Avatar is the property of people who aren't me. This work of fiction is not authorized by those people.
A/N – The second section of this chapter contains depictions of violence which may make some readers uncomfortable. A chapter summary is provided at the end.
Jude pulled in front of the Schellers' house, but waited to get out of the car. Ever since Krysta had called her, she had been debating whether or not her cover had worked or was blown.
Entering the house was an aggressive tactic for her, but she considered it worth the risk in order to set up a microphone outside the broken window. She did not expect to capture great audio from it, but certainly enough to confirm whether or not she was wasting her time looking for her target at his house.
She promised herself to make the first download as soon as she returned to the hotel room – which a very large part of her wanted to have happen sooner rather than later. If her cover was blown, though, there would be no point in making any downloads. Jude would certainly have to report her failure to her RDA handler. He would, in turn, ensure that she never worked as a hired investigator again.
On the chance that her ruse had worked, running away now would mean passing on the opportunity to plant stronger listening devices inside the house. She would also be able to keep Franklin off her back by being able to provide him with some intel, for better or for worse.
Jude adjusted the camera-concealing broche on her blouse, and made one final check of her makeup in the rearview mirror. She also checked her purse to make sure that the microphones she intended to plant – a two pens, her business card, and a pack of gum – were still operational.
Putting on her façade, she casually stepped out of the car and approached the Schellers' door. She knocked on the door. They had a video intercom linked in, but she suspected they used it for their own surveillance purposes than to use it to answer doors, what with the guards calling ahead to announce visitors.
Indeed, the door opened and Krysta said with a smile, "Hello, Bethany. I'm glad you could make it tonight."
"Happy to," she replied. "This is my fault after all."
"Well, we'll get it taken care of." Jude stepped into the house, and Krysta closed the door behind her.
Jude took a quick look around the foyer and commented, "You do have a lovely house, Missus Scheller."
"Krysta, please," she replied, "and thank you."
She took in a breath and said, "Well, shall we return to the scene of the crime?" Krysta nodded and escorted her back to the kitchen, and which point Jude commented, "It smells like you've been doing a lot of cooking since we spoke."
"That would be Natalie," Krysta replied. "She's been active in the kitchen since she was a child."
If Krysta were on to her, she was doing a fantastic job of not showing it. "No wonder she seemed upset this morning," Jude continued in idle conversation. "I trashed her shrine. Where is she, by the way?"
"She's having dinner in her room while she studies," Krysta replied casually.
"I see," Jude said with a nod. "Well, later I'd like to apologize to her again for startling her this morning."
Krysta waved her hand and said, "She's fine. Frankly, we're both just glad you came by to own up," she added as they sat down at the dining table. "The last time this happened, we had to call the guards to stop everybody on the course."
"Sounds fun," Jude said with a short laugh.
Krysta grinned and replied, "Not for them."
For the next few minutes, Jude and Krysta haggled over invoices from the last time the Schellers – or at least that Krysta alleged the Schellers – had to go through similar hassles. Krysta noted the price of tempered windows, and Jude noted that there was no chance that their windows had been tempered, thus waiving her liability to pay full price. In all the back and forth, Jude was waiting for the moment that Krysta might give up more than she was letting on; but by the end of their exchange, it appeared to her that Krysta was arguing on the level.
Eventually, they settled on a price – Jude would pay for a standard window and labor, and Krysta would absorb the difference. Krysta had already drawn up a template contract, and Jude used her microphone-wired pen to sign it, and then casually left the pen sitting on the dining room table.
"Hopefully that settles everything," Jude said, "But if anything else should come up, please let me know."
"I certainly will," Krysta said with a nod, and then they walked towards the front door.
When Krysta opened the door, however, Jude was unpleasantly surprised. Rather than have a clear path back to her car, a man – a familiar man – was standing on the front step. It had been several years, but she remembered working with him on a project in New York City. More than the job itself, she still very clearly remembered sleeping with him throughout the duration of the contract.
He obviously remembered her, too. "Jewel!" Greg exclaimed with a wide, wry grin as her stomach contracted. "You said you'd call me."
