Blue Light of Home (11 page)

Vala was quiet for a long time, looking at her. Then he leaned away to switch on the overhead light, so that now she could see the intensity of his stare and not just feel it itching into her skin. And then he got out of bed.

“Where are you going?” she asked, dismayed. Stupid question, considering how small the ship was, but the thought that she had just chased him off into the exercise room for an angry run made her feel more than a little sick to her stomach.

“I’m getting dressed,” he answered, mildly enough. “I’m not having this conversation in my loin-girt.”

“Oh God. Look, this doesn’t need to be a ‘conversation,’ you know?” Skye covered her face, mentally smacking herself in the snout for making any of this necessary. “You had some good news, I’m just not sure how I’m supposed to take it. I’m happy for you. Really. I know you guys don’t…form attachments to your women.”

“Of course we do,” he countered, beginning to sound annoyed. “We’re not machines! We’re just not supposed to be distracted by them.”

“Well, I would certainly hate to distract you from the delicate business of how best to conquer Earth.”

He paused in the act of fastening his pants and gave her a look that was more marveling than irritated, and it was plenty irritated. “You pick the
damndest
things to want to fight about,” he said. “Did it ever occur to you that there may be a reason the Empire has chosen this moment, after all the years we have known about you, to initiate these proceedings? The Barakit are out there, Skye, and believe me, you’ll want our protection before the century is out.”

“Don’t change the subject,” she snapped.

His eyes narrowed. Deliberately, he finished with his pants, then folded his arms across his impressive chest. “What is the subject?” he asked evenly.

Why couldn’t she just stop now and let it go before it all blew up in her face? And why did she insist on lighting the fuse herself?

“Am I or am I not a distraction?” she demanded, still sitting stiffly forward in his bed, dimly aware that she had begun to tremble and he would see it. She didn’t handle confrontations well. She handled break-ups even worse. And that was what this was, she knew it, no matter how much it might predate the actual leave-taking.

Vala’s gaze bored into her in calm silence for a very long time, then moved unhurriedly down to inspect her hands where they clenched on his coverlet, and finally came back up. “No, Skye,” he said quietly. “You are not.”

She waited to feel that angry bloom in her chest that she remembered so well from the two previous breakups of her distant past, but felt instead only an unhappy tightening in the pit of her stomach and the dull crawl of embarrassment in her cheeks. It wasn’t a break-up after all. You had to be together to break up. She heard herself laugh. She didn’t mean to, and the sound wasn’t pleasant, but when she heard it, she knew she wasn’t going to cry. She got up and started for the door.

“Skye, let me speak—”

“Don’t,” she said, and laughed again. “I’m begging you, don’t. I’m humiliated enough for one night. Please, let me walk out of here with a shred of self-respect.”

He touched her arm, not catching at it, but just brushing the back of his fingers lightly across her. He did that sometimes during sex. It made her shiver and she stepped quickly out of his reach. He took a step after her and she turned around fast, her back against the closed door like a trapped animal, forcing a wide smile at him that stopped him in his tracks.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Really. I’ll be fine. Somewhere along the line, I just forgot why I was really up here. You’re a good man and I shouldn’t just blab stuff at you like that and expect a good reaction. I knew what this was.” She laughed some more; he stepped away. “I knew it all along. You don’t have to explain.”

“You misunderstand.”

“Yeah. I do that a lot, apparently.” She found the door panel behind her and fled into the hall, not so much to have the last word as to escape before he ordered her back inside with him. She’d have to go if he did that, either go or openly defy him, and she couldn’t bring herself to do either one.

In the safety of her room, huddled small in her own bed, she replayed the whole ridiculous thing start to finish. Will you miss me, light and teasing. Was she supposed to say yes, no, what? Six months shut up with him in a silver pear in space…all the stupid petty arguments and all the clumsy goodwill gestures…all those nights with his weight balanced above her, his hands digging at her hips, the inadvertently comical sounds he made when he was trying to make it last and losing the battle. Four words: Will you miss me?

