Archive of Our Own

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*****
September, Jim's Senior Year
***
This was the best, Jim knew.  How
could it get better?
"Oh, babe ... Oh, Ruth, Ruth ...
yes, yes, you're so good ..."
Her legs around his waist.  The sun
on his back.  Better than good.
When he dropped his fists and leaned forward
on them, they dug into the sand under the blanket, and her heels pushed
into his buttocks, urging him in.  Her muscles gripped his cock as
it slid in and out.  Her hands rubbed up and down his arms. 
She said, "Yesss, yessss, there it is, yes!  Now, Jim, darling! 
Now!" and she jerked under him, her eyes closed so tightly the lids seemed
puckered.  He moved his hands then, to grab her breasts where the
nipples were hard as pebbles and hot, and he threw his head back to catch
the breeze on his sweaty face.  A cloud moved over the sun, he could
tell even with his eyes closed, by the sudden shade and the way the breeze
turned cold, and something about the tightening of his own skin in goosebumps
set him off, and he came, his groans in counterpoint to the gulls' cries
in the air.  He was shaking.  They both were.
He eased himself down on the blanket and
she scooted over to make room for him.  He pulled her over and got
her head on his shoulder the way he liked it, her hair spread under his
cheek, and they lay damp and chill except where their skins touched. 
Jim looked up into a sky even bluer than Ruth's eyes and patched with huge
fluffy clouds, the kind that city kids said were like sheep.  He'd
seen sheep close up, but he never liked to disillusion luckier people.
She hadn't said anything yet.  That
was unlike her.
But maybe then he could try leading up
to what he'd been planning to ask her.  He'd thought of a romantic
dinner, roses, the whole thing, but maybe it was better here.
"Ruth," he said, and waited.
"Mmm?"
"Ruth, you are so wonderful.  That
was so sweet, babe.  So good.  Like always."
"Mmmm.  You're nice too, darling Jim."
"Do you ever ..." he began, and then lost
his nerve.  It had seemed like a good idea in his head, he could hear
the line and it sounded romantic, and all that, but now he was actually
hearing it in his own voice, for real, irrevocable, he didn't know whether
he could go through with it.  But he did want to.  He thought. 
She was very still on his shoulder and he thought she might even be falling
asleep.  "Do you ever think, Ruth, that you'd like to ..." he paused,
swallowed, couldn't think of a better line at this last minute, blurted
it:  "that you'd like to do that, feel that, every morning and every
night for - years? Forever?"
She sat up.  He couldn't see her face. 
"Ruth?  Babe?"
"Jim, we need to talk," she said, and her
sober voice told him all he needed to know.
"Oh," he said, and sat up himself. 
Suddenly, being naked wasn't wild and free and sexy, it was vulnerable
... and chilly.  He looked around, remembered his sweatshirt was still
over near the cooler.  His swim trunks were right here, but they were
also soaking wet.  She had wrapped her arms around her breasts and
drawn up her knees, her tangled hair around her shoulders - he was willing
to bet she wanted something to wear too.  He waited, in case she wanted
to reject him right away, but she didn't say anything for the few seconds
it took him to shiver and think, the hell with this.
"I'm getting my shirt," he said, standing
up.  "Want yours?"
"Oh, Jim," she said, and caught her breath,
and something in her voice made him remember that she was actually older
than he was, "Oh, Jim, what a nice guy you are!"
One 'nice' too many.  "Jesus, Ruth,
just answer," he said, a flash of irritation through the fog of his shock. 
"Is that a yes about the clothes?"
"Yes, please."
He got up and walked the ten feet or so,
picked up the clothes and brought them back to the blanket, where she still
sat in the same position.  "Here."  She pulled the loose blouse
over her head and he did the same with his sweatshirt.  And he put
on his shorts, and she got up and slipped into the stirrup pants she'd
worn to cycle down to the beach from the chemistry lab where she worked. 
Then they sat helplessly down on the blanket again, facing each other.
"It wouldn't be fair to you," she said
at last, pushing a loose lock of golden hair behind one ear.
Now there was a sentence that was nothing
but trouble.  Jim was getting to hate it when people told him they
wanted to be fair to him.  He wasn't too thrilled about the times
he felt he had to be fair to other people, either.  Was this going
to go on his whole life long, he wondered?  This fairness thing got
in the way of some great sex.
"You're not in love with me anyway," she
went on after a pause.
"How do you know? How would anyone know
but me?  I think I am."
"You think you are, Jim darling?" 
She sounded sad about it.
"Look.  Ruth.  I was asking you
to think about marrying me.  I'm not going to do that if I don't love
you."
"You've never said so."
"I just did!"  How unfair could a
girl get?  He realized his hands were clenched, and relaxed them,
trying to stop glaring, trying not to lose his temper.
"Anyway there's another reason," she said. 
"About me."  She took a deep breath.  "I keep thinking about
Gary, and that's not fair to you."
"Gary?  Gary Mitchell?"
"Yes."
"I didn't know you knew Gary."
"I knew him before I met you."  She
looked to the side, toward the ocean, blushing.
He assumed there'd been an affair and wondered
how long it had lasted - or how they'd met - since this was only the summer
break after Gary's freshman year.  He thought of saying, 'so you started
fucking me because you couldn't fuck Gary?  What if I said that made
two of us?'
But he had known a few girls who'd gone
nova when Jim mentioned liking guys too.  And anyway it wouldn't have
been true about Gary.  Not - not lately.
*****
Previous October, Jim's Junior Year
***
Midshipman-Lieutenant Jim Kirk, instructor
for Section 5 of Ethics and the Decision-Making Process, looked down at
the paper he was reading with a mixture of anger, dismay, embarrassment,
and half-denied amusement.
He closed it and looked again at the title
page.  "How the Other Half Lives:  Ethics in Short-Term Interpersonal
Relationships," read the title, and lower on the page was "Ens. G. Mitchell,"
with the date and course number.  It was a paper about picking up
sex partners in bars, written in the form of instructions, based on the
assumption that the reader had never had sex, much less picked anyone up,
and needed all the concepts explained.  It was accompanied by a hyperflow-chart
on a padd for further clarity. Jim's name was never used; the reader was
never directly addressed.  It filled the requirements of a paper describing
a common process and its ethical components -  well, the ethics really
weren't particularly strong.
Especially the part about deliberately
trying to get under the instructor's skin.  That was a bad ethical
move - a bad practical move.
But Jim couldn't think of a single comment
he could write on the paper without feeling like he had walked right into
Mitchell's little practical-joke world.  He could tell him that it
was foolish to irritate the instructor - thereby admitting irritation. 
He could make a few marginal notes pointing out flaws in the techniques
- now that was mature.  He could - he could go find Mitchell
and shake him until his teeth rattled.  That was a satisfying image
and he dwelt on it for a little while, until he found himself thinking
a little too much about the way Gary's - Mitchell's - shoulders would feel
and how he'd look ....
Damn.  Mitchell was too damn
attractive.
And hadn't he been playing on it? 
He'd flirted with Jim in an understated way from the first day of class. 
Brought him article clippings and complimented his haircut and leaned over
the desk ... Jim had regarded him with a steady cold gaze and responded
as little as possible.  And Gary - Mitchell - had scaled back
until he only flashed that too-charming smile once or twice a week.
That had been a victory.  But then
Jim found he missed the smile.
Now, he put "How the Other Half Lives"
aside and picked up Ensign Harper's paper on the ethics of buying a used
flitter, but found himself on page three with no real idea what the thesis
had been.  He put Harper's paper down and stood up, stretched his
arms and shoulders, and then went to get a fresh cup of coffee.  Then
he tried again.  This time he caught himself drifting on page two.
How the hell was he supposed to grade Mitchell's
paper?  Why was Mitchell making it so hard for Jim to grade him fairly? 
Jim sighed.  It wasn't like Mitchell couldn't do the work of the course
perfectly well, if he'd just stop spending his energy subverting the course
requirements and simply do them.
Jim went for a run and listened to some
music and did some of his own homework, and then went back to the papers
and graded most of them, but didn't look at Mitchell's again that night. 
The next day, he dropped in on Ben Finney, a former instructor and now
a friend.  He started out just visiting, but soon he found himself
pouring out the story of the paper he couldn't grade - though he left out
the part about flirting in class, and was conscious that he was making
the whole story harder to understand, but ... well, he just couldn't tell
Ben about it.  It felt like betraying Mitchell, somehow, which was
weird and worrisome, but he still couldn't.
"Let's see the paper," said Ben, "and I'll
see what I can tell you.  I can at least say what I'd give
it."
"That would be a help," Jim told him. 
And he even had the paper with him - all of them, so he could do the rest
of the grades at lunch and hand them back.