She tried to make a break for it past him, but he very easily caught her and returned her inside the house. For the second time tonight, Krysta closed the door behind her; but she had no plans to be taken down so easily.
First, she drove her knee into Greg's crotch, which she followed with a punch to his stomach. He did his best to maintain his hold on her, but the second time she kneed him was enough to get him to let go and double over. Jude made a break for the door again, but Krysta tackled her to the floor.
The two wrestled on the floor for a few moments when, at the moment Jude thought she was able to make her escape, yet another person entered the foyer. He grabbed Jude by her shoulders and very roughly forced her against the wall. "I'll thank you to not fight with my wife in our house," he said.
She responded by trying to elbow his stomach, but he was holding her arms tightly; so she tried stepping on his toes, but that appeared to have no effect. Despite her continued struggles, Jude knew she was caught.
"Thanks for taking your time," Krysta said as she stood up from the floor.
"I didn't know you finished negotiating so quickly, Honey," Abe replied. "Or else I would have been here sooner."
Catching his breath, Greg chimed in, "Jesus, Krys, you forgot to mention your husband was back! Coulda saved my nuts the effort."
"About that," Abe said. "Krysta tells me you've been trying to 'make partner' in my absence. Is that right?" Greg's response was something between a monosyllabic muttering and an articulated grunt. Abe continued, "Thanks for your help, but get the fuck out of my house before I give you a performance review."
Jude could not see it, but from the way the door slammed, it sounded as though Greg made a quick exit.
"Why don't we keep talking in the basement, huh?" Abe said as he forced her to walk down the hall.
"Let me go, and I'll just cancel the contract," she offered. "We can end this quickly."
Abe scoffed as they entered the basement stairwell. "Yeah, I don't know what snide comments Savage had to say about me in my personnel file, but I'm not actually that stupid."
"Are you sure?" she asked. "It seems to me like you have no idea what you're going up against."
He casually replied, "I think I have a clue. That's why I brought help."
They turned the corner of the stairs to be received by a group of people and, stunning Jude into silence, one very unhappy looking Na'vi.
Norm and Tseyo had been asked to remain in the basement for Abe's interrogation of RDA's goon, although Norm was fast becoming uncomfortable with the situation. She was forcefully seated in a chair, her hands bound behind its back with duct tape and her feet to its legs. She had fought through the process, landing a solid kick to Luke's mouth when he went for her feet. Amy had taken him upstairs ahead of the others' dismissal in order to treat his split lip.
Abe kept the basement lights turned off, except for an adjustable floor lamp that he moved beside her. He bent the lamp's neck so that the light was beamed directly onto her, at which point she said, "I've already seen your face. What's the point of this?"
"Who said it's to hide my face?" Abe replied.
She chuckled. "Oh, so it's supposed to make me nervous, then?"
"Unfortunately, I don't have a polygraph," he replied, sounding as though he were making a sincere apology. Norm found himself surprised that Abe, of all people, did not have such an instrument in his house. "However," Abe continued, "it's easier for me to tell when you're lying if I can see every tick on your face, every shift in your pupils. Direct light helps."
"And your two friends?" she asked. "Are we going to play 'good cop, bad cop, and freak?'"
"They have as much interest in this as I do, but no. No cops today."
"You know RDA's going to get suspicious when I don't report in tomorrow morning," she said. "It won't take them long to put two and two together."
Abe shrugged and pulled up another chair. He did not sit, however, but leaned against its back. "It won't matter by the time they do," he replied. "You're already well behind the power curve."
She gave him a cocked smile and said, "Oh, do tell."
Abe chuckled and sat down. "That would be cliché, wouldn't it?"
"Maybe," she said. "But you tell me yours, I'll tell you mine."
He pursed his lips and lightly shook his head. "Sorry, but this isn't a quid pro quo situation."
She took a breath and replied, "Your loss, then."
