Chapter VII: Waking Nightmare

He wanted to cover himself, but his uniform was folded neatly on the armchair by the door and he couldn't take the sheet from Palis. Julian clambered out of bed and hastened, naked, into the shelter of the bathroom. He closed the door with deliberate control, trying to make the movement seem nonchalant. She called something out as the latch clicked, fond amusement in her voice. Julian locked the door and sagged against it, eyes closed against a fresh, hot wave of misery.

His knees were weak and he wanted to slide down onto the cool marble floor. He couldn't. She'd be listening for the water, and if it didn't start up soon, she'd get suspicious. He had to avoid her suspicions at all costs. It wasn't just her hatred he feared. He knew her opinions were not those alone: they came from Docteur Delon. He was the director of one of the most prestigious medical facilities on the planet. He was a man of power and influence. He was exactly the sort of person capable of razing Julian's life to smoking ruins in a matter of minutes.

He pushed off the door and staggered to the tub. It was an antique, clawfooted affair, but the plumbing and the accoutrements were state-of-the-art and luxurious. His hand shook as he switched on the moisture containment field that eliminated the need for a shower curtain. Julian almost couldn't operate the controls to dial in the pressure, flow rate, and temperature. Hard, heavy, hot. He stepped through the containment field, which was selective for free fluid, and plunged himself into the spray.

At first he could only stand there, numb with horror, hugging his ribs as the water pelted his back and his bowed shoulders and soaked his hair. It was a nightmare. It had to be a nightmare. He had dozed off in Palis's arms in the aftermath of their tender coupling, and all the rest of it was just a bad dream. Only it wasn't, and he knew it. His mind — his unnatural mind — was capable of generating highly realistic nocturnal imaginings, but nothing like this. The mingled scent of their youthful sweat, the perfume from the branch of cherry blossoms on the nightstand, the earthy fragrance of the Siene in the spring night outside. The feel of Palis's hand upon his arm, so smooth, so warm, moving with perfect consistency, without any of the jumps or stutters or continuity glitches of a dream. The crisp clarity of the newscaster's voice, the soft susurrations of Palis's breath. The taste of copper and bile in his mouth. It was no dream.

Suddenly, spastically, Julian bent to snatch the soap over the enamelled lap bar that bridged the tub. Quickly and frantically, he began to scrub. He needed to get the smell of her off him. He needed to rub away the feel of her hands. He needed to cleanse himself of the horrible, crawling shame that had crept over him as soon as she began to speak.

I don't know what they think they are, coming here like they have some kind of right to be on this planet! Honestly, what do they expect? We're just supposed to tolerate creatures like that? It's vile. It's foul. Genetic enhancement is obscene!

Julian turned in the stream of steaming water, screwing his eyes closed as it pummelled his face and ran down his chest and his arms. He worked the soap into the soft hair of his axillae. He chafed the bar up and down his limbs, from shoulder to wrist. Across his pectoral muscles and his flat abdomen and the crest of his pelvis. He washed the parts of him that had touched her most intimately, back in that half-forgotten eternity ago when he had believed she loved him unconditionally, desired him, trusted him.

She still believed all of those things. She didn't know. She must never know.

Desperately, almost wrathfully, Julian scrubbed his legs, bowing dizzyingly forward to do so. He didn't usually bother to soap up below the knees. It wasn't really necessary in the ordinary way of things. Tonight, though, he needed to get as clean as possible. He felt vile, disgusting, coated in invisible layers of unknowable filth. He straightened again, scrubbing at his arms, his chest, his flank, his groin. He had washed all these areas the first time, but they felt dirtier now than when he had fled Palis's bed. He didn't reach for the shampoo: he simply buried the bar of soap in his tousled hair, now settling into soft, soaked curls against his skull. He raised a lather viciously, not caring how the tangled tresses tugged at his scalp. That petty little pain was tangible, identifiable, welcome. It was infinitely preferable to the nebulous agony enveloping his soul. His hands trembled and he dropped the soap. He felt it buffet one bare foot before settling into a lazy clockwise spiral over the drain.