While Ben read, Jim watched;  various
expressions chased across Ben's craggy face, and once he gave a snort of
laughter, and another time he frowned.  Jim was almost as anxious
as if he had written the paper.
"Hmm," Ben said at last, and closed the
paper again, and straightened the fastener, and looked out the window,
almost as if he were anxious.
"He can write pretty well, can't he?" Ben
asked, eyes apparently on the tree outside.
"Yes, when he pleases.  And he's a
natural leader in the class: everyone listens when he bothers to talk. 
Not all that often.  And - well, I don't feel comfortable grading
him down when I'm not sure he doesn't get it, and I'm too mad to give a
high grade.  That's why I need advice."
"It is an inappropriate topic,"
Ben said.  "He sounds like a prankster.  I'd hate to have served
under someone like that on a starship."
Jim bit the inside of his cheek. Ben had
never in fact served on a starship, and in an unwary moment he'd told Jim
so.  The funny thing was that Ben still talked as though he was an
experienced line officer.  But what was really making Jim feel like
laughing was the phrase "serving under."  Like "served under glass"? 
Like "servicing"?  Oh, sure, Ben servicing under Gary - what an image. 
Jim set his jaw hard and thought about something else, that tree Ben had
been looking at, until the desire to laugh right in Ben's face subsided.
And then he abruptly stopped being amused,
because Ben said, "Frankly, I can't give an entirely unbiased opinion. 
I've been hearing about this Gary Mitchell, and ... well, it hasn't been
all that good."  Ben looked out the window again.  "He is talented,
but I can't help thinking that there are types we just shouldn't admit
to the Academy."
This was not the first time Jim had heard
Ben express similar views, but he was much angrier about it this time,
when it wasn't some faceless 'type.'  He swallowed hard, as if his
anger were a physical object he was holding down, and said evenly, "Are
you saying you'd grade this paper on the basis of whether you think Gary
... Mitchell is an asset to Starfleet in general?"
"No," said Ben, sounding as if he meant
'maybe,' "no.  But I do think that you need to focus on the big picture. 
Here's another angle.  Why do you think people like us are instructors
here?  Especially, why do you think a junior like yourself is teaching?"
Jim had never thought about it much. 
He shrugged.  "Because there are eight sections of Ethics?"
"They could hire someone.  It's a
learning experience for you too.  A command experience.  Oh,
I know a classroom isn't much like a landing party or a starship. 
But some of the same things come up.  Prioritizing.  Group dynamics. 
Giving performance feedback.  And in this case, coping when someone
under your command is resistant to orders or misunderstands them or simply
acts inappropriately.  So, Jim, how do you attain your objective of
teaching ethics to Mitchell without Mitchell's full cooperation?"
"Good question."  And it was. 
That's what made Ben a good teacher aside from all this shit about who
was and who wasn't 'Starfleet material.'  "And, if he were -" damned
if Jim was going to say 'serving under me' - "my officer, someone I was
commanding, how would I get him to stop withholding cooperation?"
"Another good question."  Ben nodded.
Jim thought for a moment, long enough to
realize he needed to really think about this, by himself, and then
grinned at Ben.  "Thanks for the questions," he said.  "Now I
have to figure out some answers."
"I'm sure you will," said Ben.  "Let
me know what happens?" and Jim said he would.
"Make an appointment," he wrote on Mitchell's
paper, a routine note.  Usually it meant, 'I'm flunking this paper
and I'll tell you why;'  occasionally, 'I'm going to tell you to do
this again.'  He still wasn't absolutely sure which he meant by it
when he returned the paper to Mitchell and, after class, under Mitchell's
unabashed stare, worked out a date and time they could meet in Jim's "office"
- more a carrel, really.
That night he met Ruth for the first time. 
It was years later that he found out the two events were connected. 
At the time he couldn't have imagined such a thing.
Jim was only at the lecture by chance. 
He rarely went to hear guest speakers, and when he did, they were nearly
always Starfleet captains or Science officers who gave presentations on
new alien races or Federation members.  But this speaker was a protege
of John Gill's, and Jim wanted to hear Gill's introduction, and he had
thought the speaker himself might be interesting.  The talk
was called, "Machiavelli, Socrates, and Starfleet," and in fact it was
deadly.  And very sparsely attended, so without really planning to,
Jim found himself seated in a prominent spot, and afterward Gill beckoned
him down and introduced him.  Jim immediately forgot the speaker's
name and had an embarrassing time holding up his end of the conversation
until the speaker was distracted by a blonde girl who had hung around to
ask a few questions.
So, Jim thought, someone had actually been
listening.  Gill said something to her, and she cast down her
eyes and smiled, bringing out two charming dimples and showing off her
long eyelashes.  Someone really attractive had been listening.
It wasn't hard for Jim to get back into
the conversation, and Gill said genially after a few minutes, "Jasper and
I have to be getting along to this terribly boring party of mine, full
of aging professors.  Care to come along, either of you, and inject
some youth and energy into it?"
Jim glanced sidelong at the girl - Ruth
- and found her glancing at him too. "I'd like that, Professor Gill,
thanks," he said.
"Oh, yes, how lovely," came her soft voice,
like an echo.
They went with Jasper Whatever-his-name-was
and Professor Gill to the party, which was up in Berkeley.  The aircar
belonged to Gill, who drove it himself, and Jasper Whosis sat in the front
passenger seat while Jim and Ruth shared the back, flirting with their
eyes but saying little.  The car was full of shadows as they flew
over the Bay Bridge, its lights and their running lights flashing across
the waves below.  Then later, Jim pointed out to Ruth where the pale
tracings of roads wound up the steep hills between necklaces of light. 
A harsh warm wind beat against the sides of the car, occasionally pulling
it to one side or the other, but Jim knew from other rides that Gill was
a good driver, and he tried not to be disturbed by the jolts of the air
currents.  After all, the right sort of jolt left Ruth almost in his
lap once.  And she didn't move away very far.
Gill talked about the landscape too. 
"The real reason to invent private aircars.  I remember riding in
surface vehicles up those roads ... at this time of day, or when the weather
was bad, it was a nightmare.  Now I think you said you'd never been
to Berkeley, Jasper?  Not even to see the campus?  Why ever not?"
"And you, do you know Berkeley?" Jim asked
Ruth.
"I was a student there," she said, "but
now I work at the SerChemo labs.  I just go to a lecture or so around
town to remember when I - " she chuckled - "when I spent my time thinking."
He wanted to know her age but wasn't sure
how to ask.  "It can't have been that long ago," he tried.
"No, or I'd be over it, wouldn't I?" was
all she said.
He couldn't tell whether she was actually
avoiding the implied question, or if she assumed he was older than he looked,
or if it didn't matter to her, or if she was just plain not attracted to
him.  But he didn't think it was that.  He helped her out of
the car when they arrived at Gill's house - the carpad had a steep incline
and he had noticed that she was wearing high heels - and she left her hand
in his almost all the way to the house.
He'd been to a couple of parties here before,
and after they took off their coats and greeted Gill's wife, Jim took Ruth
to the room Gill called his observation lounge, where the back wall was
glass and a pair of sliding doors led on to a porch that overlooked what
seemed to be half a mountain.  Gill, or perhaps his wife, had found
a reconditioned string of electric lights in pale flowery colors, and they
hung across the porch.  If the night were warmer, the guest bar might
have been out there, but in this wind that would have been absurd. 
As it was, the lights swung so violently Jim didn't know how long they'd
last.
Gill had been exaggerating about the guests
all being old.  Besides Jim and Ruth, there were several graduate
students, who all seemed to have bought their fashionable clothes in the
same place, or perhaps all History and Philosophy majors had the same favorite
colors:  long tunics and narrow leggings in red and navy blue predominated. 
Even their haircuts were similar, which Jim expected on the Academy grounds
but found disconcerting in civilian surroundings.  He turned gratefully
to Ruth with her long blonde hair and her simple, pale jumpsuit cut close
to her body.  But she was talking to Jasper again.
He mingled a little, and the graduate students
were all right - he'd met a few of them before - but he kept returning
to Ruth.  At one point she asked him to find her a soft drink, as
she had never made it out of the observation lounge and didn't know where
the guest bar was.  When he got back, she was listening kindly to
the oldest man there, an Emeritus professor whose hearing enhancers were
never adjusted quite right, so he tended to talk on and on since he couldn't
hear anyone else properly anyway.  Jim handed her the drink, feeling
that he had somehow inherited all the chores of being her date without
any of the pleasures.  The old man, Dr. Karpathy, went on talking
about why Earth's Stoics and Vulcan Surakians were actually not significantly
similar, despite the mistaken arguments of some of his colleagues. 
