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Time passed quickly when he could see her, and slowly when he could not, Sandoval began to notice.
Some times, he was able to ask for the pleasure of her company a few days in advance, leaving a note at her apartment or at the café; she never disappointed him. On those nights, she would prepare a meal or order from one of the many small, surprisingly excellent ethnic restaurants that dotted her neighborhood.
"It's the only chance I get to do it any more; volume cooking for the mission isn't quite the same and I wouldn't bother just for myself. Besides, it's nice to do it for someone who appreciates it," she always said with a smile.
They laughed and chatted easily on these nights, content simply to be not alone. Their conversations usually drifted across the landscapes of their childhoods; he usually reminisced about life in the isles as best he could recall it, and then there were exchanges regarding college life. They both remembered a time when higher learning was still a lucrative achievement on their continent.
It amused them both that she had been something of a wild child in her day, while he had been a straitlaced, straight-A student back in the academy. It was quite a conundrum in light of their current circumstances; now he was the one with much that he did not want known about his day-to-day activities.
He learned that she had lived all over the Old Great Nation and had traveled extensively before she got married, before the Collapse; she delighted in telling detailed stories about the places she had been and the things she had seen. She occasionally mentioned brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, but these topics were still painful, in light of how it had all ended.
He could sense that she would like to know more about him, but she never pressed; she simply absorbed whatever he told her with keen interest. He could have lied, told her any kind of story he wanted, he thought, but that would have been contrary to why he was doing this, whatever "this" was, he thought ironically.
"Aren't you ever curious what it is I do?" he had asked her one night, as they sat on the roof watching the sun go down, sipping their coffee. Zo'Or had been preoccupied that evening, distractedly dismissing him from the mothership, and Sandoval had felt a bit safer engaging in this relaxing habit with her. Her building was one of the oldest in New Province, and just enough taller than the rest on the block that it easily accommodated observing without being noticed. She kept the top floor for herself and rented the rest to older folks who were fearful of the skies nowadays.
She chuckled. "What I don't know can't hurt me, G-man," she said with her usual irony. "Or anyone else for that matter," she added with a dark note to her voice; he knew she was referring to incidents that had occurred during the Conflicts.
Several members of her family had been victims of the wrath of a particularly virulent Resistance group because of her husband and the Kryss experiments; she didn't talk about it, but he knew they'd been tortured for her involvement with the Taelons, demanding information that she had never divulged.
She had gazed at him then, her face as serious as he'd ever seen it. "I was married once, remember? I know what it's like to share that much of a person, to know their demons and their poisons, to care what they are, forcing you to choose among the people you love. I'm not sure I'm capable of doing that again. I'm not sure I ever was."
She studied the horizon, where the river met the edge of the sky beyond the limits of New City, an almost guilty look on her face, he had thought.
"When the Kryss thing went down, I felt as if I'd been set free from a prison. Truth be told, the whole incident felt like my last chance to escape, to make the life I'd always really wanted," she had finished softly.
They sat quietly after her candid admission, letting it hang in the air between them. What he had already known about the outcome of her involvement with the Kryss experiments was one of the things that had interested him about her; it was one of the reasons why he had started watching her in the first place – he admired her cunning in using it to create a new life for herself; that she had done it seemingly without regret intrigued him further.
He knew in his heart that it was similar to the path he had taken with Dee Dee when the opportunity had presented itself for advancement in his career. He took some small measure of satisfaction in the fact that the Taelons erroneously thought they had erased all of his memories of this occurrence, though it was not a memory in which he took any particular pride – he had truly loved his wife, once.
That she and he were not so different, really, comforted Sandoval in ways he couldn't quite describe. Since his stay in the Bethesda Naval hospital and his discovery of the son he'd never known about and would probably never know he'd become increasingly determined to ensure that there remained on this planet some evidence of his existence.
He suspected that she was probably the only one left who could care about that, about him, in the way that he had begun to yearn for while he was sick, because of the things she doesn't know about me, he realized ruefully. But he was beginning to think Melissa could absorb his truths without rejecting him, if he were ever ready to divulge them.
She had smiled at him after a few minutes of this contemplative silence. "Besides, G-man, if you ever want me to know what goes on, you'll tell me," she said gently, in a smooth, confident voice.
His work being what it was, he occasionally had to break an arranged meeting with her; on these nights he sent flowers in his stead and another when he could actually watch her receive it, to see if he were still welcome. Her understanding nature in these matters set him at ease; that she readily accepted this arrangement relieved the shadows of guilt that threatened to traverse his mind for not telling her all that he was about.
Some times, after particularly troubling days, when he'd had to choose between what was right and what he felt was for the greater benefit of the planet, knowing that he would be judged harshly for his choices by those who could never understand them, he had simply knocked on her door; at the look on his face, she had let him in without a word and affectionately wrapped her arms around him; her welcoming embrace felt like his last link to his humanity, and on these nights he would hold her as if death itself were after him.
"Bad day with the demons, G-man?" she would ask quietly, gently rubbing his back; he would just pull her tighter in response.
She would hold him until his troubled mind had eased somewhat; in return, he never took advantage of her trust. Sandoval found it odd, but he realized that he respected her too much to take liberties with her, although it was difficult; his desire for her grew with every occasion that he passed with her. Everything about her physicality was becoming comfortably familiar and he felt an increasing sense of longing to know her better in that way. He knew that she felt the same; there was no mistaking what passed between them in their fond embraces and occasional, passionate kisses.