Julian buried both hands in his hair and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. Rosewater-scented soap ran down his neck and his back and his shoulders. It stung in his eyes, and they began to water. He turned his face back up into the spray, too occupied with the need to get the feel of clotted grime from his hair to even try to wipe his eyes. The prickling spray of the shower washed away the soap, but the trickle of lachrymal fluid did not cease. It intensified instead, and he could feel the oily slickness as twin rivulets cut down his cheeks to mingle with the water. His chest hitched and heaved, and a soundless sob broke from his lips. He was crying.

Ça me dégoûte! Pourquoi est-ce que l'Office planétaire du Logement permet cela? Ils sont une abomination, des Augments!

He wished he could have explained to her what that word really meant, the weight of history behind it — the weight of guilt. The Moab IV colonists weren't to blame for the atrocities of the Eugenics Wars: they, just like every human now alive in the Federation, had been conceived and gestated and born centuries after the fall of Khan Noonien Singh and his bloodthirsty peers. They hadn't asked to have their DNA manipulated before they were born, any more than little Jules Bashir had asked for what had been done to him. It wasn't fair to tar them with the tainted brush of centuries. It wasn't fair to label them with that irredeemable name. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't…

Julian didn't know if he really believed that. He knew he'd never be able to convince Palis it was true. She, her father, the protestors, the newscasters and the legal and historical experts and the politicians and the Admirals calling out for the banishment of these colonists; they would never be convinced. They didn't want to hear it. And anyhow, Julian knew he would never dare to say it.

But they were embryos. I was just a little boy. We didn't have a choice, none of us. We didn't ask for this. I didn't want this. Don't you understand? I'd give it all back in a moment, every gift, every accomplishment, all of it, just for a chance to be truly human again!

But would he? Would he, really? He loathed what he was, but not who he was. He liked being the quickest, the brightest, the most promising. He liked the affirmation he'd been given by teachers, by coaches, now by professors and preceptors and wildly gifted surgeons who saw something of themselves in his potential. He loved solving an intricate problem — not just in diagnostics, but in rhetoric or philosophy or linguistics or mathematics. And nothing, nothing in all the Galaxy, gave him more joy and satisfaction than laying his skilled hands upon a patient and restoring them to health. He loved medicine. He lived for it. And he'd never have been able to take it up, if not for the illegal genetic resequencing that had made him… this.

He was complicit in his parents' crime. He was guilty of the same outrage against morality and decency and goodness. He was as bad as they were. He was worse, because he was reaping the benefits of their transgression in a way they never could. Julian reached for the control panel on the wall, his left hand suddenly bone-dry as it passed through the containment field. With a shaking finger, he dialed up the temperature of the water another five degrees.

The change was immediate and breath-stealing. From stimulatingly hot, the water grew suddenly scalding. Julian leaned into the spray, redoubling his efforts to scour away the vileness and the shame from his arms and his ribs. The soap was rinsed away, and without the surfactant his palms dragged and the skin beneath them pinched and stung. He was rubbing himself raw under the tenderizing tattoo of the shower, but the humiliation and the sense of dirtiness remained.

Of course they did. He couldn't rub it off. He wasn't slicked with slime or covered in gore or smeared with excrement: the filth was inside of him, coded into his very chromosomes. It wouldn't wash away. He could never be free of it. It wasn't on him, it was in him. It was him.

A sound reached his sensitive ears even over the percussion of the water and the roaring of blood in his ears. A rapid rapping of knuckles on aged oak. Palis, knocking on the door.

"Mon trésor?" she called, and Julian's intestines wrenched at the term of endearment. Only a few hours ago, hearing her say that had filled him with such a sense of belonging and peace. Now it was a glaring indictment of his crimes, a reminder of all the lies he had told her.

No, just the one lie. One little lie of omission, that's all, made years ago when you were just a scared kid. You didn't tell her anything that wasn't true. You just let her assume.

The rest of his mind didn't believe that. The part of him that strove to be a good man, that aspired to become an upright Starfleet officer and an ethical physician, rejected this excuse.

A lie of omission is still a lie, Cadet, he told himself savagely.

"Yes?" he croaked. He cleared his throat and forced a lighter tone into his voice as he raised it to be heard over the shower. "Yes, Palis?"

He couldn't bring himself to reciprocate with words of affection. He had no right to address her with such intimacy. He didn't even know if he wanted to, not just now, but ever again.