He began to summarize the greater part of what must have been a lengthy
book on the subject, or perhaps it only seemed long because of Karpathy's
running commentary on its various fallacies.
Fortunately, one of Karpathy's oddities
was that he seldom looked directly at the person he was lecturing, and
Jim leaned over and said into Ruth's ear, "You're taking what Professor
Gill said too seriously," and then moved back just in time as the old man's
head swung around and he actually asked a question.  "Oh, yes, I do
agree," said Jim blandly, resisting the temptation to say 'cock-a-doodle-doo'
or something to see whether Karpathy would notice.  Not a very nice
thought.
"What do you mean?" Ruth asked him when
Karpathy had turned his face away again.
"Look around.  It's not really our
sole responsibility to be the youthful lives of the party."  He tried
his best you-know-you-want-what-I-want grin and said, "We could even leave,
and I bet the party would keep rolling along just fine."
"And - oh, yes, Professor - and
how did you plan to get back to town?"
"Leave that to me," he said, "I've met
a lot of the people here, there must be somebody ... yes, I see her now. 
Excuse me," and Jim wasn't in the mood to wait; he reached out and tapped
Karpathy on the arm.  "Professor, I'm taking my girl away now, you're
just too fascinating," and maybe the old man could read lips or something
after all, because he grinned.
"Lovely couple," he said. "Have a good
evening."
And Jim swept Ruth off with his arm around
her waist as if they were dancing, and she began to laugh helplessly.
"Oh," she said, "oh, you're not much like
I thought."
"Well, you haven't had much time to think
yet, have you?"
"Neither have you, and you just called
me 'my girl.'"
Jim stopped;  the rest of the room
seemed to stop too, as he looked into her uplifted eyes, as wide as the
sky.  "We'll ... have to talk more about that," he said slowly.
"Yes," she said.  "Jim."  Her
gravity and sweetness rang in him like a bell.
After a few more moments he could finally
look away, and spotted Lillian Martin again, still standing glumly near,
but not in, a group of animated graduate students, holding a plate of refreshments
but not eating them.  He took Ruth to her and turned her away from
the group with a hand on her shoulder.  "Lillian, how are you?"
She looked at him under level brows. 
"Just great, Jim.  Just WONderful.  The time of my life,
I'm having here."
"How is Zelda?"
"Debating something I can't follow. 
Go ahead and join them, you can probably get it."
"Please.  We just got away from Karpathy. 
Lil, this is Ruth.  Ruth, my friend Lillian, who has gotten me through
a few of these parties before."
"Why do you come here if you don't like
it?" asked Ruth, which was sensible enough.
"I like Gill," said Jim.
"I like Zelda," said Lillian.  "My
girlfriend.  Right there, in red and blue."
"Black hair," Jim added helpfully. "You
know, the long tail there down her back, with the beads on the end?"
"The taller one?" asked Ruth doubtfully.
"With the nose ring. She's doing this 1990s
thing.  They all are."  Lillian sighed.
"Could be worse," Jim said, and waited
for her to look.  "Could be 1890s."  She didn't react right away,
so he added, "Corsets?  You know?  Petticoats?"
"I'm thinking," said Lillian dreamily. 
He shoved her and she laughed.  "I'm sorry," she said to Ruth, "but
Jim and I have known each other for a long time, and we just turn into
ten-year-olds when we're together."
Ruth said politely, "It's charming."
"So," Jim asked Lillian, "when will Zel
be ready to leave, you think?"
"About three a.m., at a guess."  Lillian
was joking, but she sounded more forlorn than amused.  Jim reflected
that he never had liked Zelda.  But "Don't start," Lillian warned
him now, so he didn't.
"Did you drive up together?" he asked instead.
"No, actually, we arranged to meet here."
"Lil," he said, leaning in a little, "what
if we just ... Ran Away?"  The drama in his voice was for humor, but
he knew she realized he meant the suggestion seriously.
"Lillian and Jim run away together?" she
asked, smiling.
"And Ruth," Jim said, reaching for her. 
She was just looking back and forth between the other two as they spoke.
"Ah, I see," Lillian said.  "Ruth
and Jim run away together with Lillian as the chauffeur."
Well, he had sort of thought that - of
getting a ride from her, anyway.  Now he would have been ashamed of
himself, except that her eyes were twinkling.  "Let's find another
party.  Hell, let's find an ant farm or an aquarium.  Grass to
watch growing."
"Too wet, don't you think?" asked Ruth,
and he checked, but thought she was joking.
"Let me at least try to get Zel to come,"
said Lillian.
"I'll get our coats," said Jim, and Lillian
cast him a grateful look.  She never had gotten used to the Gills'
transcloset.
"Mine's the same," she said.  "Zelda's
is a navy velvet cape."
Jim hoped the closet wasn't full of them.
Lillian had a whole comic riff on the possible
contents of the Gills' transcloset and why they had a storage system usually
reserved for costume collections, but when Ruth asked Jim, he just said,
"I guess they entertain a lot," which was true enough.
The console for guest retrieval was near
the front door, and Jim asked Ruth for the best search terms.  "Hm,
try the color," she said, "quilted silk."  He put in 'pink' and didn't
get it, and then she said "Peach," and that did it.
He typed in 'black leather' next, for Lillian. 
It wasn't really animal skin, of course, but the simulation was so close
that the closet wouldn't be able to tell.  For a wonder, there were
two leather garments - hmm, more in the main collection, the screen said. 
Maybe there was more truth to Lillian's jokes than he'd thought. 
He typed in 'pewter' for the studs and chains and 'red silk' for the lining
and slashed sleeves, and got the right one.  "Oh, my," said Ruth when
it appeared on the rack.
Jim grinned.  The jacket was a relic
of Lillian's brief flirtation with the neoleather life, which she admitted
later had in her case been much more about fashion than sex.  "She
says it's sturdy," he said now to Ruth.
Jim's own jacket was an easy find, since
he was the only Starfleet cadet at this particular party.  But he'd
been right to be apprehensive about Zelda's cloak, and they were still
hopelessly looking at visual displays when Lillian appeared.  Alone,
and wet, as if a drink had been poured over her.  The cloak question
could be shelved, Jim thought.
"Let's get out of here," said Lillian,
stone-faced.  "The Gills know."
They piled into Lillian's little flitter
and careened off down the hill, sticking near to the ground to avoid the
wind and near the road to find their way.  Ruth, in the back, reached
forward and clutched Jim's shoulder, digging her nails in whenever Lil
swooped around a loop in the road or jumped a ridge.
"Lil," said Jim after a minute or two,
"would you like to talk about it or would you rather - " he gasped as they
took a turn and Ruth, he swore, drew blood, " - just slalom?"
Lillian made a strangled, whooping sort
of sound, and he said, "Lil, Lillian, set it down, please, Lil, please
don�t drive and cry at the same time," and Ruth dug her nails in again. 
Lillian dropped to the side of the road and killed the engine, and dropped
her head against her fists clenched on the controls.
"I'm sorry - " she gasped, "I'm sorry ...
I n-, I nev- ... never cry ...."
"Lil, I don't care.  Cry all you want
now," Jim said, pulling her nearer hand away from the altitude lever and
holding it.  It was true he'd never seen her do this.  He chafed
her hand between both of his and she sobbed, her face turned away. 
He rubbed her shoulder too.
Eventually she said, "I'm sorry" again.
"Zelda's going to be sorry if I ever catch
her," Jim said.  He waited a little longer and then asked, "Should
I drive?"
"Let me," Ruth suggested, "and then you
two can talk."
Lillian sat unresponsive, shoulders still
heaving.
"Or don't talk," Jim said.
Lil nodded.  They all got out of the
flitter and changed places, Jim and Lillian in back and Ruth in front. 
They lifted off a lot more smoothly.  Ruth was quite a good driver.
"I've still got a shoulder for you," Jim
told Lillian, "my BFG."
"OFG," she gulped, "Stud."  It was
an old abbreviated joke from their subspace squirt-message days. 
She let him hold her then and sniffled into his chest.
"Where are we going?" Ruth said at last,
when they were back in the city and she had picked up the altitude to stay
out of the way of ground traffic.
"Your place," said Lillian.  Now she
was sitting up and could speak almost normally.  "I'm OK, but I don't
... want to find another party."
"You're going to tell Cleo, right?" 
Jim insisted.  "Promise me."  Cleo was Lillian's room-mate, also
a lesbian, and why Cleo and Lil weren't a couple was one of the mysteries
of life as far as Jim was concerned.  Cleo would make sure Lillian
was all right, or as close as possible.
"OK.  I promise."
