, though at the time she’d done her best to deny what she felt for her handsome gift from the sea was anything but lust and possibly affection. But not love, definitely not that. It had taken almost losing him to realize that she couldn’t live without him.

They’d become lovers without effort. He’d been bold. She’d been willing—surprising him, she thought, when she took him up without hesitation on his charming offer to take her to bed. And after, surprised him again when she waved away his attempts to cuddle her.

“I’ve work to do,” she’d explained. “I have to check the lamp, for one thing. For another, I don’t want to spend the night in this narrow bed when I have my own much nicer one.”

Naked, she’d laughed at his snort of affront and left him there. The next day he’d cornered her in the kitchen while she sliced up a milka pellet. She’d allowed him to seduce her, but later had laughed again when he suggested he join her in her “much nicer bed.”

“You have your own,” she said. “The bed for guests.”

“But surely,” he’d said, trying again to charm her, “I’m not a guest any more.”

She’d put him in his place quickly enough with a raised brow and shake of the head. “Why would you presume that?”

He’d had no answer for that other than his furrowed brow. It had almost made her change her mind, that stubborn look. She’d always had a weakness for arrogant men.

“Make yourself useful,” she’d told him after that. “If you’re not a guest, then you should work.”

And he had. Kason had taken over much of the maintenance work that Vikus and Billis had been struggling with, not because they weren’t eager to pull their weight but because as boys they were simply incapable of some of it. Kason, despite his wealthy upbringing, had proven himself more than handy. It had surprised him as much as her resistance to his affections had, she thought, and was glad for his sake that he’d discovered himself to be more than a wealthy man’s son.

She hadn’t known then, of course, that it was more than that. Kason’s father was the Rav Aluf, the man in charge of the entire Sheirran Defense Force, which made him more than simply rich. It meant he was powerful, too.

They’d become a team as effortlessly as they’d become lovers. For nearly a full cycle, Kason had infiltrated her life, learning the ways of the lighthouse and also of her. She’d learned him too. How he liked his caffah, how he looked when he was sleeping, the sound of his laughter. The smell of him. The flavor. And yet still, though she might visit him in his narrow guest bed and they’d done their share of lovemaking in almost every part of the lighthouse that offered space for it, he did not share her bed. They didn’t speak of love.

Not until the day his father found him.

Teila had been outside, bringing in her scudder with a good-sized milka pellet dragging behind, when the cruiser appeared in the sky. It had been a long time since she’d seen one, and the noise of it startled her into nearly running the scudder ashore. At first, she’d thought it was the authorities coming to arrest her for illegal milka harvesting—the rules had become so much stricter over the past few cycles, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she’d inadvertently been breaking a handful of them. It wasn’t until she went around the back of the lighthouse and found Kason there with a man who looked so much like him it could only be his father that she noticed the crest on the side of the cruiser.

The Rav Aluf had sneered at the first sight of her. She’d never forget that he’d given her no chance to prove herself to him, that he’d immediately presumed she’d set out to seduce his son. She’d never forgiven him for that, and probably never would.

“Come home, Kason,” his father had said. “It’s time. You’ve spent long enough shirking your duties.”

Kason hadn’t seen her come around the base of the lighthouse, so his answer hadn’t been for her benefit. “I’m not coming home. I don’t want to join the SDF. I’ve found something here that I want to keep.”

“What’s that? A warm bed? Please,” his father had said. “You can find a hundred women more suited to you than her.”

“You don’t even know her.”

Another sneer. “I don’t have to know her.”

“I’m not coming home.”

“If you don’t come home,” his father had said with a long, hard look at Teila, “you will forfeit everything. Do you understand?”

Kason had turned then to look at her. “Yes. I do.”

“Will you stay?” she’d asked as though she’d just come around the base of the lighthouse and hadn’t heard anything else they’d said. “I’ll make something to eat.”

“I’ll stay only long enough to convince my son to leave with me,” the Rav Aluf had told her.

He’d been true to his word, and a terrible houseguest, too. Teila had bitten back every retort that rose to her tongue, determined not to give him the satisfaction of being right about her, but it had been a bitterly won battle. Kason hadn’t seemed as bothered by his father’s constant sniping. If anything, he’d seemed to enjoy baiting him.