"Dépêches-toi," she sang playfully. He could imagine her pivoting on one slender, exquisite, calloused foot, draped in her lilac dressing-gown, soft hair tumbling down her back. The image made him shudder. "I'm waiting!"

"I'll be out soon," he promised, far too brightly. His voice broke on the last syllable, unable to maintain the ruse. He braced himself, waiting for the inevitable question.

Instead, Palis trilled happily; "D'accord!" He heard her move off.

He had overstayed the believable length of time to linger in the shower, but Julian didn't dare to turn it off yet. He needed a plan. He needed to get out of here, to get back to San Francisco, to put as much of the planet between himself and Palis Delon as he possibly could. He could make up an excuse, say he'd been recalled to Starfleet Medical for some reason. Maybe there was an emergency in the Academy Infirmary, and they needed the most capable residents on hand. Maybe one of his classmates had failed to turn up for a shift. That was plausible, wasn't it? He was a medical student, after all. His time was not his own.

But how had he learned of this while in the shower? His combadge wasn't just in the next room, affixed to the breast of his uniform. He'd deactivated it on arriving in Paris, first to avoid interrupting the performance and then so that the Universal Translator wouldn't undercut the bilingual loveplay they had always enjoyed. If anyone wanted to get ahold of him, they'd do it through Palis's domestic comlink, and of course she'd know that no one had done that. If she wasn't in the bedroom, all Julian would have to do was get to the chair and turn his combadge back on; he could pretend he'd just done so to check in, and that they'd recalled him when he did. But if she hadn't left the room…

Even if she had, the plan was no good. Summoned back to campus because of a medical emergency or a scheduling hiccup was believable, but it was too easily verifiable. If Palis was curious and dropped a mention of his excuse to her father, or if Docteur Delon himself got curious, all it would take was one quick glance at the duty roster for the Academy Infirmary to destroy Julian's alibi. The duty rosters of all Starfleet Medical facilities in Sector 001 were accessible to civilian medical centres to facilitate continuity of care across the innumerable time zones involved. If Julian hoped to extricate himself, he was going to have to find some other pretext.

Running to the aid of a friend wouldn't be believable. Palis knew he wasn't close enough to any of his classmates, even Erit, to be the first call in an emergency. She'd ask questions he couldn't answer, and Julian didn't have any friends who would lie for him to corroborate the story. He had a sense that this was exactly the sort of thing most people could turn to family for: a no-questions-asked alibi to extract oneself from an uncomfortable situation. It was something mothers did, wasn't it? Didn't they say things like, "If you ever need an excuse to get out of something, just say that I needed you instead"?

But his mother had never said any such thing, and Julian hadn't seen his parents since Eid al-Fitr of the previous academic year. Neither of his parents were particularly spiritual and they certainly didn't observe Ramadan, but his mother's family had marked the festival as a cultural holiday for generations and it meant a lot to her when Julian made the time to come back to England to celebrate. He'd made the allowance, hoping for peace. For his pains, he had found himself beset with guilt from the passive-aggressive remarks about how he never bothered to visit and how he used all of his transporter credits visiting his French girlfriend instead of his parents. He'd been peppered with ceaseless questions about his plans after his postgraduate practicum— which had then been a year and a half away from starting, much less concluding. And finally, he and his father had wound up having one of their loud, hateful, horrible fights.

Julian had fled into the streets in the dead of night, and wandered the alleyways of Guildford in a dreary November rain. That night, too, he'd foolishly let himself be separated from his combadge, so he'd been unable to contact Starfleet for transport. Instead, he had shivered away the miserable hours until dawn, when the local transporter hub had opened for business. Then he'd finally been able to return, soaked to the bone and borderline hypothermic, to the Academy campus and the emotional stability of his own damned life. He hadn't gone back for the holiday this year, and he had no intention of visiting for any other reason. Bad enough he'd have to see his parents at the graduation ceremony in a couple months' time. He wasn't about to ask them for a favour, not even to extricate him from this horrifying situation.

There was another knock at the door. This time, Palis's voice was tinged with concern. "Julian?" she asked. No love-language this time. His stomach did a slow, sickening roll. "Is everything all right?"

"Just fine!" he called, thrusting his hand through the containment field and deactivating both it and the shower spray with one hurried slap of his fingertips. "Sorry… I was daydreaming!"