They pulled up in front of a 22nd-century
rebuilt rowhouse with a light-stripped exoskeleton, and again they all
got out of the flitter.  Both women seemed embarrassed;  Jim
didn't know why.  He was the one being dropped off he-had-no-idea-where,
but both Ruth and Lillian seemed to be assuming he'd stay, and he certainly
had nothing against the idea if he knew Lillian was going to take decent
care of herself.  He gave her another hug and pinched her cheek gently. 
"My best friend-girl," he said.
"You're a sweetheart, Jim."  She got
into the flitter and lifted off, steadily and carefully.
Jim only turned from watching her go when
Ruth said, "Come inside for a while?"
Why else was he there?  "Sure. 
Thanks."  They walked up a little staircase and stood in front of
a metal door formed and colored to look almost like it had panes of frosted
glass in it.  Ruth got out a little keycard, narrow and pink and not
shiny, like a little animal's tongue.  She swiped it through the lock,
a motion like licking sideways, or maybe Jim just had a dirty mind.
Inside, when the door swung shut behind
them, it seemed completely dark.  Disorienting.  Jim just stood. 
"The hall-light's out," said Ruth in a near whisper, and reached out, probably
meaning to take his hand, but instead she grazed his hip and the tips of
her small fingers hit him like a bolt of current.  He caught at the
fingers and brought them to his lips.
"You," she said, sounding a little surprised,
"you don't waste time - do you?"
"Too fast?" he asked, and kissed the ends
of her fingers again, and then licked down to the top of her palm.
"No," she said, pulling her arm in but
not away, and they were against each other and even in the dark it wasn't
hard to find her mouth below his.
They kissed for some time.  The darkness
wrapped around them made him not completely sure how long, or what was
up and down, like floating.  They played shallowly with each other's
mouths, licking and suckling and finding all the contours of lips and teeth
and the edges of tongues.  She licked his upper lip and kissed up
the bridge of his nose, finding his eyelashes and nibbling them with her
lips, which felt strange to him but he supposed she liked it, so he did
the same to hers.  That felt nicer but it was never going to be a
big turn-on for him.  But he found her neck, and that was much better,
and she stretched it out for him and made little sounds in her throat while
he fed there.  He didn't think she was actually speaking.  Anyway
he wasn't paying attention.
Then he hit the neckline of the jumpsuit,
and couldn't find how it was fastened.  He began to feel around for
the break in the fabric a little frantically, and she said, "OK, stop,"
and he slowed down but kept his hands on her body, his hard-on nudging
her and his face against her skin.
"You've got an apartment?"  he asked,
then nibbled her neck a little.
She wriggled, but not hard, a token struggle. 
"A suite.  Upstairs."
"Can we go there?"  He stroked her
hips and ran one hand up to her breast.
"Yes, come on," she said, capturing that
breast-fondling hand and holding it as she turned away and moved unerringly
into blackness.
"Isn't there any light?"
"Upstairs," she said again.  "Here's
the railing," and she put his hand onto it.  This brought his arm
across her body and so they paused for a while as he pulled her into him
and found her breasts again and kissed her hair and ear and - she turned
her head - her mouth.
She was kissing back but she also laughed,
the sensation strange against his lips, and he pulled back, a little miffed. 
"Come on," she said, and then from the next stair up, "Have you lost the
railing?"
He found it again and followed.  She
seemed to keep a step or so ahead, and he reached out with his free hand
and brushed her hips, and she disconcerted him by laughing a little again.
"It's funny?"
"I'm so horny," she said, breathless,
"and I'm not having sex on the staircase, it's too silly." 
She quickened her pace and so did he.
They reached the top of the stairs, and
there was a light in this hallway, though not a very bright one. 
She went about halfway down the corridor and fiddled with the door, and
rattled what sounded like a knob, and then at last they were inside. 
She turned on the light.
The room was full of boxes and papers and
objects jumbled together on almost every surface.
"Are you moving in or moving out?" he asked.
"In," she said, and then "Come in,"
and he shut the door behind him as he obeyed.
Now that he looked, he couldn't see why
he'd missed the opening on the jumpsuit, or perhaps she'd started that
gap at the top while they were on the stairs.  Now she put her hands
there, at mid-chest, and simply opened the length of the thing, hands skimming
down her body as she did, and under it she was naked except for panties. 
She wasn't strip-teasing, she was just getting out of it, and she was the
most erotic thing he'd seen for a long while.  Her breasts jiggled
as she bent over to pull the legs down, and looking at the line over her
shoulder he realized why there were so many paintings of women washing
themselves and dressing and so forth.  The paintings weren't a turn-on
but she sure was.  The little dents along her spine and her round
hips and her soft arms ... She looked up.
"Are you just going to stand there?"
He stripped out of his uniform as fast
as he could.
The bed was assembled and made up, in fact
too made up for his taste, with several pillows and a decorative coverlet
and a featherbed or a down thing, all puffy and crowded.  She scattered
the stuff from the surface of it, though, and when he joined her under
the covers there was enough room for both of them, even with the hard-on
he was swinging around by that time.  Her ass as she'd climbed into
bed was made for his hands, but he wasn't close enough to grab it. 
Later, he told himself.
She ran her hands over his skin, holding
him off just a little, and he murmured an inarticulate protest.
"Oh, you are - " she said, "you are such
a big, sweet, broad-shouldered -" her palms swept over them - "beautiful,
unhairy - " her hands across his chest, where actually there was some
hair - "muscle-y - " her fingers played across his belly, and lower, and
slowed, and he groaned - "eager big, big boy!"  She grasped
his erection and held it, sliding her hand down to the base and up to the
tip several times, and he was thrusting a little but trying to get his
hands on her thighs, positioning her on her back and tickling her pubic
hair, separating her, finding her wet - "Yes, please, stroke me, make love
to me, yes, use your fingers, there, in my cunt!"
He hadn't thought he liked talkers before,
but this was getting to him in a big way, and he really had to tense up,
hold back, to do what she wanted him to.  Both hands there as she
stretched her legs apart, running his fingers in the rough hair and the
slick juices, the backs of his hands chafing her soft thighs, and she arched
her back and writhed and gabbled, "Oh, that's good, that tickles, again
there, yes, oh, inside, please," but instead he teased around the edges,
round and round until she was wild, bucking, down to ooohs and aahhs, and
then he pushed his cock in.  She was wet as a sponge, moving under
him, and he held her hips, lifting them from the yielding mattress, and
plunged in and pulled out, and again, and again.  It felt so good. 
And she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him half down and arched
half up so she could kiss him, deeper this time, her slim tongue moving
into his mouth.  He sat up more and pulled her closer and they rocked
back and forth with her in his lap and his cock deep inside her. 
She got her legs under her enough to pull up and push down, and she took
up the rhythm of his thrusts, moaning into his mouth.  Her back was
damp and her hair spilled over both their shoulders as they rocked back
and forth.  He couldn't stop, he wanted to go on but he was past the
point where he could control and he tipped her down again and pushed in
hard and came, and she moaned again and clamped down as if she wanted to
milk his cock dry or keep it inside her even after it was soft.
He lay on her but she was still squirming
under him, and he realized she hadn't gotten off.  "Sorry," he said,
and then, "tell me ..." amazed that she wasn't already telling him.
"Feel me," she said, "fuck me," and he
couldn't do it with his cock now but he got up on one elbow rather dizzily
and used his fingers instead.  The wet, clingy skin inside her was
amazing to touch, and she was flushed and gorgeous as she twisted and arched,
trying to get the best stimulation.  He had two fingers in her; 
he tried separating them and pressing against the sides of the passage,
and she gasped, "up, up," kicking her free leg aimlessly, and so
he moved them the other way, turned his hand sideways.  He thought
he should do something with her clitoris as well, but he was leaning on
his other arm and wasn't sure how he'd do it, and anyway she seemed to
be coming now, grunting, "Y's, yes, yesss," and the muscles around his
fingers convulsing.  He kissed her mouth while she was quiet and limp
and pulled her soft body to rest against his.
"Oh," she said softly, "you are darling,"
and hugged him back.
They rested a little.  Then she asked,
"Jim?"
"What?"  He was a little surprised
that she wanted conversation, but given how much she'd talked while they
were fucking, he probably shouldn't have been.
"What does BFG mean?"
"What are you - oh," he said, remembering
he'd called Lillian that in the flitter.  "What made you think of
that now?"
"I don't know, I just wondered.  Is
it private?"
"No."  He paused, sorting out the
story.  "OK, Lil and I go way back.  And while she was on Mars
and then when I was - off Earth for a while - anyway, we were friends,
and I called her my 'best friend-girl,' you know, as opposed to 'girl-friend.' 
Abbreviated BFG, to save space in the squirt message."
