XXX. Night and Day
The trading district on Ganymede kept an accommodating schedule, owing to the frequent stops of long-haul freighters and caravans traversing the beltway of gates. In the fading light of late evening, Vicious wandered the bazaar, hands in his pockets and his long coat drawn back, casually baring the scabbard and sword, keeping his head low and scouring the wares from beneath a wash of hair. Something here had to be good enough to take home to Julia.
He smiled to himself, watching the milling crowd part like a drift of Spike's cigarette smoke, his body the finger that toyed with the flow. People on the street gave him wide berth instinctively, even when the katana hung flush against his thigh, invisible. An opalsmith's shop caught his eye; the choke-collar of platinum link and blocky, imperfect trapezoids of stone drew him in, but when he reached the booth, his loyalties shifted.
Twin Derringers, iridescent blue steel wrapped in boltless handles of green opal, lay in a pile of crushed black velvet. Despite their size, they looked formidable and cold to the touch. As he reached to pick one up, the smith put a hand on his wrist, and then jerked back when he looked up into the face of his potential customer. He swallowed and let his hand drop beneath the counter, but managed to say his piece. "Unless you are planning to buy, please do not touch. The oils of your hands, combined with the oils of others, will dull the stone. They should be held only by their owner."
Julia was always after him to carry a gun. The Sig Sauer was a beautiful piece of machinery, but heavy, and with a wicked recoil that left the tendons of his wrists aching dully. He hated having to fire his way into a confrontation, and then compensate for the numbness of his palms and the hot-cold twinge in the tendons while he finished the fight as he was meant to do, up close, with a blade. These looked light, antique only in appearance.
Vicious grinned. "You're a good salesman," he replied. "I'll take them. I want to touch them."
"Sir," the smith said in a stage-whisper, "These are not inexpensive trinkets."
"Do you mean they are real weapons, or are you implying I cannot afford them?" Vicious arched an eyebrow, the grin gone.
"Well, perhaps, a bit of both, sir, no disrespect intended." The smith shifted on his feet. "They are quite valuable. Modified. Kerstner assembly under the handle. The small caliber backup sidearm carried by the IS –"
"I know what a Kerstner is," Vicious interrupted in a low, silky voice. "Package them up. Gift wrapped." He slid a hand into his coat pocket and brought out his bankcard.
"Yes, of course, sir." Using the cloth beneath them, he gathered the pistols and boxed them, leaving the card sitting on the counter, his eyes flicking to it every few seconds. When he'd finished wrapping the package, he finally took the card, one hand still resting on top of the box. "Six hundred fifty, sir."
Vicious nodded.
"Thousand, sir."
Vicious sighed and rolled his eyes. "If you want it, you had best not try to talk me out of it," he muttered. He caught the smothered smile of the merchant and knew he'd been charged a premium for his eagerness, but the guns were perfect and the money was easy to come by. He collected his card and the package and set off back toward his ship.
One for each. The engagement rings of ravenous beasts at the top of the food chain. He smiled to himself.
Julia tucked her head under Spike's chin, returning the embrace. He said nothing in response to her admission, but she could feel his muscles tense, almost imperceptibly, and then relax again as they lay in silence, their breathing settling into a matched rhythm.
"We should get up," she whispered, recognizing the beginnings of sleep in the way his neck relaxed.
He drew in a deep breath and sat up abruptly. "When is he coming home?" The words came out low and rough, an attempt at casual that instead fell into sullen.
"I don't know," she replied, carefully neutral.
He sighed and turned to look at her; like the night before, his expression softened as soon as he saw her face, and he nodded. "I'm sorry," he said, and gave her a sad smile. "I'm just not ready to wake up from this."
She smiled back, hoping he couldn't see the way her throat tightened until she thought she might not breathe again at his words, and slid out of bed to take a shower before she lost her resolve.
She returned, wrapped in her bathrobe, hair brushed and wet, to find him perched at the open window in his jeans, out of sight from below, arms crossed over his stomach and his cigarette held out so the smoke drifted on the wind. He'd gathered the blankets and sheets from the bed in her laundry basket, and the sight of them – balled up much more ferociously than necessary – broke her heart.
She wanted to tell him there would be a next time, but she didn't want to lie. Instead, she crossed to where he sat and put her hands on his shoulders, laying her cheek flat against the warm expanse of his back. He took a long drag of smoke, leaning into her, and then let it go in an impossibly drawn-out, perfect narrow trail. "I probably need a shower myself," he said softly, and was about to flick the cigarette out the window when she took it from his hand.
