Chapter 32
When she was finally alone Alja sat down on the simple bed in the cabin. From the inside it was a small but high tech Psy accommodation unit. Alja had spent a lot of time in similar units and she'd never stopped hating them.
The wooden walls were covered with isolation panels and laced with security systems as she guessed from the extensive control panel beside the door. Other than the bed there was only the necessary furniture: A desk with a chair on the wall opposite to the bed and a small cupboard for nutrition bars and drinking water beside it. One section of the room was divided as a wet room entirely made of dull, stainless steel while everything else was colored in the same well-known grey. The only spots of color were the checkered blue and white curtains that covered the two small windows. From the outside they turned the cabin into an almost romantic cliché. Inside they seemed strangely out of place. Just like Alja in her evening dress.
Suddenly feeling cold she switched on the laz generator beside the bed. It emitted a cozy warmth at once. But nothing else. Of course no one had added the artificial flames the humans and changelings used on their generators to make them look like a real fire. The visual effects had no function. They were useless to the Psy.
Everything here felt wrong to her, because it was a piece of the world she wanted to escape set right in the middle of all the beauty of nature, of the world she longed to escape to. It felt like a sacrilege. And still it was a part of her world too and even more important: it was a piece of Kaleb's world. And that fact made it impossible for Alja to hate it. This place belonged only to him. Probably not many people knew about it, if any at all. Being there alone felt strangely intimate and Alja couldn't help but picture Kaleb sleeping in the very bed she sat on.
Before she knew it her hand stroked over the cotton of the simple, gray covers. And she wondered whether they still held his scent.
Very bad idea!
She jumped up and paced across the room trying to give her mind a different direction just to find herself staring at the shower in the wet room the next moment. The stainless steel didn't look so bleak, when she thought of Kaleb's naked body under a sprinkle of hot water. Glistening drops of water rolling from inky black strands of hair on his forehead, caressing chiseled features and sensual lips, dropping down on a hard, male chest to shatter on smooth skin that stretched over firm pectorals. Streams of water running along the hard lines of his muscled front following the vee shaped by his lower abdominals, down to… Don't think about it! Don't think about it! She tried to reign herself in. The fantasy vanished to the back of her mind, but her whole skin felt suddenly so hot, she wondered how she'd ever thought she'd need the laz fire.
When she turned around to step back into the room she saw a selection of her usual clothes had appeared neatly piled on top of the bed and her boots stood in front of it. A second later her toilet bag and the container for her contacts popped up beside her clothes. And again instead of being annoyed that Kaleb invaded her privacy like that, all she could see was the comprehensiveness with which he took care of her.
She had no defenses against him. Everything he'd done might have been precisely calculated. He'd practically told her she was but a pawn in his schemes. Only her heart had stopped caring along the way. It made her wonder: Would it always be like this for her? That any pleasure would be tainted with pain, any hope with distrust?