"And then she said OFG," Ruth said.
"Yes, well, she used to answer 'I'm your
only friend-girl, you big stud.'"
Ruth laughed a little. "You two are funny
together."
"Always have been."  He wasn't speaking
very clearly.
"Are you going to sleep?" she asked.
"'S it OK?"
"Yes, all right, for a while."  She
snuggled in.  "I'll drive you back to the Academy."
"Thanks."
"It's only fair."  She smiled against
his skin.  "You got me a ride from Berkeley."
He would have chuckled, but he didn't have
the energy.  He wondered if they'd really get back to the Academy
before morning.  He didn't want to bother.  A bed like this could
feel like home ... and he thought he could get used to it, if she could.
They'd see.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

*****
October, Jim's Junior Year, continued
***
Jim's office/carrel was already small,
and when Mitchell swaggered in for the appointment about his Ethics paper,
it suddenly seemed much smaller.  Jim realized that if he didn't
seize control instantly, this could be an all-around ugly experience. 
"Ensign Mitchell," he said crisply.  "Sit down.  I'll just be
a moment."
Mitchell dropped into the chair as if by
reflex, then crossed his legs and leaned back in it, a good trick considering
that in fact it was impossible to sit comfortably there.
Jim made him wait while he finished writing
a note about something he wanted to point out in the next class. 
Then he looked up and found Mitchell smiling at him with a kind of pure
pleasure he found disconcerting.
Somehow Jim couldn't play games. 
He decided to take a leaf from Ben Finney's book - something like what
he'd said when Jim had asked him for advice.  "What would you say
is the purpose of the Ethics class?"
Mitchell hesitated.  Then he grinned
and opened his mouth, but evidently thought twice and shut it again without
making whatever crack he had planned.
"Thank you," Jim said, not pretending he
hadn't seen it.  "I'm serious.  If you tease me in one paper,
that's not important;  but if you miss what the class is meant to
give you, it's my failure as well as yours.  So if you really think
Ethics is a joke, tell me why."
Mitchell sat forward now, leaning his elbows
on his knees and looking at his hands clasped between them.  "It's
so abstract," he said soberly.  "I can't think like that."
"Well, I'm sure you can," said Jim,
"but anyway it doesn't have to be abstract, that's why we're applying it
to specific decisions."
"So years from now, I'm looking down the
nose of a Klingon cruiser, and I'm supposed to think about Spinoza
before I fire the phasers?"
"Transform passion into action," Jim said,
a paraphrase, and smiled in spite of himself.
Mitchell shook his head.  "Sorry,
Captain Kolonik, I realize now that my sadness is not externally caused
and that you are as much a part of the great God/Nature as I am, so go
right on raiding the outpost."
"Captain Colonic?" Jim laughed. 
Then got hold of himself.  "No.  Look.  Ethics isn't being
all passive and goody-goody.  I'm doing it wrong if I've made you
think that.  But . . . "  He thought of Kolos and turned his
mind away, but the memory lent passion to his voice as he spoke. 
"You've got to have reasons for action.  You can't just act
out of whatever's floating around in your mind;  you can't pretend
you've got a real philosophy if it's just prejudice;  you can't just
follow orders mindlessly.  I don't believe that's what they want from
us.  I won't believe that."
"No," said Mitchell almost fondly, "you
wouldn't.  You're an idealist."
Jim started to object and then stopped. 
Anyway this wasn't about him.  "So write about that," he said. 
"Tell me - listen, forget philosophizing a common decision.  Tell
me about the way you really do make decisions.  The practical way. 
Explain it to me."
He'd been really communicating with Gary
- with Mitchell.  He knew it. ; But now Mitchell's expression
changed, and it was like a door slamming in Jim's face.  "The way
I make decisions," he said in a bleak voice.  "You mean, the way the
other
other half lives.  The unidealistic half."
Now what?  Jim didn't know. 
He could only go on being honest and hope that would get through. 
"You know I didn't mean to denigrate you.  I need a paper from you
that shows you've been thinking about these issues, that demonstrates practical
ethics.  Decision making.  Because that's what the class is about."
"Does it have to be a decision I make?"
"What, are you going to analyze one of
mine?"  Jim smiled, but felt very little humor.  That idea was
more unpleasant the longer it was in his mind.
But, "No," Mitchell said, seeming a little
startled.  "No, I wanted to . . . do some research.  I'm not
exactly sure yet - can I tell you later?"
"Not much later, please."
It was the same afternoon.  Jim got
a text message from Mitchell, proposing a research paper on the equitable
scoring of Starfleet Academy entrance exams.  Jim agreed to the topic
and a week later the paper was in his hands.  And it was entirely
serious, and very good.
"I learned from this," Jim told Mitchell
when he handed it back.
"So did I," said Mitchell simply. 
"I hadn't thought about scoring as a system.  What you were saying,
right?"  When Jim smiled, Mitchell did too.  "Uh-huh." 
Then he sobered, looking away.  "I only wish I'd known about it before
- before I got here.  I'd have . . . made some different decisions. 
Known who to trust."  Jim didn't know what he meant, and Mitchell
obviously wasn't going to explain, but when he looked up again, there was
at least humor there.  "Hey, I'm trying to say you're a good teacher. 
And I learned something."
"My pleasure," said Jim.
"Hope so," said Mitchell, smiling, meeting
Jim's eyes again.
Time didn't stop.  The class period
went on normally, and Mitchell didn't suddenly turn into the perfect student,
either.  But weeks later, whenever he thought of Mitchell, it was
that unguarded smile Jim saw in his mind, like a reference picture in a
database.
 
*****
December, Jim's Junior Year
***
Jim saw Ruth when their schedules allowed
- not much during the last month of the semester.  When he thought
of her, which was often, especially when he lay in bed at night or in the
morning, he had dozens of little glimpses of her in his mind: her face
in repose and amusement and arousal, the back of her neck when she wore
her hair pulled up, the shape of her body against the light, her gesture
as she pushed her hair back or reached for his hand or came close and looked
up for a kiss.  The way she let her arms and legs go just anywhere
when he was finger-fucking her.  The way her throat looked, stretched
out, when he glanced up from licking her.  The way her face changed
while he rode her to orgasm.
Yet - it was strange - he kept thinking
of Mitchell at odd times, laughing at something and wondering if Gary would
think it was funny, hearing a Garylike tone in someone's voice, walking
on the Academy grounds and catching a glimpse of someone that might be
Gary, but wasn't.  Once the resemblance was so close Jim caught up
with the other cadet before he realized he was looking at a stranger. 
And even off campus - in a restaurant or on the street - suddenly Jim thought
he saw Mitchell and turned and looked, and it never was, and Jim never
learned.
It was going to be a relief to go home
for the winter break, if he could leave that behind, though it was hard
to go away from Ruth when they'd had so few weeks as a couple and so little
time together lately.  He called her the night before the flight to
Iowa was scheduled;  his suitcases were already sitting by the door
of his dorm room.  After some chat, Jim said, "I'll miss you. 
I'll call you from home, OK?"
"I'm staying with some relatives for the
holidays," she said.  She pulled a long curl that lay over her shoulder,
and let it spring back, and then did it again.
"For how long, which days?"  He was
leaning toward the screen, he realized, and sat back.  "Call me on
Christmas Day?  Or anytime."
"I'll call," she smiled.  "And I got
your present.  Thank you, I love them.  Lilac and rose! 
My favorite scents.  I'll burn them and think of you."
"Well, they're not very seasonal, I guess.
But as long as you're thinking of me."  He grinned at her, thought
of holding her, said, "I'd rather remind you personally."
She reached out and put just the tips of
her fingers on the screen.  "When you get back," she said softly.
He'd barely cut the connection when he
got an incoming call, and it was his mother.  "Jim," she said, half
distracted, "Jim, honey, I have bad news."
He swallowed, mind racing, and said, "What?"
"Mom," she said, "my mother, Grandma, she's
been working at the Seattle Cultural Exchange, you know, and she got some
weird fever thing, and she didn't even tell me right away! 
I didn't know 'til now and she might have died!"
"Mom," he said.  "Mom."
She closed her mouth and took a deep breath. 
"OK."  Another one.  "Sorry, honey.  She's been really sick. 
They had to bring in somebody from Starfleet, actually: it's one of those
offworld things.  And she and practically everyone she's ever met
was in quarantine.  But now that's over.  She's still weak, though. 
She shouldn't be by herself . . . she needs me. And, honey, it's awful,
you'll be alone . . . "
"Don't worry about me, Mom.  Really. 
I'll call the dorm people.  I'll just stay here."
"Would you rather?  You could come
home anyway, would you like that?"