They stared at each other for an uncomfortably long amount of time, each intensely concentrated in their own ways. Abe was clearly trying to get a read on her weaknesses – Norm expected nothing less from him – and she seemed to be fortifying herself against his silent probing. Tseyo leaned over to Norm and whispered, "How long will they do this?"
Norm just shrugged.
It was Abe, though, who broke the silence. "Bethany Adams, right?" She remained still, silent. Abe smiled. "Do you know what makes a good alias?" Silence. "I'm sure you do, since this is your job – and I assume you're usually pretty good at it. But, since you're not talking—?" He waited a moment before he continued, "It's the ease with which you can assume the identity.
"I have no doubts that if I went to verify all of your documents, I would come back to a Bethany Adams. Driver's license, social security number, birthday." He paused. "Obituary?"
While she was quiet and almost motionless, Norm thought he saw Abe's smile tick just a little wider.
"Stealing a dead person's vitals is one thing," he continued. "Just about anybody can do that. But assuming that identity – not just using it to mask your activities – either requires you to be a fantastic method actor, or to be familiar with the identity."
More silence.
"Was she a friend?" he asked, leaning forward. Some moments later, "Family?" It looked to Norm like she took a deeper breath. Some of the levity drained from Abe's voice when he asked, "What exactly did RDA hire you to do?"
He received no answer.
Abe sat back in the chair and crossed his arms. "You never really will be another person, though," he said, plainly serious now. "You can change your voice, but not always the way you inflect it. You can force yourself to behave one way, but your mind is still inclined to behave another. You can put on makeup, change clothes, and even the color of your skin these days, but there will always be things – blood, hair, fingerprints – that are quintessentially you."
He paused before saying, as though he were wondering aloud, "I wonder if I sent some of your blood, your hair, or your fingerprints to the FBI or Interpol if they would come back to the innocent Bethany Adams, or someone of greater interest."
Her leg twitched, but it could have been for any number of reasons.
"What exactly did RDA hire you to do?"
She remained silent.
Without turning towards him, Abe asked, "Norm, you were out there when I met Jake and Neytiri for the first time, right?"
"Yeah."
"Do you remember what it was I said the three of us had in common?"
He tried to recall, but failed. "No."
"Murdered siblings," he said flatly. "And I owe you an apology."
Norm could think of several ways Abe owed him an apology, but he did not see the point in bringing all of them up. "Oh yeah?"
"I lied to you yesterday. I have ordered one person to be killed." Norm was not surprised, although the revelation did manage to make his skin crawl. "It wasn't anything RDA wanted done," Abe quickly clarified, "but a guy can't rape and murder an RDA executive's sister and expect to sit quietly in a jail cell for the rest of his life." He took a breath and crossed his legs. "It bothered me for a little while, but then I figured that anybody in my position, with my resources, would do likewise for their family."
He let that turn over in his mind for a while. As a general rule, Norm was a believer in letting law and order take its course; but then RDA and its ilk had done plenty to subvert the normal order of justice. On a personal level, though, Norm was not sure that if he were in Abe's shoes, he would not do likewise – assuming he could be just as corrupt.
Abe leaned forward an asked again, "What exactly did RDA hire you to do?" She remained silent. Abe nodded slowly, and then stood from the chair. He hesitated, giving her a long stare – which she did not meet with her own eyes – and then headed upstairs.
Tseyo leaned over again and whispered, "She's scared."
Norm looked back at him with a puzzled expression. "Are you sure?" Tseyo nodded. "How can you tell?"
"Her fingers," he said with a quick glance in her direction. "It's how she's been able to keep her face still – by moving her fingers."
Although Norm trusted Tseyo's reading of the woman, she was not his primary concern. "Any thoughts on Abe – T'ngyute?"
"He seems very cold," Tseyo replied. "What did he say to the woman just now?"
Norm loosely translated for him, reading between the lines of Abe's inquiries. "He said he killed someone who killed his sister, and he wants the woman to tell him if she was sent to hurt his family, too."
Tseyo's eyes wandered for a moment, his brow furrowed, and then he sat upright once more, his head somewhat lowered. He took a breath and said, "She should be very worried."