"À propos de moi, j'espère!" she said with a seductive little laugh.

"Who else?" Julian responded hoarsely, forgetting his French and the fact that, really, all that was called for in response was a chuckle of his own. He didn't feel like laughing. He wasn't sure he ever would again.

He had no plausible excuse to leave Paris early. He had to stay. That meant towelling off, going out into the bedroom, and getting back into bed with a woman who believed his kind were an abomination and an affront against nature. A woman who had said, not half an hour ago, that creations like him had no right to be on Earth.

Julian had no choice. He stepped out of the tub, dripping on the bath mat, and reached for one of the huge, fluffy lavender towels. He dried himself hurriedly. The air was warm and humid, but he was trembling.

On any other night he would have tipped the towel into the cleaning processor and simply gone out to join Palis as he was, clean, soap-scented, and casually naked. Tonight, he didn't have the confidence. He felt exposed and vulnerable, as if the old-fashioned oak door was all that hid his secrets, not just his body. He wished he'd thought to bring his clothes into the bathroom with him — but of course, that would have been suspicious. He wished he'd brought a pair of pyjamas to Paris, but he only did that in winter.

He looked at the towel, now heavy with damp. He wrapped it around his waist anyway, folding one corner snugly over the top edge. It was all the armour he was going to get. He drew in a deep, shaky breath, willed his muscles to cease their cowardly quaking, and opened the bathroom door.

Palis was back in bed, draped artfully over the pillows with an elbow on the headboard and the other arm lying sinuously down her side. Her knees were nestled together, and her slender, strong feet were pointed, further elongating them. It was a classical pose straight out of a painting. Julian couldn't for the life of him remember the name of the painter, but they had seen it together in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin last summer.

She smiled at him lovingly, and broke her pose to pat his pillow. "Come to bed," she coaxed.

Julian couldn't see any way around it. He did as she asked, rounding the foot of the bed to approach from his customary side. Palis followed him with her eyes, fond and contented and completely oblivious to the ways in which he repulsed her. At last, Julian couldn't delay any longer: he steeled his resolve and removed the towel, folding it hurriedly over the chair near the window. He climbed into bed as quickly as he could, pulling the sheet up from where it lay bunched near the footboard. It covered them both to the waist, hiding Palis's shapely, muscular legs and his own lean ones.

She was semi-supine, so he didn't lie down, either. He sat propped against his pillows, trying desperately to look relaxed and at ease. Palis took his right wrist and raised his arm so that she could slip underneath it, compelling him to embrace her. Julian tried to make his limb mould naturally around her, even though her touch electrified him with dismay. As there had been no choice but to get into bed, so there was no choice but to let her snuggle up to him, and she was doing so with the easy comfort of long acquaintance.

An hour and a half ago, that same familiarity had filled his heart with peace and a certainty of safety. Now he felt hunted, cornered, and bitterly ashamed of himself. Julian closed his eyes and forced a slow, deep breath. He felt Palis's breasts flatten against him as she curled around to reach for his hair. Her fingers twisted a couple of damp curls, and she laughed softly.

"You know, if you step through the containment field instead of lowering it while you're in the tub, you'll come out perfectly dry," she cooed.

"I forgot," Julian said. That was perfectly true, anyway. The last thing on his mind had been getting out of the shower dry. Still, he wasn't comfortable leaving the explanation there. He seldom forgot anything at all, and she'd know that. She might wonder why he'd been so distracted. "Nothing but sonic showers at the Academy," he added.

She nodded. "Oh, the weary life of a cadet!" she teased, moving her hand to her shoulder for leverage as she pulled herself up to kiss him briefly, full on the lips, before settling down again. Julian's long legs meant their height difference wasn't as pronounced when they sat hip-to-hip like this, but they still had to adjust to get their lips to meet. He wasn't capable of adjusting right now: she'd had to do all the work. Julian anxiously scanned her face, wondering if she had noticed; if she was suspicious. She didn't seem to be. She didn't seem to mind at all.

"You know," she said, with a playful little pout; "if you take a post on a starship, you could go months without seeing a real bathtub."

"Some starships have bathtubs," Julian said. He was surprised at the words, and at how casually they fell from his lips. His survival instincts were stronger than he'd feared, apparently. He had been certain he wouldn't be able to carry off this charade, but his mind seemed to be compensating without him. "Only the old ones don't. They're standard in most senior officers' quarters now, even on the small ships. On the Galaxy Class, all the regular crew decks have them."