Jim thought about kicking around the empty
farmhouse, practically snowed in, alone.  "I'd rather stay here,"
he said honestly, "since Sam and Aurelan aren't there either, but what
about the horses?"
"Kevin will board them for us.  He's
got space now."
"And he'd do anything for you, Mom," he
teased.  Their neighbor's crush on his mother was a running joke in
the family.
She just wrinkled her nose at him and then
frowned anxiously again.  "I wish there was room for you in
the Seattle house."
"There's not.  I understand. 
Hey, I can get really caught up, staying here."
Her eyes narrowed.  "You're not really
caught up?  Oh, Jim, I don't believe you."
He grinned.  "You're right." 
She rolled her eyes.  "Um, I can get started early.  I can -
" he told her the real reason - "I can spend some serious time with my
girlfriend.  Ruth."
"Ruth."  A patented Mom moment. 
She meant, 'who is this person?  Are you serious about her? 
Why haven't I heard her name before?  Will I like her?'
"Yeah."  He smiled.  "Ruth." 
He wasn't ready to answer those questions yet.
And twenty minutes later, when he had talked
to Ruth again, he was less ready to answer them than ever.  Ruth had
been standoffish.  No, she couldn't see him tomorrow:  she was
working late.  No, she was leaving town herself in only a few days,
and would be away until New Year's Eve or New Year's Day.  "You didn't
say it was such a long visit," Jim said.  But now he came to think
of it, she hadn't said it was a short one.
"Well, that's how long it is," she answered,
sounding a little irritated.  "It's all arranged."  Then, just
as he was feeling like a teenaged fool, tagging after an older woman, she
sighed and softened.  "Jim, darling, I'm just so frustrated. 
I want to see you more.  I wish I was going to be in
town.  Look, I'll call.  I'll call every night."
The whole conversation left an odd taste
in his mouth.  Afterwards he sat looking at the suitcases, knowing
he should unpack them but not very interested in doing it.  But if
he didn't, what would he do?
He went for a walk.
There was practically no one around. 
He supposed a lot of people had left already, or were just indoors. 
Digging his hands into the pockets of his jacket, he walked through the
Academy gardens as if he were doing some sort of assignment, stalking along
the paths and across the little footbridge, in and out of the pools of
light left by the big Japanese lanterns hovering over the bushes and pruned-down
trees.  It was just barely  foggy, and every lantern had a shimmering
halo around it.  He slowed down.  It really was pretty. On the
second footbridge, he stopped altogether and looked for the koi, but they
must have been asleep.  He stood for a while, watching the light dance
on the surface of the water as the breeze moved it.
Then the movement of the water changed,
and he heard a pattering on the leaves of the trees, and then felt the
same rhythm on his head, the nape of his neck, and the backs of his hands. 
It was raining.
He still didn't want to go back to the
dorm, and didn't want to think about what a bad omen that was for the rest
of the break.
The campus pub was closer anyway.
It rained harder and harder, stroking the
hair down against his scalp, tapping his shoulders through his shirt and
jacket.  He ran for a while, but then walked again, realizing that
no matter what he did he was basically going to end up wringing wet. 
Scents rose from every bank of greenery he passed, evergreen here and some
green spice there, and petunias, and marigolds, and wet cedar chips. 
In Iowa, he'd only smell the humidity in the air like this in summertime,
or anyway no earlier than March or April.  He enjoyed the smells,
but the wind struck cold once he was wet.  And he was soaked through
by the time he reached the pub.  As he stood dripping inside the door
he found that the bartender had put out a stack of soft recycled-fiber
towels for people to use.  He wiped down his hair and face and, once
his jacket was hung up, squeezed as much water as he could out of the shoulders
of his shirt, then tossed the towel into the barrel with the other used
ones and went to the bar.
The wind had chilled him so that he ordered
the seasonal special, called wassail but basically a hot fruit punch, no
alcohol.  He got the tall glass mug, garnished with a Christmassy-looking
green sprig of something he hoped wasn't poisonous - so few people knew
this stuff and somebody might think eating it was funny - and carried it
away from the bar.  The pub wasn't crowded but it was busy enough
to have a comfortable hum of voices and occasionally laughter in the background,
which beat being alone.  A couple of people he knew looked up as he
passed and waved or smiled, but they were all involved in the groups or
couples they'd come in.  He stopped at the jukebox on his way to the
booth near the door where he liked to sit, especially when he was here
alone, and chose a couple of recordings with nice saxophone riffs in them.
About to sit down, he reached up to change
the angle of the lampshade so the light wouldn't glare in his eyes, when
he heard a familiar voice saying, "Whoa, huh," and looked up to see that
yes, this time it really was Gary Mitchell.  He was as wringing wet
as Jim had been, and now stood shaking his head and his hands to scatter
the water everywhere.  Had the rain stood out in beads in Jim's hair
too, or was it the spiky shortness of Gary's that let it do that? 
And on his face.  And - Gary looked down at his wet shirt, then up
at the bar - raindrops spangled in his eyelashes, catching the light like
glitter.  Jim was frozen, body suspended above the table, for the
time it took Gary to wipe his eyes, then down his face, then see the towels
and reach for them.  Jim wanted to tell him to let the rain stay,
but smiled to himself instead and sat.
Perhaps it was the movement that caught
Gary's eye:  when he had dried himself and come in, he stopped beside
Jim's booth.  "Lieutenant Kirk," he said.
"Oh, the class is over," said Jim. 
"Don't call me Lieutenant."
"What then?  Cadet?  James?"
"Not if you're being friendly.  Jim."
"Jim."  He smiled.  "I see you
got caught in the rain too."
"Oh, yeah.  I'm just sitting here
dripping and trying to warm up."
Gary gestured toward Jim's wassail, an
unusual sideways swipe of his whole hand that Jim didn't remember seeing
before.  "That help?"
"I don't know," Jim said.  "I just
got here, so I haven't tried it yet."
Gary examined it critically.  "I think
I'll let you make this experiment."
Jim looked again.  The liquid was
cherry-candy red, an unlikely enough color even without the green sprig
to set it off.  "The plant life is probably synthesized," he said.
"Oh, good," Gary said.  "Now
I'm completely reassured."  And then he paused just long enough, so
that Jim had summoned up his bravado and picked up the mug to take a sip,
and then Gary said, "Uh, Jim?  You don't drink the plant life part."
Jim snorted, and set the mug down with
a thud, and snatched his hand away as the punch splashed onto his knuckles. 
It was still hot.  He was sure he wasn't really burned, but he shook
his hand and glared at Gary anyway.
"Look, are you at least going to sit down?"
Jim asked, and immediately wondered if it was the right thing to do. 
It was only a couple of days ago he'd still been Gary's instructor, after
all.
"Yes, sir," said Gary, dropping
onto the opposite seat at once.  "Seated, sir!"
"Rub it in," Jim said, not stopping to
wonder whether Gary would know what he was talking about.  Gary's
grin said Jim was right to take understanding for granted.
It had been quite a while since Jim had
had a friend like that, not counting Lillian.  And that was more important,
surely, than the way the rain had hung on Gary's eyelashes, especially
since Jim had a girlfriend.
Some time later, Gary was still on the
other side of the table, both of them dry now and in the middle of a fairly
intense discussion of commercial-release holovids, of which Gary seemed
to have encyclopedic knowledge and for which he apparently felt nothing
but contempt.
"OK, OK," Jim said at last, "But tell me,
if Heintz and Mori and Patel are all so god-awful, why have you seen all
their vids?"
Gary hesitated, then smiled slowly, and
Jim's breath caught a little but he didn't really think about it. 
"Got to have something to talk to people about," he said at last.
"Right," said Jim.  "Sure."
"Sure," Gary agreed.  "Because, after
all . . . if we weren't talking about vids, what would we be doing?"
For a moment, the conversation could have
turned, was about to be a pick-up, and Jim took a quicker breath and then
sat back and got hold of himself.  He still couldn't allow himself
to flirt with Gary Mitchell.  Bad idea.  Very bad.
"Playing cards," he said firmly.
Gary answered easily, "OK, right," as if
he really had been asking for suggestions.  "Piquet?  Mao? 
Centaurus?  Pinochle?  Tarock?  Cribbage?"
Jim chose, "Cribbage, if there's a board."
There was, of course, at the bar. 
Gary was an uncanny card-player.  He shuffled with fancy bridges,
the cards seeming to leap from hand to hand, and what he didn't plan for
in the play wasn't worth scoring on.
Jim needed some points badly, or he was
going to be skunked, and he didn't want to let that happen.  He frowned
down at his hand.  A four, a five, a six, a seven, an eight, and a
jack.  Gary's crib.  Jim picked out two cards and counted; 
a different two cards and counted;  stared at the whole hand again.