As if to confirm Tseyo's suspicions, Abe returned to the basement with a golf bag full of clubs. He set it upright, and then grabbed the roll of duct tape from beside the woman's chair. He quickly tore off a piece and slapped it on her mouth, and then he raised her shirt up to her breasts.
"Abe, what are you doing?" Norm asked.
Abe taped the shirt down without immediately responding. "When Jake's posse captured me," he said as he casually walked to the golf bag, "one of them broke my ribs with some kind of trapping weapon. My chest hurt like hell for weeks."
Even though it was obvious from even before Abe exposed her, the woman had a stunning body. What caught his eye in this moment, however, was not the firmness of her stomach or the curves of her breasts, but that, in the direct light on her taut skin, Norm could see the outline of her ribs.
He took a quick survey of the unfolding scene and let out a nervous laugh. "Abe, c'mon. You said it yourself, she's already too late. This isn't funny."
"It didn't help that they tied me to a pole immediately afterwards," he said, ignoring Norm's protest. Abe pulled a club from the bag. "These were a fifteenth anniversary present from Chairman Savage," he continued. "Anniversary of being at RDA, anyway." He turned the club's head over in his hand a few times. "Top of the line, of course – graphite shafts, composite heads, and meticulously perfected centers of gravity."
He tapped the club's head on one of her ribs, causing her to wince – whether it was the cold metal, a soft spot on her body, or a dreaded moment of anticipation catching up to her, Norm would never know.
"Here's what I want to know," Abe said as he tapped the club on her ribs. "What club did you use to smash my window?"
"Abe—."
"It couldn't have been a wedge," he said with a slight chuckle, withdrawing the club from her skin and putting it back in the bag. "That's too high of a loft. Maybe…" he dug through the clubs before pulling out "…a five iron?" He tried another club. "A six iron?"
Norm looked at the woman's hands. They were balled into fists. He wanted to intervene, or to simply walk away, but he was just as worried about what Abe's fallback plan might be. What if he brought down the rest of the team? Surely they would not stand for this.
"No, an iron wouldn't have the power to smash a window. Not from the fairway, certainly not out of the rough," Abe said. "Ah!" He withdrew a club with a wide, thick head. "A fairway wood could do it." Abe set the club on the floor as though he were practicing at a driving range.
"It has the same low angle loft as an iron," he said as he shifted his feet and started his back swing, "but a high moment of inertia," as he swung the club, "to carry the full force of the swing through the ball and down the fairway." He patted the club's head in his hand. "A titanium face on a solid steel head. It's beautiful."
Abe crouched beside her, resting the club against his shoulder, and said, "There is one thing I'm pretty damned certain of, and it's that you have no pain resistance. You're a woman who uses her mind, not her body, to get what she needs." He paused before clarifying, "Well, maybe not often, but I'm guessing that's usually not so painful."
He stood up and moved in front of her, kicking aside the chair he had been sitting in. Abe held the club's face against her lower ribs and asked, "What exactly did RDA hire you to do?" His lips curled into a wry grin and he said, "Feel free to talk through the tape."
Instead she took a series of deep breaths and narrowed her eyes at him.
His face hardened. "Fine."
Abe's swing might have been the envy of a professional golfer if he were swinging at anything other than a woman. The club was almost silent as it moved through the air, which made the sickening, fleshy impact – and subsequent crack – with her chest all the worse, causing both Norm and Tseyo to wince.
Her scream was loud, even with the tape masking her mouth, and she leaned forward as much as she could. She closed her eyes tightly as she writhed and moaned in the chair, and tears were quick to stream down her cheek.
"Christ, Abe!" Norm shouted. "What's wrong with you?!"
Abe continued to ignore him. He grabbed her jaw and leaned forward inches from her face, causing the chair to lean back in the process. "I have two, very qualified doctors upstairs," he said. "I can either bring them down here to treat you…" he pressed the club into the quickly bruising skin, causing her to moan, take in a sharp breath, and struggle against him "…or I can keep going until your lungs collapse. What's it going to be?"