His deepening feelings for her became a source of annoyance to him; this game was getting complicated now. He told himself that she was the source of the complication, although she had made no demands on him of any kind; she simply accepted what he had to offer and did not ask for more. The complications were all in his head, manifestations of his own fears that he refused to acknowledge; Ronald Sandoval was not a man who knew fear, he reminded himself.
He tried staying away from her for a while. Still, he watched her; thinking he might find a crack in her display, something that would indicate her loyalties to either the Resistance or to the Taelons, something that might reveal her capacity to ultimately betray him as the others had; that would certainly have made it easier for him to forget about her, but nothing in the manner in which she conducted herself or the affairs of the New Province mission demonstrated anything of the sort.
As in private, she publicly refused to take a side in the matter of Taelon versus Earthling, preferring, as she had told him, to embrace the positive aspects of both points of view rather than pass judgment on the rightness of either.
"I don't know if I'm qualified to say who's right and who's wrong in this debate, G-man," she had said with a sigh, as they sat on the patio one night. "All I know is that humans aren't as infallible as they like to think they are and why would it be surprising to discover that the Taelons had their own secrets? Their own agenda? In recorded history as we used to know it, hadn't humans proved themselves equally capable of such deception in the misguided interest of self-preservation?"
She had leaned forward then, elbows on her knees, face in her hands, gazing at the bustle in the street below. A slow, wistful smile had made its way across her face as she watched the people going about their lives.
"Still, I'm not quite ready to give up on my own species just yet," she had said.
He tried pulling his cloak of cynicism around him again, reminding himself that she was not the kind of woman he normally favored, telling himself that her lifestyle was not one he aspired to in any way. There were plenty of attractive, young female Volunteers on his staff who gladly kept him company, though their hero worship style of affection was only a brief thrill, quickly turning into a burden; it was worthwhile only as long as they served his nefarious purposes. In the end, he despised them for blindly following his lead into the murkier aspects of what passed for morality in this day and age.
That Melissa seemed not to notice his absence also bothered him; he realized that he had secretly hoped she would miss him on some level. If she did, it wasn't obvious in the way she carried on, further invalidating his conviction that she was the one complicating matters in their unusual scenario.
He would see her laughing with one of the mission's regulars or helping out some kids in the health club, or deftly beating down an executive at some firm to donate items to the mission or take one of its residents into their employ. He admired her ability to identify and explore the best things about people; she could find the weakest threads of goodness among the ones she helped, and weave them back into strong fabric. These people usually decided to serve the mission in some way as repayment for this, so it was never at a loss for resources to carry on its work. It was the type of manipulation he himself employed with the Volunteers, but without the venom of his own endeavors.
He noticed that she occasionally had company in the café in the mornings; these were Volunteer and Resistance alike. Sometimes it was someone who had managed to make a life for themselves beyond their stay at the mission; she chatted easily with whoever it would be, deeply interested in whatever they were telling her; she cared immensely about so many, he realized. He would find himself attracted to her again, enamored by her devotion to humanity, defying his own cynical thoughts.
Sometimes, it was a former lover; these were vapid, good-looking young men with empty eyes and great conviction of direction coupled with great amounts of ambition; he imagined that they were captivated by her dedication to her own cause. Sandoval vehemently denied the small tendrils of envy that would curl around his heart when they would stop to see her, with a tender kiss on the lips and big, body pressing bear hugs, the kind that are shared between two people who have been intimate.
He reminded himself that her engagement with these had stopped after he'd said hello to her. He surmised that, like his own involvement with the ladies at the club, these men had served a practical purpose and her time with each had mutually ended long before it became a complication, when both could still recall only the enjoyment of it.
During his darkest moments, he still went with Tate down to the club. In the anonymous clinch of those plastic, doll-like women, he could take out whatever frustrations he had encountered. He was afraid to show this side of himself to her; in truth, he was afraid of this side of himself.
But he had inadvertently begun to imagine it was her that he was with, behind the papier-mache walls of the backrooms there; the confusion and disappointment that this fantasizing caused was usually too painful to deal with and he would squeeze his eyes shut and look away.
Since this release no longer worked as it had before he'd spoken to her, more than once after an unsatisfactory evening there, he found his way to her door, knocking quietly; she would answer with the knowing, sympathetic look and comforting embrace he had come to rely on, despite his repeated self affirmations to the contrary.
"C'mon in, G-man, sorry to see the demons have got the upper hand these days," she would say, offering him a coffee or something stronger if she felt the occasion warranted it. When the storm in his mind had calmed, she would smile, as if she sensed it.
"Feel better?" she would ask; he would just smile back at her – she knew he did. He was increasingly grateful for the way in which they could interact like this, without words; it made him feel safe.
Together they would watch the animated life in the busy street below from the patio or the living room window of her apartment, steeping themselves in the chaos of other people's every day lives, secretly relishing the sense of security and peace it gave them about their own lives. From the roof on warm nights, they would admire the lights of New City or enjoy the calm, soothing effect of the silent, swift-moving river traffic.
They punctuated their observations with commentary about what they saw; hers usually revolved around some innocently amusing moment or tiny, beautiful detail unnoticed by him; his usually centered on some violent happening or criminal activity that was occurring.
"Occupational hazard," he'd told her with a grin.
On the nights when he saw her, he spent as much time as he could, immersing himself in the comfort it gave him, until the incessant nagging of the global dictated when he needed to leave; but on the rare occasion when it didn't, he never stayed; it would have been too dangerous for her.
To an outsider, their encounters might have seemed odd, uneven, certainly dysfunctional at best, but they carried on in this sometimes way, through the summer and into the cold season, back into the days when their continent was warmed by the sun and those things that still bloomed in New Province did just that.
Yet their paths never seemed to cross in public, until that night.