"Hullo?  Jim?" asked Gary at last. 
"Um, the whole fate of the universe doesn't exactly hang on what you throw
into my crib."
"Uh-huh," Jim said absently.  But
it was time to give up;  there was no really good throw; 
he put in the seven and the eight, giving Gary two points.
He thought.  When Jim had counted
his hand (and gotten past the skunk hole, thank goodness) and Gary came
to count the crib, he turned over the cards and had two sevens and two
eights.  Twelve points.
"It's like you knew what I would
put into it," Jim said.
Gary shrugged.  "I’m good at guessing
that kind of thing.  Fat lot of good it's ever done me."
"You mean you don’t play for money?"
"Oh, that, yeah, sometimes.  Poker." 
He pushed the cards together, tapped the deck on the table to even out
the edges.  His hands were graceful.  "Poker's work, not play." 
He pushed the deck across the table for Jim.
"You've been playing with the wrong crowd." 
Jim took the deck and shuffled it, just for the feel of the cards since
the cribbage game was over.
"What do you mean?"  Gary's voice
was sharp;  Jim realized he'd done it again, sounded like the Ben
Finneys of the Academy.  The wrong crowd.  He could have kicked
himself.
"I mean if you play with people who take
it too seriously, it's not fun."  He made his voice ordinary, just
answering the question.
"Oh," said Gary.  He was watching
Jim shuffle.  Jim was watching him watch.
This, it dawned on him, was a mistake. 
He put the cards down, surprising himself with the sharp sound they made
hitting the table.  Gary's eyes flicked up.  "Well, are
we playing again?" asked Jim.
"Don't you want to win one?"
Nobody had ever had to ask Jim Kirk that
twice.  "Sure," he said.  He shuffled again and dealt, eyes on
his own fingers and the cards, glancing only when he really couldn't help
it at the broad strong hands moving the pegs back to the beginning of the
board, adjusting its position, resetting its timer, picking up the cards
as Jim tossed them to him.
"Why are you still here?" asked Gary as
he moved cards around his hand.
"Family thing," said Jim, "No room at the
inn this year."
Gary just looked, but Jim didn't want to
explain.  "Sorry," Gary said, his voice the gentlest Jim had ever
heard it.
"You?" asked Jim.  They cut the cards.
"I'm living near here."  Gary paused,
then played.  "Eight."
"Fifteen two," said Jim, and moved his
peg.
"Lucky seven."
Something in Gary's voice alerted Jim,
and he stared, and then said, "You knew I had it."
Gary shrugged.  "Just a guess."
"But you said you could guess things like
that.  I bet you trust your guesses.  You gave me those points."
Gary looked away.
"Don't do it."
Gary laughed a little, still looking out
of the booth.  "I'm not very good at doing favors."
"Do me this one," said Jim.  "Don't
hand me stuff."
"OK," said Gary, and paused, and then changed
his tone.  "You know what I really can't guess at all?  Darts."
"Let's do it, then."  And Jim reached
over and took the cards from Gary's hand, pulled the ones lying on the
table in toward him and pushed them together.  Gary took care of the
board again, turning off the timer and pushing the pegs into their separate
crannies.  They walked together to the bar and got the darts. 
And Jim did win that game - fairly, he thought.
Being carefully fair to each other was
not the brightest prospect Jim could think of.  On the other hand,
the semester break was certainly looking less bleak.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

*****
December, Jim's Junior Year, continued
***
After the night they played cribbage and
darts at the campus pub, Jim ran into Gary fairly frequently;  then
they began to arrange meetings - Jim still didn't know where Gary was staying
for the semester break, but Gary could easily reach him through the Academy
system, and did.  Jim did some research for next semester, puttered
over some practice command simulations and studied his plasma physics and
starship specs, which he could always use more time on.  When Ruth
called - not every day - it was late in the afternoon, so Jim had most
evenings free to spend with Gary.
Jim liked Gary, his sense of humor, his
charisma, his intelligence and the wide-ranging things he knew about. Every
card game ever invented, it seemed like.  How the fasttrains worked. 
Where to buy unusual things for not much money.  They both enjoyed
running and boxing, and they were pretty evenly matched.  Gary, being
taller, outreached Jim, but Jim was more agile.  They watched and
discussed holovids, and Jim learned not to tease Gary about his fascination
with them, since he never would admit to liking one.
The campus pub couldn't keep them occupied
for long, and they began leaving the Academy grounds to find a club or
a game room.  Gary knew night spots off the beaten path, and Jim didn't
ask how he found out which of them would serve probationary-drinking age customers. They
never seemed to run into anyone Gary knew, though.  And Jim found
out that Gary had a temper, but never could really tell what was setting
him off.  One night when they were at a new holovid release, Gary
just suddenly stalked out, and when Jim followed, wouldn't tell him why. 
"If you have to ask!" he said scathingly, and . . . well, Jim had needed
to, so he just shut up.  At a bar one night, Gary went to get a second
round of beers - the next thing Jim knew, Gary was shouting at the bartender,
and Jim never found out what that was about either, though he had to drag
Gary away before the bouncer threw them out.
He never gave Jim points in anything again. 
On the contrary.  When they ran together, Gary always had to be a
few paces ahead, and when they boxed, his eyes were as flat as if Jim were
a stranger, or even an enemy.  They tried unarmed combat practice
together only once, and Jim found himself on his back, throat in Gary's
hands - Jim's head knocked twice against the floor, connecting solidly
even through the mat, and then Gary backed off as if he'd set a destruct
sequence to go off right away.
Jim rolled up on one elbow and coughed.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Gary was saying
from the edge of the mat, and Jim wasn't sure how often he'd already said
it.
"OK," he rasped out when he could. 
"Bout over."
"Yeah, sure - Jim, you're OK, right? 
God, I'm sorry, you're really OK?"
"Yeah."  But his neck and skull hurt
for quite a while.
On Christmas, of course, he didn't see
Gary.  He did spend a lot of time at the computer, on and off, amusing
his grandmother, who as an old-fashioned nethead loved to set up what they
used to call a chatroom, and get friends and family into it.  Jim
read, and tapped his keypad, and tried to keep it all straight in his mind,
wondering why they couldn't just comm each other like normal people. 
"Silver Terror," his grandmother called herself for the chatroom. 
Jim wished he and Gary could laugh about that right now.
He read/wrote:
silver terror says it was Rigellian
fever, one of u Starfleet types brought it here i spose
Winona56 says  I don't think
you've seen the guest rm since redecoration
silver terror says funny, none
of the xchange guests had it
JTiberius says  Starfleet
types?  *Starfleet* types?
Winona56 says its a serious thing,
mom, you could hv died
silver terror says guest rm's the
same tiny closet
Winona56 says and you still can't
climb the stairs I don't think yr fine
JTiberius says  anyway that's
serious, grandma, now dont run around doing too much
silver terror saysthought about
taking a chunk out of my bedrm but the automated bed
Winona56 says she just blames everything
on starfleet Jim you know (g)
JTiberius says grandma where are
u sleeping if yr not going upstairs?
silver terror says takes up too
much space.  guess u coulda stayed in there 2
Winona56 says actually we moved
the guest bed down and Im in hers
silver terror saysbut i bet yr
happier where u are.  how's the girlfriend?
JTiberius says  down the stairs? 
Who?
Winona56 says how are you Jim are
you happy?
silver terror says tell us about
her
Winona56 says mom's friends from
the ex program, don't worry
JTiberius says  I'm fine,
mom, there are some other cadets staying and Im spending time w/ them
silver terror says oh pshaw stop
*worrying* I'm not silly yet
Winona56 says isn't Lillian in
town too?
JTiberius says  Her name is
Ruth but she's out of town for awhile
JTiberius says  no Lil's not
in town either for a few days
silver terror says I knew her *name*
but what is she like
Winona56 says poor sweetie you
said you'd be able to spend time with her!
Winona56 says i'm so sorry
silver terror says I remember Lil
how is she?
JTiberius says  I'll see Ruth
when she gets back.  oh grandma how can I describe her?  Blonde,
beautiful, sweet, nice voice, had enough yet?
Winona56 says and Lil too! 
I hope yr not lonely
JTiberius says  Mom please
cut it out, you had to go
silver terror says it is a little
much, doesn't she have some human error?
JTiberius says  Lil was good
the last time i saw her.
Winona56 says sorry whenever i'm
with mom she sucks up all the sarcasm in the air
silver terror says i've bn *telling*
yr mom to lighten up
JTiberius says  human error? 
Nope.  She's an angel.  Dimples.