She looked up at him with sudden, avid interest. "Do you think you could be posted to a Galaxy Class ship?" she asked.

Julian's chest ached. For months, he'd been waiting for her to show any sign of softening towards the idea of him pursuing his Starfleet career. After her excitement at Docteur Delon's job offer, he'd been afraid that hope was dead. Only a few hours ago, this level of eager engagement would have filled him with jubilation. It would have been a sign that there was room for negotiation and compromise. Now… now, he didn't know what he felt, but it was dreadful.

Palis shifted to look at him more squarely. "If you took an assignment on a Galaxy Class starship, I could come with you," she said. "They're ships full of families. They go on diplomatic missions. It would mean leaving the company, but I could arrange an exhibition tour on the worlds we visited, appear as a guest danseuse with prestigious off-world troupes. I could start une école de ballet onboard ship!"

He couldn't bear to listen to this. They were his dreams, too, or had been until tonight. But how could he even think about the future now?

"There aren't any Galaxy Class posts available now," Julian said hollowly. "In half a year… who knows?"

"Hmm," Palis allowed, nodding thoughtfully. "Well, keep your ear open. You'll have the first choice of assignment, won't you?"

"If I'm valedictorian, yes," Julian managed.

She made a contented sound, and settled back into the crook of his arm. She smoothed the edge of the sheet and drew it up to cover their navels, smoothing it over their laps.

"That would change everything," she reflected. "If you weren't posted to the middle of nowhere, or to some research vessel warping off into deep space for years at a time. I wouldn't mind joining you on a Galaxy Class ship."

Julian made a vague noise of assent. His throat was dry, and his tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth. He wished he'd thought to take a drink of water while he was in the bathroom. He wished he dared to get up and fetch one now, but that would mean crossing the room again, naked, and coming back again, and getting into bed with Palis again… and he didn't think he had the fortitude to do any of that. If he got out of bed now, he'd lose his courage, and he would run, and all would be lost. Maybe not right away, but eventually, inevitably, she would begin to ask questions and to put the pieces together. She was ferociously intelligent. If she paused to think about it, she'd realize how silent he had been during her tirade at the viewscreen, and that he had fled her company immediately afterwards.

She was nestling nearer to him now, twisting onto one hip. "Mmm," Palis murmured, pressing the length of her lithe body against him and kissing first his breastbone, then the hollow of his throat, then the side of his jaw. His earlobe was next, as she whispered; "Mon trésor, encore une fois…"

Julian felt a sudden, clenching nausea. She wanted to make love again.

In Federation schools, the ideas of bodily autonomy and consent were introduced to the very youngest pupils in terms they could understand. They were given strategies to implement to empower and protect themselves, and to lay the foundation of a healthy understanding of sex as they grew up. In the first grade, Julian's classmates had been taught the proper words to describe their bodies, and the difference between physical contact that was was appropriate or inappropriate, welcome or unwanted.

Little Jules Bashir, who couldn't even tell a dog from a cat, hadn't been able to make sense of most of these lessons. But Ms. Ravani, who came in once a week to teach the wellness classes, had started turning up on Thursday afternoons in addition to Wednesday mornings. While the others had their computer time, learning to use the library database and the games and the keyboard consoles, she had taken Jules to sit in the story corner. Painstakingly, over the course of most of the winter, she had managed to teach him one simple but essential thing.

If anyone ever tries to touch you in a way you don't like, Jules, she had said, over and over again with kindness and infinite patience, you need to say, "Stop. I don't want that." Then you go and find another grown-up to help you. Can you say it with me? "Stop. I don't want that."

He had learned how to say it. It had been one of the longest phrases he could reliably repeat in those days, and he'd only mastered it because of her dedication to repeating it almost endlessly. But he hadn't really understood. He certainly didn't understand on Adigeon Prime, when he had repeated it just as endlessly to the doctors who kept performing procedure after procedure on him as he lay terrified and alone in his hospital bed, wondering miserably whether his parents would ever come back for him. After a few days of their platitudes as they dismissed his words and kept on with their work, he had given up, broken-hearted and bewildered that Ms. Ravani had misled him.