He dropped the club and pulled the tape off her mouth. She stared at him for a long second, her eyes welling up with more tears. When it looked like she was going to try to stay resolute in her defiance, Norm shouted, "For fuck's sake, tell him something!"
She looked over at him, and then briefly over to Tseyo, before she looked back at Abe and said in a shaky voice, "They know you're here."
"No shit?" Abe said dismissively. "So why did they send you and not a SecOps team?"
She tried to take a breath, but winced when she inhaled too deeply. Eventually she said, "They want to know what caused you to switch sides so they can destroy all traces of it, not just you."
"Were you supposed to do that, or someone else?" Abe hit her across the face with the back of his hand when she did not answer right away. "Were you supposed to do that, or were they going to send someone else?"
She reverted back to her defiance. Abe took a much less graceful swing at her ribs, but resulting in the same, sickening sound as the first swing.
"I was!" she cried out. "I was hired for the full package, to gather the information and bury the links."
Abe held her for a little while longer, and then brusquely released her. He picked up the golf club and dropped it back into the bag. "Here's what's going to happen," he said casually. "Even if you didn't tell me anything, if RDA found out you were captured, you'd still be considered a liability. The best you could hope for is that they'd make certain you never worked as a hired gun again."
He picked up the chair he had kicked over and sat in front of her once again. "Tomorrow morning, I'm supposed to hand over one of my team to the Soldiers of Gaia as collateral for not screwing them over. You're going to be that person."
"To the Soldiers?" she asked incredulously. "Fuck you."
"No, fuck you if you think I'm either going to hold you here or let you go without getting something in return. This is your quid pro quo – if you help me out, you get to go free. I'll even see to it that your contract is paid in full."
"And if I don't?"
"Then when the police ask me if I know anything about how your body ended up in the desert, I'll tell them you broke into my house with the intention of killing me and my family on orders from RDA, and I did what I had to do to protect us." He gave that same, disturbing wry grin and added, "I'm sure by that point they'll have their hands full enough that they won't conduct the most thorough investigation to corroborate my version of events."
She tried another deep breath, wincing again, and said, "So once you're done, assuming the Soldiers haven't planned to outright kill whomever you handed over, you'll just let me go?"
"That's it," he replied with his hands held up.
She was quiet for a brief time, and then nodded her head. "Fine."
Abe stood, grabbed his golf bag, and said, "I'll get the doctors."
He hardly hurried up the stairs, but once they could hear the basement door close, Tseyo crawled over to her. She eyed him warily, and, despite being bound, tried to move away from him as he came closer. He delicately brushed the cheek where Abe had struck her, and then settled her shirt back into its place.
Tseyo whispered in her ear – what, exactly, he could not hear; and by the look on her face, he doubted she understood – and then kissed her temple. He crawled back to sit beside Norm, and she kept her eyes locked on him throughout. Soon after he was resituated, however, she turned away and lowered her head.
Norm was going to ask Tseyo what he said and why, but he was pre-empted. "Even enemies have their dignity," Tseyo said. "If you try to take it from them, they'll do the same to you."
"So then why didn't you try to stop T'ngyute in the first place?"
"Why didn't you?" he quickly retorted. "You stopped us from killing T'ngyute."
He made several attempts to compose an answer, but they all fell flat. He could not explain how Jake's overstepping was any different than Abe's singular focus on the security of his family. Other than his half-hearted protests – though his disgust was certainly genuine – he had sat on his hands throughout this torturous interrogation. Eventually he just had to confess, "I don't know. Because this was different."
Tsyeo frowned in response.
Abe came back downstairs with Matthew, who carried a first aid kit. He lifted the woman's shirt and, upon seeing the bruises that were forming, asked, "Christ, what'd you hit her with?"
"A fairway wood," Norm answered dryly.
"Just make sure she's able to move," Abe said. "Then lock her in the laundry room. We'll keep her there until we make our move in a few hours." On his way back upstairs, he added, "Also, Doctor, you're off the hook for the trade."