“You let him speak to you like you’re a child,” Teila had said one night when Kason had tried to make love to her and she’d turned her back on him, too aware of the Rav Aluf’s presence.

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“It bothers me,” she’d said. “And you allow him to speak to me like . . . like I’m worthless.”

That had made him sit up. “No.”

“Yes,” Teila had said. “And you say nothing.”

“It’s just talk. He’ll leave soon, when he sees that I’m not going with him.”

She’d turned on him fiercely. “And why aren’t you? Why would you stay here, so far from anything, working so hard, when you could go home and live a life of luxury?”

His hand on her wrist had kept her from going far. Little by little, he’d pulled her closer, then onto his lap. He’d brushed her hair from her face. “Why do you think, Teila? Tell me why you think I’d rather stay here.”

She couldn’t bring herself to say it, in case she’d overassumed. The thought of looking like a fool in his eyes was too much to bear, so she shook her head and stayed silent. Kason had kissed her, soft at first. Then harder. His hands roamed, making her sigh. Making her squirm.

“Don’t you want me to stay?” he asked her after, when both of them, spent and naked, lounged in his bed. “Teila?”

Pride and fear had bound her tongue. His hand on her bare back had gone still. He sat up to look at her.

“Answer me.”

“I need to check the lamp and get some sleep.”

He caught her wrist again, this time harder than before. “Check the lamp, but come back to me. I want you to sleep here.”

“No. Your father—”

“It’s not his business.” Kason’s voice had gone hard as lightning-seared sand and just as brittle. “Say you’ll come back here.”

She hadn’t been able to make herself form the words. Silence had filled the darkness between them, colder than the air outside. When she left him, he didn’t try to stop her.

The next morning, the roar of the cruiser’s thrusters had woken her from restless dreams. She’d leaped from her lonely and too-empty bed before her eyes were even open to run to her window. He was leaving her; she knew it without even seeing him board.

Teila had never taken the stairs so fast in her life. She’d tripped at the bottom and broken her ankle; the pain had been distant and faint until much later, overshadowed at first by her desperation to reach him before he went away forever. Limping, she hurtled herself through the back door and toward the cruiser, which was just closing its doors. Vikus and Billis had been pressing their goggle-eyed faces to the glass.

She’d said nothing, made no cry. It was too late. He was going to leave her because she’d been stupid.

And then, the door had opened. Kason came down the ramp. She’d run on her broken ankle and launched herself into his arms. She’d covered his face with kisses and vowed to never let him go. And, until his father had returned a few cycles later and convinced Kason that his duty to protect her meant serving in the SDF, she hadn’t.

H
e smoothed a hand over the curved wood, testing it for splinters or imperfections. The pads of his fingertips caught briefly on a tiny rough spot, so he went over it with the smoothing paper again and again until the wood was as slick as glass. Only when the entire hull had been smoothed to his satisfaction did he get out the jar of whale oil.

He held it to the light, swirling the golden contents. This oil was what lubricated the whale’s jointed segments; over time and with the right amount of grinding, it would become milka. It was far more precious and expensive in this state, because it was so much harder to gather. It was also poison if you tried to eat it, unlike its nutritious and delicious other state.

He knew these things the way he knew the color of his hair and eyes, that he liked milka pudding, that his favorite color was blue. None of that came from the data stream, which, though still prominent, had begun to bother him less. He knew about whale oil and boats, he thought, because he’d known about them
before.
And Teila had known he would know.

Carefully, he poured some of the oil on the wood and began rubbing it in. He used his fingers because it was easier that way to make sure he got the oil into every crevice and pore. Something happened while he worked.

He relaxed.

The aches and pains he’d come to count as commonplace began to ease, despite the way he’d been stretching and using his muscles while working on the boat. The tension in his neck disappeared, which in turn erased the throbbing pain in his skull he’d thought would never go away. This was what he was meant to do, he thought as he got lost in the rhythmic motions of his hands working the oil into the wood. Fix. Not break. He was a builder, not a soldier . . .

“Hey! You!”

Startled, he turned and nearly knocked the jar of oil off the counter. Pera stood in the shed doorway, her eyes wide and her white hair mussed. She looked shiftily around the shed before settling her gaze on him.

“You need to go inside,” she said. “Something’s happened.”