After the enhancements, when suddenly he seemed to understand everything, Julian had been able to comprehend the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touch, and how sometimes it was necessary for a doctor to do something — hold your arm, for example, or put a halo full of flashing lights over your skull and tritanium goggles over your eyes to blind you while they worked so they did not blind you forever. That had helped a little with the feeling of betrayal he'd felt in the muddled, foggy days before the neural pathway acceleration had taken hold, when Ms. Ravani's magic words hadn't worked to stop them from touching him. As a child, he'd found comfort in the understanding that doctors did that to help you when you were sick. It was different than the other kind of violation, or so he had believed when he was seven.

As the years went by and he'd advanced through the curricula from elementary to secondary school, Julian had learned the specifics of sexual consent. The fundamental foundation of "Stop. I don't want that." had evolved to encompass what did and did not constitute consent. Pupils were taught that, for all partners, nothing less than a "yes" qualified as consent; that reluctance was not an invitation to persuasion or coercion; that consent could not be given by a person who was inebriated or pressured or frightened. He remembered how most of the young men in his eighth grade class had chuckled at the idea of being reluctant with a date when the concept had been revisited that year. They'd all been bundles of hormones and imagination in those days, with roving eyes always on the lookout for the people they found attractive. Julian — then still going by Jules, because he'd known no reason he shouldn't — hadn't laughed. He'd thought he had understood. Just because a girl, or another boy, or a person who didn't identify with a gender dimorphism or whose species didn't have one, was attractive and willing, didn't necessarily mean a young man would want to reciprocate. It was essential to understand that you always had the right to say no.

They'd been taught all sorts of strategies to decline comfortably; different phrases to choose if you wanted to close off the possibility completely, or to let your partner know that you'd be interested in revisiting it on some other occasion. They'd been taught that they owed no one an explanation, but could explain if they wanted to. And of course, they'd been taught all the appropriate ways to respond to these refusals, demurrals and postponements.

But as Palis snuggled closer to him now, her small, perfect breast pressing against his ribs, her mouth questing for his, her hand slipping beneath the sheet and following his flank down to the crest of his pelvis in search of an intimacy he could not endure, Julian couldn't remember even one of those phrases. He was frozen in horror and dread, knowing he couldn't allow this, couldn't endure it, had to prevent it. And the only words that came to mind were the ones Ms. Ravani had so painstakingly taught a little boy who couldn't even count to ten.

"Stop," he said hoarsely, his own hand diving swiftly under the airy cotton drape to catch hold of hers before it could stroke the organ that would respond, no matter what his brain wanted, because he was twenty-six and healthy and as susceptible to sensory stimuli as any young man. "I don't want that."

Palis froze instantly, her sinuous body stiffening against him as she pulled back from his lips to regard him quizzically. Hastily, terrified that he had overstepped and that she would take offence, demand explanations, start to suspect, Julian adjusted his hold on her hand, twining his fingers with hers in what he hoped would be read as a loving gesture instead of a desperate defensive manoeuvre as he drew both their arms out from under the sheet. He did not dare to breathe as she tilted her head to the left, raised her eyebrows, and smiled a little ruefully.

"Well, all right," she said with a little shrug. "We don't need to." She smiled then, and wriggled closer to him as she kissed the corner of his mouth and then moved up to his ear, brushing her lips against the lobe as she whispered; "I knew I should have suggested it before you got into the shower. Mon trésor, si fastidieux."

Julian felt such a wave of relief that he almost seemed to melt against the pillows. He closed his eyes as she nuzzled her cheek against his, kissing the ball of his jaw. "Peut-être nous pouvons se câliner, non?" she asked.

The truth was that Julian didn't want to cuddle, either, but he didn't dare to refuse her. Declining sex was uncharacteristic enough. He didn't think he'd ever begged off before, and neither had she. They'd always been perfectly attuned to one another's desires, always eager for passion at the same times and in the same ways. He'd thought that was one of the things that made them soulmates. He'd hoped…

Palis was travelling down his throat again, leaving a trail of kisses. She slid her thigh across his, her skin warm and velvety. She slipped her hand from his, but didn't return it to his pelvis: she was respecting the line he'd drawn so clumsily and uncharacteristically. She reached up to stroke his face instead, and then twined her fingers in his hair again.

