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6.
She was right. Of course she was right.
That didn't stop Lee hating her for being right, for being stronger than him, for sticking to the rules and leaving when the tryst was over. He never wanted to be in that situation again; better, he decided then and there, to be the one who left: even if it seemed cold or heartless, better not to play on the goodwill of his partner or encourage her to misinterpret his intent. Not that he thought he'd have any desire to be in anyone's bed for any longer than it took to get release. Not that he fooled himself, even for a moment, that any other chance fraks might in any way measure up to what had happened in his bed tonight.
He sat in the armchair, welcoming the chill off the glass where it intruded into the room, and stared at the rumpled sheets, the twisted covers. He knew the linen would smell of sex, of Kara, wished she'd stayed long enough to leave an imprint in the pillow. She hadn't left anything behind, though; not even the traditional token of appreciation, or a card with her call code as a tacit invitation to stay in touch. Not even the marks of nails on his skin.
Usually a slip of ribbon or a twist of silk, the tokens were a homage to a much older tradition where a warrior would wear his lady's colors in his sleeve. Nowadays, young people often wore them like trophies, knots of bright color pinned down their arms at Eros festivals and Bacchanals, proof of their desirability. Lee had never left one, never under these circumstances. He'd never even prepared a strip of ribbon before going out to find a casual partner. He'd jokingly given one to a girl on the Orion one year, once they'd been sharing a bunk on and off for months. She'd laughed, and blushed, but he never saw her wear it openly. He'd been grateful for her circumspection but hadn't been surprised at all when she drifted away, soon after, into something decidedly not casual with one of the bridge crew.
Lee wished he'd had the forethought to snip off a shred of the ribbon that had threaded Kara's blouse, or asked her for it; she could have left her call code - if she had, would he even have waited until morning to use it? Would he have been able to resist the desire to bring her back? - but that was risky; if she wasn't looking for more, it was also unfair. But a token would have been nice: something tangible so that in the morning, when the hotel staff came in to change his sheets and make up the bed, he'd have some way of knowing it wasn't all a fantasy.
His hand still smelled of her. Lee propped his face in the palm of it, drew his leg up over the arm of his chair, closed his eyes.
He woke up to bright sunlight; Picon's traditionally unpredictable weather had done one of its swift and thorough reversals, so today the beach looked inviting, the ocean as still as a millpond after the restless heaving of the night before. Normality, Lee reminded himself. No expectations, no demands, just each day as it comes. Each night as it goes. He had nowhere he had to be, wasn't hung over enough to go back to sleep nor interested enough to switch on the vid and see what was happening in the Twelve Colonies.
He was, however, hungry. Ravenous, in fact, with his body aching pleasantly in a few places but apparently fully recovered; the thought of her, the sight of the sheet dragging on the floor - either were enough to stoke a different kind of hunger.
"Frak," he muttered, looking away, but the sunlight prismed off the window and highlighted the marks on the glass: the smears of her palms, the print of her lip. The round circles which could only have been sweat off her torso where he pressed her against the chill surface.
His body had not forgotten at all.
Lee stripped off his jeans and picked up his shirt and undershorts, tossed the garments in the corner and headed for the bathroom, determined to spend the last of her influence on him in the shower, think of her for the last time under the blast of hot water that would wash all traces away. It didn't take long. He dressed carefully, white shirt and blue jeans and trainers, made sure to hang the housekeeping sign out so the room would be clean before he came back, and went to find some breakfast. It was just one night, just one frak in a hotel room. He'd never see Kara again.
Only he did, because when he stepped out of the hotel lobby, nodding stiffly at the doorman, she was ten feet away, waiting for him.
---
"Kara," he stuttered, his face astonished for a moment before it closed down again, going a little distant. Kara bit her lip; that was as expected. He hadn't planned on looking for her.
She hadn't wanted to do this, either, but there were rules about military ID: you don't take them off, and if you do, you don't let anyone find out. And if she'd sent these to Lee, or dropped them off at the concierge desk, or done anything other than bring them herself, somebody would have found out that he'd broken both the written and unwritten standards.
She hadn't even known he was Fleet, let alone a pilot, and she couldn't do that to a fellow pilot.
"Lee," she started, "I'm sorry to bother you -"
"No bother," he interrupted. "What's wrong?"
"I -" Kara stopped, looked around. The sidewalk was crowded, the doorman eying them curiously. She could shove the damn things in his hand and go, but then he'd have no idea how she ended up with them, might even think she'd done it as a trophy, or that she'd set out to steal or misuse his ID. They might only have been a one-time thing, but Kara knew she did not want Lee Adama thinking ill of her. "Look, can we go somewhere? I'll buy you a coffee."
He hesitated, shrugged and then nodded, and five minutes later they were sitting in a vine-screened cafe-garden, steaming coffee in thick cups on the table and only a bored waiter for audience. "This is... awkward" she began at last, prompted by his inquiring gaze, "but I need to return these to you." She held out her fist: he raised his brows and put out a palm, and she let the tags fall into it with a sigh of relief.
His fingers closed very quickly around them; a glance at Lee's face showed him confused and beginning to be suspicious. "What the -"
"Look, I didn't mean to take them. Well, I did, but I wasn't stealing them. I just thought they were mine."