He didn’t move, not right away, though he did reach for a rag to begin cleaning his hands. “Something like what?”

“Something with the Fenda.”

He carefully wiped each finger, making sure to get his skin clean. “What about her?”

Pera danced, impatient, clearly having expecting him to have run out the door the moment she arrived. “She’s probably dead!”

“She was old,” he said. “It’s not unexpected.”

The woman in front of him looked blank for a moment. Then something else filtered into her eyes, an expression he couldn’t quite read, though it wasn’t sorrow or fear. “Teila’s really upset. She’s crying, hysterical. Says she needs you.”

“Why would she need me?” His words had nothing to do with how he felt, but there was no way he was going to give away anything emotional to Pera.

“I don’t know, she just does. You should come.”

He gave a last glance at the boat, which ideally needed another few coats of oil, but it wouldn’t hurt it to be left for a while. Again making sure his hands were completely free of any traces of the poisonous oil, he tossed the rag onto the workbench. “Fine. Let’s go.”

Upstairs in the lighthouse, the boy wailed in his bed while his mother, Vikus, and Billis had gathered around the slumped figure of the ancient Fenda in her rocking chair on the other side of the room. Teila looked up when he came in the room, and though tears streaked her cheeks she didn’t look hysterical. She did look surprised to see him.

“Pera came for me.”

Teila nodded, stepping away from the Fenda’s chair and giving a quick glance over her shoulder at her weeping son. “She’s gone. Stephin found her.”

At the sound of his name, the boy wailed louder. Crossing to the bed, Jodah sat next to him. “Shh. It’s all right.”

Stephin buried his face against Jodah’s chest. “I thought she was sleeping!”

Jodah passed a hand over the boy’s thick, dark hair. He pulled a milka bud from his pocket. “Here.”

The boy took it, sitting up to look at him. “Mao says not before dinner.”

“It’s fine,” Teila told him before Jodah could answer. Pera had arrived a few minutes behind Jodah, and Teila gestured at her. “Stephin, go to the kitchen with Pera. She’ll get your dinner for you. I’m going to take care of Amira Densi, all right?”

Stephin nodded, giving another tearful look toward the Fenda. “Can I say goodbye to her?”

“Of course you can.” Teila took him by the hand and led him to the chair.

Pera watched the boy tentatively put his arms around his amira, then hug her completely as he sobbed out a goodbye. “Disgusting.”

Teila hadn’t heard her, but the men had. Jodah shook his head at her, only to earn a wide-eyed look of innocence and a shrug. Vikus glared, while Billis looked uncomfortable.

“Go with Pera,” Teila told the boy. “Pera, can you please make sure Stephin gets his dinner?”

Pera’s smile stretched her mouth and showed her teeth, but looked more like a grimace. “Of course. Come on.”

When they’d gone, Teila turned to him. “We’ll need help wrapping her and carrying her outside. She’ll return to sand soon. I’d like to say some words over her before she does. I think Stephin would like to be there too.”

“Are you all right?” The question slipped out of him before he could stop it.

Tears still glittered in her eyes. “Yes. Densi was very old, and she’d been telling me for a while that it would soon be her time. I didn’t want to believe it or think about it, of course, because . . . well. Because I love her.”

Billis burst into muffled, snorting sobs. Vikus clapped him on the back, but the younger man couldn’t be soothed, even when Teila put her arms around him. Over his shoulder, she said to Vikus, “Take your brother to the kitchen and get him a drink. A strong one. Hush, shhh, Billis. It was her time.”

Even with her own pain at the forefront, she was so good at taking care of people, Jodah thought as he watched her comfort the younger man and send them both off. She turned to him, her features strained, weariness evident in every movement. She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a long, slow sigh. Then her shoulders slumped and she put her hands over her face.

He didn’t think about anything else, not his anger or her lies. He gathered her against him and held her close. She gave a low cry but then melted against him. They stayed that way in silence while he measured the beating of his heart.

“Thank you,” she said finally, pulling away from him. Her eyes were dry, her smile sweet but a little wary.

Suddenly, he hated that he’d made her feel that way about him. Distrustful. He wanted to pull her close again, breathe the heady scent of her hair, but that would be selfish. Instead, he let her go.

“You’re welcome,” he said gruffly. “Let me help you.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. I’d like that.”