No, I’m sick of slime and I want my own bed and even Battlehammer gets old when it’s all there is to do. I want to taste fresh air and feel sunlight again and rain and even snow, if it’s cold enough, and I want to buy a bike and go on long rides down bumpy trails and smell trees. I want to eat real food and I want to learn how to cook it so I can eat it some more and even wallow naked it in if I want to. I want to burn these clothes so I never have to look at them again and buy all new ones. I want a big stone house on a hill by the ocean and I want to sit outside in the cold air in a big quilt and do crossword puzzles all day if I want to. I want to get out of here.

Yes, dammit. I’m missing you already, you big scaly jerk.

His footsteps crossed heavily back and forth in the hall. Skye listened, waiting for this sick knot to loosen. She wasn’t angry at him, not even a little. It just wasn’t a get-angry situation. It was more like one of those awful high school dances, where you show up alone and spend all night working up the nerve to ask the kid you like—the one who smiles at you in the hall, asks what you got for question three on the quiz, occasionally eats lunch with you and complains about egg salad—to dance, only to see his puzzled face and hear him say, “Oh hey…You know I was just being friendly, right?”

God.

Pacing, pacing in front of the door.

Skye groaned and pulled the cushion over her head. “Leave me alone! I’ll be fine, I swear! Just leave me alone for one night!”

“I have to talk to you.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, rolling over. “Men don’t talk to women where you’re from. I never appreciated that arrangement before. I think I’d like to give it a try.”

He snarled something in his own language and opened the door. For only the second time in all these months, he crossed the threshold and came all the way inside. She heard him stomp over to the bed, and with one heave of her covers, she was utterly exposed.

“Look at me,” he commanded.

Skye dragged the pillow off and obeyed with a weary sigh. “Okay,” she said. “I started it. I admit that. But I’ve been trying to end it too. You’re the one determined to have a scene tonight. I’d just like that on the record.”

Faint green markings were beginning to bleed up through his scales. Her heart sank, seeing them.

“You don’t distract me,” he said tightly. “Because there is no one else here. I’ve grown accustomed to the freedom of showing my true emotions, sharing open speech, laughing when I think something is funny, sympathizing when you complain about the food. What I feel for you is not a distraction. My work is.”

“Stop trying to make me feel better. You wouldn’t be finishing up so early if that were true. I don’t need to be placated here, Vala,” she said as he started to argue. “We’re not equals, remember? I’m not your partner. I’m just here to serve you, and seriously, it wasn’t so bad. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”

“You are making me so angry,” he said distantly, distinctly. The warning was unnecessary. The green markings were now extremely evident all down his back and sides from his head to his hips.

“I know, but I’m not trying to. Being stupid about emotions is just a human thing.” All at once, tears threatened. Honestly surprised, Skye rolled away from him before she lost one, curling on her side and squeezing her burning eyes shut. “I’ll be fine in the morning, I swear. Or, you know, whenever morning is for us.”

“How can you act like this?” he exploded. “After all this time, how can you act like you don’t know me?”

She started crying. Damn it.

“What did you want me to say?” she wailed. “That I’m happy I’m going home early? I am! I’m thrilled! That I’m sorry I’ll never see you again? I am! And now I’m going to
be
sorry every time I see you now! Jesus, why did you even bring it up?”

“Stupidly, I wanted to talk about it!”

“For God’s sake, why?”

A long silence followed, broken only by her hoarse struggles to control her sobs and his clawed feet scraping at the floor as he paced beside her bed.

“I wanted to know how you felt about me,” he said at last. “If…perhaps…you wanted me to come with you.”

Skye wiped her eyes over and over, staring at the wall. “With me?” she repeated in a small voice.

“I’m the Emissary. I don’t have to stay here after my report is complete, I just have to maintain a discreet presence. I could go to Earth. I could live…quietly. Somewhere remote.” He paced three steps and stopped again. “You spoke of an island once.”

Skye wiped her face once more and turned back over. He was staring fixedly out her window, even though the Earth wasn’t visible yet. His skin had faded back almost to its natural color, but his body was still very stiff.