Julian was left with one arm pinned beneath her body and the other out in the open air with no purpose. He didn't want to touch her, or to reciprocate her affections in any way. She wouldn't want him to reciprocate, not if she knew the truth. If she knew the truth of who — of what — lay in bed beside her, she would recoil from him, doubtless spitting more of the venom she'd lavished on the Moab colonists. She might call for the municipal police to remove the Augment. She'd assuredly summon her father…

He had no choice. He had to make a show of affection — if not to match hers, at least to echo it. Julian put his hand on her waist, careful to keep the sheet between his palm and her smooth, firm flesh. He couldn't do anything about the fact that one whole side of his body was engulfed by hers, but at least he could offer her this one little buffer.

Palis had reached his collarbone now, and she kissed it twice before resting her cheek in the hollow of his shoulder. Her hand caressed his jaw briefly, and then she moved it to his left flank. She hugged him tightly for a few seconds that seemed to stretch on like a three-hour oral exam. Only no examiner had ever inspired in Julian the kind of frozen dismay he felt now. She rubbed the side of her face against him, tumbling hair tickling his arm. She kissed his right pectoral. Her hand migrated up to rest over the left, palm caressing the sensitive skin of his chest with the same loving tenderness she'd always displayed.

Julian couldn't look down at her, as he would have done on any other night. It was the natural thing to do: to savour a glimpse of the beautiful woman curled around him. But he couldn't bear it. If he didn't look at her, maybe he could convince himself that none of this was real. Not her words of hatred and scorn; not her misplaced tenderness now; not the smouldering ruins of his dreams of a life with the woman he loved. The woman he had loved?

The woman he'd believed he was allowed to love.

"C'est parfait," Palis murmured. She sounded drowsy now, and her dainty fingers played over his skin. Their tips brushed his nipple, and Julian felt his body stirring in response.

Julian screwed his eyes closed, trying to will away the impulse to respond to her touch. He could manipulate his own blood pressure. He could alter his heart-rate with a thought. He'd never tried to upregulate his hypothalamus, wary to prove even to himself just how much of a deviation he was, but Julian suspected he was capable of that, as well. If he could do those things, he could master this urge, too. Vasoconstriction. He needed to induce vasoconstriction in his peripheral vessels, to prevent himself from becoming engorged with blood. Failing that, maybe he could prevent contracture of the tunica albuginea so that the deep dorsal vein kept draining.

No medical student wanted to think about urology while in bed with their lover, but Julian thought about it now. He envisioned the anatomy of the organs in question; the muscles, the vasculature, the complex system of glands and vessels, the processes that produced the hormones that fuelled the human sex drive, and the gametes that ensured the continuation of the species. It calmed him. It anchored him firmly in a part of his mind where there was no doubt, no misery, no shame.

Palis was still murmuring soft words of affection. "C'est mieux," she sighed happily. "Tu es sage, Julian. Je suis trop fatigué pour faire des galipettes."

He found that particular colloquialism absolutely charming, and when she said it, it had never failed to make him smile. It failed tonight. His body was back under his control again, but Julian couldn't make the rest of it relax as he had his erectile tissues. He lay rigid under Palis as she settled drowsily against him. Her cheek rested on his chest, the warm gusts of her breath burning against him. Her index finger stroked his areola once more before lying still. Her breath deepened and grew quiet as she drifted off to sleep.

There was no hope of sleep for Julian. He felt bitterly tired, not merely physically weary but utterly wrung out with the strain of the last few days and the nightmare he was living now, but the release of slumber was unimaginable. Wide-eyed and wakeful, he waited out the Parisian night.

(fade)

French Translation Glossary:

"Dépêches-toi.": "Hurry up."
"À propos de moi, j'espère!": "About me, I hope!"
"une école de ballet": "a ballet school"
"Mon trésor, encore une fois…": "My treasure, one more time…"
"Mon trésor, si fastidieux.": "My treasure, so fastidious."
"Peut-être nous pouvons se câliner, non?": "Perhaps we can cuddle, no?"
"C'est parfait.": "It's perfect."
"C'est mieux. Tu es sage, Julian. Je suis trop fatigué pour faire des galipettes.": "It's better. You are wise, Julian. I am too tired to do somersaults."