Library Pass

By

Pat Foley

Chapter 9

Beneath the trees where nobody sees
They'll hide and seek as long as they please
Cause that's the way the teddy bears have their picnic.

It's cold in here," Sascek complained, standing shivering in the entrance to the media center, to which he had never been. "And humid."

"It is not difficult to adapt to it."

Sascek shivered again. "I will reset the environmental controls."

"No," T'Jar covered his hand with hers. "It might show on the computer systems. Let us just open a window. I know a place, in the stacks, by a window. It will serve us well."

Sascek hesitated, regarding the room doubtfully. "Won't opening the window be recorded as well?"

"I …don't know," T'Jar admitted. "But I have sometimes seen my Lady do it, so it cannot be forbidden. And it may be overlooked as it is something she would do."

"Perhaps we should not be here," Sascek said.

"We cannot go to the guard barracks," T'Jar argued. "Nor can we go to my quarters. Someone would hear your great hulking feet."

"I am quiet," Sascek drew up at that, amazed and hurt.

"You only think you are quiet," T'Jar countered. "Your ears are so far above your feet you scarcely notice the noise they make -- as those of us lower to the ground cannot help but do."

"T'Jar--"

"Besides, I have been given leave to use the library whenever I wish. My lady said so. She called it a library pass."

"A pass?"

"She laughed, perhaps it was one of her human jokes. But the leave was given." T'Jar looked up at him, eyes as wide and black as Vulcan's night. "Sascek?"

"Show me this place," Sascek said, taking her hand.

xxx

In the master bedroom, Sarek and Amanda were resting from their… chores, Amanda drowsy and content, and Sarek meditating, thinking pleasurably upon his wife, the successful evening, and pondering if Vulcan control was equal to preventing his stomach from growling at least until his wife was fully asleep. He glanced at her, watching her lowering eyelids and estimated that in perhaps ten minutes he could get away without waking her. But before his plan could reach its fruition, a cry shattered the silent night, echoing back from the hills, clearly audible through the open windows and the wide flung balcony doors. And jerking his wife out of her near sleep.

"What was that?" Amanda asked, sitting up, now wide awake.

Sarek's eyes had widened as well, and he looked astonished from the windows to his human wife. For a moment he had no answer. Or at least not one he could in countenance voice. Was there no end to the surprises in his household this night?

"What did it sound like to you?" he asked evasively, rising from the bed.

"I don't know." She watched as he crossed the room to the side of their suite that opened to Vulcan's moonless night – and to the darkened court. "But it sounded awfully close!"

"Perhaps it was a nightbird," Sarek suggested, decisively setting the window shields to filter sounds and closing the balcony doors.

"That was no kind of nightbird I ever heard," Amanda countered skeptically, puzzled at his actions. Her husband seldom set the window shields, complaining of an infinitesimal hum, inaudible to her, that disturbed his sleep when they were on. They only set them during sandstorms, whose swish partially drowned out the hum. And even then Sarek complained.

Sarek came back to bed, doing his best to ignore the distracting hum, and drew his wife into his arms, planning another distraction for her. "Have I never told you, my wife? There are…all…manner of nightbirds."

"Oh?" Amanda regarded him. "I've never heard there were more than the one species. But why set the window--"

"There are others. Indigenous to this habitat on Vulcan. But are seldom known to vocalize."

"Really? But you don't have to--"

"Quite. And then there are some rare varieties," he kissed her, "migrants, as it were, from other areas, that are heard far more frequently. But in a very limited range. Extremely limited." He kissed her again. Deeply. And drew her under him. "Such as this bedroom, for example."

"Ummm," Amanda murmured, her eyes closed, as he drew a hand down her side, and up one thigh.

"Do you understand, my wife?" he asked, lips trailing down her throat.

Amanda opened her eyes, bemused. "What were we talking about?"

"That was the response I hoped for." Sarek said, well satisfied. And continued with his distractions.

To be continued…

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