Tucker

The silence after the door closes again isn't entirely comfortable. I roll off Hoshi almost at once; both of us know I was bluffing from the start. Though that quip about the corn dog was a bit below the belt, and I'll get her back for it eventually.

"Damn," I say at last, tiredly. "Maybe the shore leave thing wasn't such a good idea after all."

She snuggles up against me and I wrap my arms around her, trying to blot out the sudden chill I feel. "The idea was great, Trip," she tells me earnestly. "I don't want to give up on it. It's just that – we'll just have to be really careful if we go ahead with it."

"I don't know. Maybe I'm pushin' things too hard, too fast. Maybe we need a break from everything, even each other. An' even if we're careful, there's always a risk of some jackass gettin' hold of it and makin' something out of nothing. Mud sticks, Hoshi."

She raises herself up on one elbow to peer down at me in shock. "You think your family would talk? They've never seemed like those kind of people to me." I've never made any secret of how much I love them, and by the number of messages that come in for me in the mail bursts she must know they think the world of me too. How can I reconcile that with the sudden cold dread that's come over me that they could somehow betray me in spite of that?

"I don't know," I say miserably. "'Bout you and me, probably not. You bein' a beautiful woman, an' all. They'll understand that. But Mal, he … he's not a good mixer, Hoshi. You an' me, we know it's just 'cause of how shy he is, but they won't understand that. I'm scared they'll just see him as some snotty upper-class asshole who's tagged along where he's not welcome. And if they find out about him and me, they'll blame him for it. No matter what I say.

"And now he thinks I'm ashamed of him. Of what we're doin'."

This feels like shaky ground, and I've put our feet on it. She pauses before she asks the question I pray she won't: "Are you?"

The pause is tiny, but it's still too long. "Trip!"

"I'm not! I'm not! Leastways…" I scrub my hand desperately through my hair. "I was raised that way too, Hoshi. The first time, back in the Academy, I … well, it was a bit of a … I don't know, maybe it was just nerves, but I made myself think it was because what we were doing was wrong. Like, God was tryin' to tell me something.

"We tried again, a couple more times, but it never worked out that well. So I guess I convinced myself I didn't 'go' for guys, not really, not the way it mattered. I even went to confession about it and promised not to 'sin' again. At the time it felt like a relief." The crack of my laughter sounds bitter, if not outright crazy. "Then I saw Mal."

"So you'd thought about him even before…"

"Once or twice. He's good-lookin', I noticed that straight away. But for a start off I never realized he was bi, and for another his damned prissy attitude got up my back from the start. That's how I know exactly how my folks'll see him. Just the way I did."

She looks down at the hairs on my chest and starts combing her fingers thoughtfully through them. "Do you feel ashamed when you're with Malcolm?"

"Hell, no. I won't say I don't still want to slap him into the middle of next week when he comes on all stiff-upper-lip at me, but now he's finally gotten round to lettin' on he's a real decent guy under all that armor-platin' I … well, I suppose I feel kinda honored, because I don't think he lets people get this close to him easily." This makes me feel even worse, because I know that however deftly Mal tried to pass it off, he was hurt by my reluctance to be open about being in a relationship with him. "As for the sex, if you haven't noticed I'm enjoyin' it then I think you'd better schedule an eye examination. Real soon."

"So are you still thinking we should cancel the idea of meeting up?"

I sigh. When the three of us are together everything is beautifully simple, but other times … I guess it's not that easy to shake off the values you were brought up in. It's not that I doubt what I feel for Malcolm (even though I'm not really sure what it is yet), more that the memories are sometimes too clear of sitting in the chapel listening to the preacher going on and on on the subject of 'dishonorable passions', even though I was too young at the time to have that much of an idea what he was talking about. Looking back, I've even wondered if the way he concentrated so much on the stuff condemning gays really wasn't saying as much about himself as it was about the way God supposedly feels, but the first time someone in a college debate came up with that idea I pretty well expected the ceiling to cave in.

But whether or not, I know now that if I call it off, Mal will believe it's because of him. Because I care more about what my folks will think than I do about him. And that's not true – at least, I don't want it to be true, and I won't let it be true – so hell, I'm not giving up on it at all. The three of us can just hang out together (I've never asked if he likes fishing, but I know he's got patience, so damn, I can always teach him if he wants me to), I can teach him about baseball and he can teach me about soccer and Hoshi can teach the both of us about that ancient Andorian literature stuff she's just started studying, and all my folks will see is three Starfleet officers who get along together. There's no harm in that, is there?

So I say that to Hoshi (or at least most of it), and she hugs me and says she's sure everything will be fine. And we both pretend there's not a shadow of anxiety on the horizon, and that neither of us has heard of Murphy's Law which states that 'Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.'

We're Starfleet officers. We're professionals. We're friends.

We're lovers too, but nobody's going to find out about that.

Period.


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