“You don’t mean it,” she said finally, hopelessly. “You’re still the first-born of the highest caste in blah blah blah. You’d have to go home sooner or later. I’d rather rip the tape off all at once than have to live with the anticipation of it forever.”

“I’ll take you with me,” he said, with great confidence.

“So you can put me in a room in the rear of your house and never speak to me again?”

He frowned. “A courtyard. And only when others could hear.”

“Great. I get to be your personal dirty little secret instead of the whole Space Administration’s.” Skye faced the wall.

He stalked away, snarling. The doors hissed open and shut…and open. “Do you think it’s easy for me to talk about my feelings to a woman?” he demanded.

“It isn’t easy for you to talk about wood lice to a woman.”

“I want you with me!”

“You’ll get over it.”

“
Do you or do you not love me
?”

Skye sighed, pressing a hand over her eyes. “I’ll get over that, too.”

Silence.

In retrospect, she supposed she really didn’t expect him to leave quietly after that.

He came to the bed in two long, angry strides. Before she could flinch, shout, do anything at all, he seized both her ankles and yanked her legs off the pad. Her knees hit the floor; his hand played out between her shoulderblades and shoved her belly-down and flat against the bed. She felt the scrape of his scales on her arm when he braced one bent knee beside her, and the next thing she felt was his open palm slamming down over her out-thrust bottom.

She let out a broken yell before she’d even known she’d done it. Funny, how Time erodes expectations. She’d known he was capable of this, of course, but the handful of punishments he’d doled out in the past somehow paled in her memory beside his recent foray into the more sensual side of spankings. Now, all over again, she was not and could not be prepared.

Skye howled as Vala’s arm swung, her bare feet sliding and drumming on the slick metal floor as if she were trying to kick her way into the mattress and burrow through it to freedom. Her struggles had no effect on either him or the bed. His hand rained down, the air popping and cracking like fireworks in that rapid-fire assault until she’d exhausted her first panicked efforts and regained enough lucidity to try and reason with him.

“You said you’d never spank me just because you were mad!” she cried, frantically trying to fend him off one-handed. “You promised!”

His answer was to catch her hand, hold it at the small of her back, and then flip up her nightie, drag down her panties, and start all over again.

She never would have believed two thin layers of slinky nothing could have afforded her so much protection until he took it away. The shock of his hand had gone, now it was wholly fire. And not a gentle fire either, but fire like the tip of a 4
^th
of July wand, white-hot and sparking as it sizzled. Each new blow slapped away the burn of every other, leaving a void behind that filled up with molten immediacy.

Her struggles were reborn, exploding phoenix-like from the embers of the first spanking into the conflagration of this one. She kicked and clawed and bucked and tossed and was held perfectly in place the whole time and spanked anyway. It went on until she lost her strength, lost her breath, and lost a few more useless tears into the forgiving pad of her bed. Then there was nothing else she could do but lie there, and she did, until the seemingly endless barrage of ear-splitting slaps rained itself out.

The second silence in her room was heavier, charged, like the air before a thunderstorm. If it weren’t for the painful proof throbbing in her flesh, she’d think they were at the start and not the finish.

Then he lifted his hand and his weight away from her. He sat down, stroked her hair once, then put his hands around her waist and lifted her onto her lap as easily as if she were a small child. Sitting was torture, but her head against his shoulder was too essential to give up, so she sat and suffered, held him and wept.

She hated crying, hated crying in front of him even more, but he didn’t let her pull away. Her efforts to slip out of his grip somehow ended with her straddling his hips, his left hand tucked under her thigh to help support her roasting ass out there in empty space, and both her arms around his neck, bawling into his shoulder while his claws combed through her hair in slow, steady passes.

“You’re not supposed to spank me just because you’re mad at me,” she said, ages later.

“Perhaps I spanked you for lying.” His hand, that same ruthless hand that had set these fire ants swarming over her, caressed her trembling shoulder and brought her in even closer. “Now I will have an honest answer. Do you or do you not love me?”