There was still a lot about her father that she did not know; much of it, she assumed, stuff that she was happier not to know. She could also not recall a time from her childhood that her father ever raised his voice to her, or commanded her away from him; however, when he ordered everybody but Norm and Tseyo out of the basement, she understood his tone well enough to go to the house's second floor, retreating into his study – her old room.
When she and her mother had transferred Abe's study from the basement to the second floor, Natalie had not paid much attention to what exactly it was they were moving. He did most of his work on carefully protected tablets, which he had stored away in locked cases before he left. Anything he did not want people to see beyond those was locked away in a safe in her parents' bedroom, which Natalie had never been given permission to open. She assumed her mother locked away whatever else she might have wanted to prevent Natalie from seeing long before they made the move. The only things left in the open in his study were volumes of old books whose contents had long ago been digitized. She assumed her father kept them because they completed the study's ambience than for any functional reasons.
Natalie scanned the titles, noting that many of them were dense works of law and history – two subjects she was happy to leave behind in survey courses. Another shelf was dedicated to a yet more distasteful subject: philosophy. She never cared for other people's opinions of what life ought to mean to her, especially as the times in which they wrote were so radically different than hers.
But she spotted one title that appeared more worn than the rest, whether from its age or her father's repeated viewing. The binding was coming apart, the pages had yellowed, and there was a dark streak down the pages' center that was indicative of someone who repeatedly thumbed through them.
She pulled The Prince from the shelf and thumbed through the pages as her father, or someone, must have done many times before. She scanned a few pages before she was interrupted. "We aren't going to have to lock you downstairs as a spy too, are we?"
Natalie looked towards the door, where Dawn was standing with a faint smile. She smiled back and said, "No, I'm just trying to get in Daddy's head."
Dawn nodded and stepped into the room. "Having your dad literally light years away had to have sucked. I mean, there are distant parents, and then there's that."
"It was hard the first year or two," she said as she returned the book to the shelf. "Mom did a good job keeping things together. But yeah, once everything fell apart, I wanted him to be home more than anything else."
Dawn sat down and opened a locked tablet case. "Well, I think your dad's given that investigator a little payback for whatever RDA did to you and your mom."
Natalie frowned. When her father brought the woman into the basement, Natalie's stomach churned when she saw it was the supposed golfer from that morning. But then, as she had posed to her father, what was she supposed to have done about it – even if she had known? The world in which her parents operated was so foreign to her, it was hard for her to feel guilty about doing something wrong.
She sat down at her father's desk. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"The other night when you said you were tired of being blamed for what happened on Pandora, what did you mean by that?"
Dawn let out a short, sharp laugh and shook her head. "Not the question I was hoping for." If she had hoped that would have been enough to get Natalie to let it go, she was wrong; and when Natalie didn't drop her expression, Dawn took a breath and elaborated.
"Our inside man got adopted by the Na'vi, and not long thereafter he, as you would expect, started getting propositions from the tribe's women. I was running communications when he called in for advice, and I suggested that he take a mate so the Na'vi wouldn't become suspicious as to why he kept rejecting their women."
"Couldn't he have just said he already had a mate?"
"That was the first plan, and it didn't work."
"Why not?"
Dawn shrugged. "They must not have believed him, or they thought that because she never showed up to claim him, she was dead."
Natalie nodded. "All right, so why was Daddy upset? I mean, you sound right. It'd be weird for a guy to keep refusing women."
Dawn appeared to be choosing her words carefully. "He thought it would be more of a distraction than reinforcement of his cover," she eventually replied. "It was a direct order, and your dad isn't a real fan of people going off script – but I guess you know that."
"Not really," she said. "He was a pretty cool dad to have, or that I remember."
"Yeah?" Natalie nodded. Dawn paused for a moment, and then said, "I guess I could see that."
They were quiet for a little while, and then Natalie tried to inject some levity to the discussion. "Well, I don't think you did anything wrong." She tried to bring some levity to the conversation. "I mean, if he still had a guy's brain in his body, I'm surprised he didn't blow his cover by sleeping with multiple women."