Lee's face hardened, went sceptical, right up until she tugged her own tags out of her shirt, let them rest between her breasts. He stared at them for a moment, then looked back up at her. "You weren't wearing any last night."
Kara heard the accusation in his tone. "Neither were you."
They stared at each other over the little table, and stared. Finally he shook his head. "You're fleet? That's ironic."
"Not only Fleet. I'm a pilot-instructor at Sparta. And you're a pilot too."
"You don't look like Fleet. Or act like it." Now he sounded resentful, and she couldn't quite figure it out. "Why'd you not wear yours?"
"I'm on leave. And in this town, pilot groupies are ten-a-credit. I'm not interested in them." Kara explained, feeling her own hostility sparking. "You, on the other hand, do look like Fleet. But you also looked too much like Fleet not to be wearing tags... even on leave."
Lee stared at her, then abruptly laughed. "Figures. I come here, bound and determined to have two weeks away from the frakking military, and I not only take it back to my hotel room, but -" He stopped, his face settling into a wry expression.
"Ironic," she repeats. "Funny, isn't it? I get ordered off-base, practically escorted from my office by marine MP's, and told to take a break. Don't think about it, Deak told me. Stay away from the usual bars, don't hang out with pilots. Cut loose. And my first night out, I..." She bit her lip on the fall for a superior officer that seemed to rise in her throat. Instead she shrugged, helpless.
Lee shook his head. "Sounds like we both tried."
"I can't even take leave without frakking up." The coffee was too weak; this wasn't how they brewed it in the mess; Kara put her cup back down, pushed it away with a fingertip. "Sorry to have to spoil the illusion, Captain."
Lee reached over, lifted her tags with his fingers and examined them. "No need to apologize, ... Lieutenant."
She grimaced, tried to ignore how the proximity of his hand to her chest was making her breath come in shorter. "It bothers you that I'm a pilot?"
"Why would you say that?"
He hadn't taken his hand away.
"You're a ranking pilot, with a battlestar posting. You could have stayed on-base if you had to be in Sparta; you could have kept your tags on, you could have found any number of people who understand the rules of the game in any number of bars that the Fleet types like to frequent. Instead, you came looking for something else."
"But I found you."
"And you wish I wasn't Fleet."
He dropped her tags as though they'd burned him; Kara scooped them up, dropped them back under her shirt. They radiated warmth - the trace of his touch - between her breasts, and he was looking there again, over her heart, tracing the subtle imprint of chain beneath fabric. "No," he said after a moment. "I wish you hadn't known the rules."
They didn't speak; he took a sip of coffee and looked at her. Just looked. Kara's head swum with possibilities that intrigued and terrified her. She took another sip of watery coffee to mask her confusion, then another. Then Lee reached over, brushed stray hair off her cheek.
Kara nearly dropped the cup.
"I was being honest, Kara. I hadn't planned on anything more than you, last night - in fact, if I'd known that I'd want more than the one night, I might even have walked away. But all I knew at the time was that I saw a woman who was beautiful and strong and free of restraint, of stupid codes and regulations. A woman who had no more expectations of me than good company... and I wanted her. What I didn't expect was that she'd be a match for me in so very many ways."
"You don't know me, Lee." It was a struggle to get the words out, when she'd rather just hear more of the same from his lips, but she had to warn him off. "I don't do 'normal' well. I screw up everything regular in my life. If I... if I had known how this would turn out, I might have walked away, too."
They were both trying not to give anything more away. Words hovered on Kara's tongue: her absolute ignorance of how people were supposed to care about each other, her lousy, frakked-up track record with men who couldn't handle being the stable one in the partnership, the regrets of getting involved with people who were supposed to understand her life - other pilots - and finding that none of them could handle being overshadowed by Starbuck.
And what Lee was trying not to say? She could only guess. He didn't want to be locked up in the military, didn't want to be rulebound or have to deal with responsibility outside his career as well as in. She didn't know his reasons, but he was right: in a lot of ways, they were very much the same.
"What now?" Kara asked, eventually, the long look and silence weighing on her. "Maybe I should -"
"Maybe we should change the rules," Lee interrupted. "I don't mean now. Gods know, I'm on leave for the next two weeks, and it's going to be tough enough to go back to Orion without getting involved with a woman who can so easily get under my skin. But someday -"
That made sense. "Someday," Kara agreed. She tugged an old Panthers ticket out of the back of her wallet., swore briefly andlooked around to ask the waiter for a pen.Lee beat her to it, offering his own. Smiling, she scribbled a familiar string of digits and her name across the back, bold on the blank yellow card, and as an afterthought added her callsign: Starbuck. "Let's do this the old fashioned way, Lee Adama. Look me up... someday."
Lee's face thawed into a smile that made her want to grin like a lunatic. "You already convinced me, Lieutenant." He tucked the card into his pocket, bent close and brushed his lips across the corner of her mouth; Kara's eyes slid shut the moment she felt his breath on her skin. "Someday ... soon," he added, kissed her more softly still.
When she opened her eyes again, he was gone. Kara tucked his pen into the back pocket of her jeans, and smiled. "Mission accomplished, Deak" she said quietly, and wondered if he'd be pissedif she showed up for work the next day.
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