"If ever an occasion warranted me having one of these again, this is it," she explained, with a hint of humor. She brought it to her lips and tasted him on the filter, closing her eyes.
He chuckled low in his chest and stood, trailing his fingers down her terrycloth thigh.
She listened to the sound of the shower running, the uneven splashes of movement, the moments when he would fall still and she could picture him, water drumming against those sinewy shoulder muscles, his head bowed. Mechanically, she spread clean sheets with her arms outstretched like supplication, smoothing the fold marks and tucking the corners tight. She had just finished securing the bedspread around the pillows when the water turned off with a thunk, followed by a wave of silence. She raised the window another inch and went to the kitchen, feet like lead.
He came back out in a towel, oddly young with his wet hair smoothed down around his skull. Smiling as he passed her, he crossed to the couch and retrieved his boxers. "Wouldn't want to leave these here."
She did not smile in return.
"Hey," he said, "breakfast?"
It was like an inward stumble – falling back in her memories, knowing that look, hopeful and cajoling and more than anything else earnest. He'd looked just like that every time he'd said the word before. Always the same implied question.
"Absolutely," she replied.
"It wasn't so much that I wanted to get in trouble," Julia was saying, her eyes sparkling, "as that I just couldn't resist."
She'd let slip to Spike that she'd once been kicked out of the science museum on Venus, and he insisted on hearing the whole story. He picked at his food, laughing too often to make any headway and not wanting to miss the opportunity to make a smart remark.
"I mean, there's a big placard explaining how the counterweight at the end of the pole makes it possible to ride the cycle across the tightrope," she went on. "And I was five pounds over the weight limit, but I didn't look it. So I got in line. I got out in the middle of the tightrope and started goofing around, swinging further and further to the sides. They were right, I couldn't get it to go all the way over. But!" she paused for a swallow of coffee, "My street physics education was incomplete on the subject of gravity."
He raised his eyebrows, smirking, seeing where it was going.
"I got over far enough that I fell off the cycle. And I tried to hang on too long. The counterweight nailed me in the head as I was falling. At which point I was no longer curious why they'd wrapped it in styro padding."
He struggled for a few seconds to keep his reaction to an amused smile, but his cheeks twitched and he finally burst out laughing, feeling the sting of a half-swallow of coffee in his sinuses. She laughed with him, pink creeping up her cheeks. "Bet you never forgot that physics lesson," he finally managed. "Probably explains a few things, too. That Julia. You'll have to excuse her. She was hit in the head by a counterweight when she was a little girl."
She gasped mock indignation and feinted at him with her fork across the booth. He reached for his knife, but she jabbed at his hand and he jerked it back, grinning at her from under his eyebrows. They squared off, he wiggling the fingers of his left hand while she sat coiled and ready to pounce, but at the same moment he managed a particularly elaborate roll of those digits, he darted his right hand out and came up with a spoon, triumphant. "Don't you remember the cigarette trick I taught you?" he needled, clashing spoon with her fork. "Distract with the off hand. Execute with the on hand."
She giggled and speared a piece of melon with her silverware-cum-foil. "I do remember."
They sat silent for a few moments; Spike finished the last of his coffee and looked around for a waitress, but there was none in sight. He set the cup down, uncurling his long fingers from it, and dug into his jacket pocket for a handful of Woolongs.
"I'll walk you home," he said, slow and deliberate. "Annie is going to wonder where I've been."
She blanched a little. "Annie wouldn't say anything," she thought out loud.
"No, she wouldn't, to anyone else," he replied, "but I'll never hear the end of it myself." He avoided Julia's eyes and slid out of the bench seat to stretch beside it.
She followed, putting a hand on his arm. He turned to look down at her, and she entwined her arm with his. "Still no regrets," she murmured. He nodded, but had nothing to say.
It took less than a block for him to smile again; in this moment, he was walking down the street with Julia on his arm, Julia recently in bed with him, Julia with a cluster of tiny moles shaped like a constellation just below her left nipple, Julia telling him another Venusian story because he laughed at her stories and he knew she loved to get a laugh. Came of spending too much time with a man who laughed too little. Since there was nothing he could refuse her, he was laughing out loud again by the time they rounded the corner to the back stairwell of her building, and perhaps that was why he missed, for half a second, the way her hand disappeared from the crook of his elbow and the fact that she fell an inch or so behind him. He turned to see what held her up and then followed her gaze, up the stairs to the covered porch, where Vicious stood with his hands in his coat pockets and a silver-wrapped present under one arm.