Dawn laughed. "Yeah, you drop a guy – a soldier, no less! – into a village of mostly naked women, and what else should you expect? 'Look, but don't touch?'" she said with a wry grin. "Really, if someone dropped me into a warrior tribe surrounded by mostly naked men, good luck ordering me to keep my hands to myself."
Natalie chuckled, and then she risked broaching the subject that had been lingering in her mind since the previous night. "I don't think I'd do any better."
Dawn let out a wistful sigh. "It was probably best that we didn't have video surveillance," she said with a smile. "That would have been a distraction."
Trying not to betray her own thoughts, she asked, "So, what do you think of Tseyo?"
Dawn appeared to hesitate, but then offered, "Not terrible." Then she smiled and elaborated, "I mean, he's a bit lean for me, but he's got those eyes." Her smile turned into a grin, and she added, "Great butt, though."
Natalie chuckled and looked down when she felt her face become flush. She rubbed the back of her neck and said, "So you've also looked."
"How can you not?" There was a long pause before she asked, "But you've been the one who's spent more time with him than anyone else. What do you think?"
"He's all right," she tried to say dispassionately. "He's nice. I think if he weren't so weirded out, he'd have a good sense of humor, too."
"He's been through a lot," Dawn said. "Most of it negative, and most of that negativity is because of us. You can't blame him for being weirded out by all of this. But it sounds like he's relaxed around you, and that's a good sign."
"A good sign of what?" Dawn's grin was too knowing. "No, it's not like that," she said dismissively.
Dawn chuckled and crossed her arms. "Who're you trying to lie to?"
"I'm not," she insisted. "He's not human," she said, trying to channel Norm's lecture from the morning. "He can't be interested. Forget that we've only known each other for, like, two days, we're different species!"
"But you've still checked out his butt."
Natalie blushed again before she laughed. "And maybe some other things, too."
"So again, who're you trying to lie to?" Dawn pressed. "If you have a crush on him, then you have a crush on him. You just have to manage it. I mean, you're how old?"
"Twenty."
Dawn held a hand out as though she were presenting evidence. "Okay, so I'm sure you've had crushes on 'the impossible' guy before. What'd you do?"
She flirted with him, and he cheated on his girlfriend to have sex with her in the janitor's closet during their fifth period for most of fall semester until he decided Natalie wasn't interesting enough for him anymore. "Nothing really. It just sort of ran its course," Natalie said.
"There you go," Dawn replied with a shrug. "He's going to be gone tomorrow, and it's more likely than not that he's going to be too nervous about tomorrow to even be thinking about anything else," Dawn said. "Best thing you can do for him is stay out of his way tonight anyhow. Just keep that in mind, and you should be fine."
Natalie let out a nervous laugh. "You make it sound so easy."
Dawn chuckled. "He is a bit of a literal elephant in your room, isn't he?" Natalie nodded with a smile. "Maybe crash upstairs tonight. Give him space."
"That's just the thing," Natalie said. "He doesn't like space. He's hated being alone, and he hates not talking about what's on his mind. If I'm not there tonight, I think he'll suspect something's wrong. If I am there, and if he is nervous–," she trailed off. "I don't know."
"For all everyone complains about not being able to find an emotionally available guy, you have one and you hate it." Dawn quipped.
"I don't hate it," Natalie said flatly. "I think that's the problem."
Dawn tapped her fingers against her knees in thought, and then said, "Well, you two obviously trust each other, and obviously get along. Maybe just follow his lead and assume he'll take you to the friend-zone."
"And if he doesn't?"
Dawn shrugged. "Relationships aren't really my area of expertise," she said, "and you're old enough and smart enough to make your own decisions." She paused. "Besides, the last time I advised on a human-Na'vi relationship, both of them died, so–."
Dawn let the silence finish her thought as Natalie felt her stomach turn over.
Summary: Jude is discovered and coerced into becoming Abe's "fall guy." Natalie learns more about her father, and receives coaching from Dawn on navigating her feelings for Tseyo.