Winona56 says and i just turn into
this limp rag.  I'll try to be better.
silver terror says Dimples!
silver terror says I ask you!
Winona56 says she certainly sounds
pretty
JTiberius says  yes dimples,
right around her mouth
silver terror says whatever happened
to that boy u used to go around w/?
Winona56 says oh *mom*
JTiberius says  don't sound
so doubtful mom
Winona56 says you're always teasing
him
JTiberius says  she's a tech
at the SerChemo labs
silver terror says the one with
the irish name and the sense of humor
Winona56 says MOM!
JTiberius says FINNEGAN? 
Grandma are you crazy?
JTiberius says he beat me up!
Winona56 says I think I told her,
Jim, but i never said you were friends
silver terror says u know what
they say about repressed attraction
Winona56 says much less a couple
silver terror says yr just so soppy
with girls, Jim
JTiberius says Im nauseous, I'll
be sick - Finnegan!
silver terror says always have
been
JTiberius says youve gone so *beyond*,
grandma
Winona56 says & thats so bad
for the keypad
silver terror says (snort)
Winona56 says sorry, don't know
what came over me
JTiberius says *mom*  - what
was that about Grandma getting all the sarcasm?
silver terror says look heres my
real pt.  dont sit around feeling sorry for yrself,
silver terror says find a new girl
or a new boy and have a good time or i really am gonna feel guilty.
JTiberius says no im too busy to
feel sorry for myself
silver terror says go out for Nyrs,
k?  on the town, on me.  i'll send credits.  take Lil if
yr really being faithful to ms dimples.
The number of credits she actually sent
seemed astronomical to Jim.  "Am I flying to Paris?" he asked when
they were (finally) on the comm together.  She laughed, still not
the full grandma-bray he'd been hearing his whole life, but obviously happy.
"If you want, but then you really have
to tell me all about it."
"I'll ask Lil where she wants to go. 
If she hasn't already got plans."
Grandma wrinkled her nose, ordinarily the
only part of her face that wasn't wrinkled.  "Lil's the best you
can do?"
"I thought I might take out a group. 
For this, I could take out half the junior class if they were here."
She laughed again.  It really did
bother him a little, how much she'd sent, but it obviously didn't bother
her.
He wanted to ask Gary.  Not as a date,
as a friend. But all those credits, the extravagant time his grandmother
expected him to have, were actually an inhibition.  He had a feeling
that Gary's own family income wasn't too high, and he wasn't sure how to
say, come to this expensive place with me and let me pay.
Jim left a message for Lillian, to start
with, knowing he could be completely frank with her:  "Grandma sent
me untold wealth and told me to have a grand New Year's Eve.  And
she says how are you.  And I say, what are you doing the 31st? 
Got a date?  Decided a place?  Let me know."
She caught him out too - one of life's
unchanging verities, that people were never home to take the good calls. 
"Lil here - I lost my date, remember?  But I still have a reservation
at the Metreon's Reboot-Millenium bash, wanna go?  Bring your light-sensitive
eye-shade, they've got technobeams and all, totally unmedically cleared,
the same stuff they did in 1999.  Your grandma would love it. 
Pity she can't come.  Shall we pick people up there or get someone
lined up as a date beforehand?"
"Yes," said Jim, perversely without explanation,
in his return message.  "I will.  She would.  She can't. 
Whatever.  Let's try to talk live, get the number straight, change
the reservation."
He left a more user-friendly message for
Ruth, in case she did get back in time.  Now he had to find a way
to ask Gary.
He was still wondering how six hours later,
sitting
in the red-leather, brass-tacked, mirrored splendor of Gary's latest favorite
bar.  He and Gary had picked up two women who had come to the bar together. They were sitting in a booth
chatting and drinking wine, trying to be classy.
"It's sour for a good white," said the one sitting next to Jim, looking at the glass she'd been sipping from.  She had introduced
herself as Miss Jones and didn't seem very eager to share her first name,
or her personal space.  Gary's girl, Sondra, was already snuggled
up to him, taking up about half the booth seat for both of them. 
Both girls' hair was straightened, but while Miss Jones wore hers down
in a kind of pageboy against skin almost as dark, Sondra's was streaked
with red and brushed up into a pompadour, from which a few shorter
pieces of hair had come loose and were sticking out.  When she sat
up straight, one of these obviously tickled Gary, and once it made him
sneeze.  Jim would have laughed at that moment, but with his own Miss
Icicle beside him he didn't feel in a position to tease Gary.
"I want to see if they've got anything
better," said Miss Jones now, and turned to Jim, now improbably kittenish
and vulnerable.  "Come with me?  They might get mad."
Jim didn't dare look at Gary, but let Miss
Jones take his hand and tug him out of the booth.  At the bar, among
colored lights and even more mirrors, she seemed to relax at last, and
didn't even call the bartender over.
"All right," he said after a moment, "what
was that all about?"
She looked sideways at him under long,
red-tinted lashes.  Probably false.  "Sondra's my sister," she
said, "my big sister, and I just can't get comfortable with a man while
she's watching."
"Comfortable with a man," he repeated. 
The phrase sounded so false.
"Yes," she said, blinking slowly, then
more quickly.  "I haven't . . . done this much before."
Jim wasn't sure what made him look again,
really look, at the sharp jawline where the wing of black hair brushed
it. . . the shape of the hands lying dark against the synthesized quartz
of the bar . . . the bony wrists poking out of the soft fuzzy sweater.
. . the long throat and its adam's apple.  Then, realizing she was trans, he thought about the uncertain body language and awkward joints, like a child's.
"Look, how old are you really?"
Miss Jones raised brown eyes gone wide
and startled.  "Fifteen."
"How did you think you'd buy wine? Or was I supposed to buy it?" He saw her embarrassment and went on, "I usually date people older than I am, but you're so much younger . . . I'm sorry, I don't want to be a jerk, but." He shook his head.
She shrugged. "I just wanted to practice, really. And I meant it about the wine."

"Then let's call the bartender," Jim said. 
He waved down the bar, and a man in a white coat nodded back.  Jim asked about fruit juices, and chose a mango for himself. Miss Jones wanted hers to look like a cocktail, so she debated mixes and garnishes with the bartender. For Sondra, they got a half-bottle with a heavy scent, like a fruit smoothie with perfume in it. The bartender called what they'd been drinking "tourist wine," and that
amused Jim, seeing that it had been Gary who ordered it for them.  So he bought another glass of it for him.
At their table, Jim said, "Miss Jones and I are drinking juice," right to the knowing
smirk on Gary's face that said he knew now, if he hadn't known before. "And Sondra, here's what your sister got for you.""Ooh," Sondra said as she smelled the bouquet,
"Jackie!  My favorite!  Thank you, I didn't even know they had
it!"
"You've never learned the name of it,"
said Jackie Jones, gruffly but with a little smile.
After that, conversation in the booth flowed
more easily.  And Sondra sat about six inches away from Gary, so there
was no more sneezing.  Jackie told them about wine, with extra information
about the best vineyard tours, and it was actually interesting.  An
hour or two later, Sondra gave her comm code to Gary, but insisted on seeing
Jackie home.  Gary and Jim handed them into a cab - with a live driver,
yet - and when Gary turned back to him, still shaking his head, something
in his expression made Jim lean against the wall of the bar and grin even though he was irritated at the way he'd been dealt the underage girl.
"When did you know how young . . . " Jim began.
"Sondra with her candy wine? Barely probationary to drink it. And Miss was the younger."Jim shook his head. "What if they'd checked us? I get checked all the time.""For your angel face," Gary said, grinning but looking like he meant it, too. "Sure," but Jim's response wasn't jokey enough either.

Later, on their way home, Jim suddenly realized he was staring at Gary's mouth, and decided that rather than jump him in the back of the muni on the narrow plastic bench seat (because he had a girlfriend, damn it), he might as well take the other plunge.
"Hey, you want to ask Sondra out for New Year's Eve?"
Gary asked, "What are you talking about?"
"My grandmother sent me this . . . present,
and she told me to take some friends out for New Year's.  Lillian,
you know, I've mentioned her, she's coming, maybe with a date.  She
chose the place.  The Metreon."
"Your grandmother give a lot to charity?"
Sharp, that voice, cutting, though it wasn't loud.
"Mitchell . . . " Jim began, then realized
he didn't really have anything in mind to say.  "Never mind. 
Just a thought."
They rode in silence for a while, the atmosphere
so stiff that Jim thought even Miss Jones would have been a more comfortable
companion.
"Why did you ask me?"  Gary's voice
was still angry.
"Because I wanted to be with my friends
at New Year's," Jim answered as simply as he could.  He was miffed
himself, but held on to his temper, remembering that he had anticipated
a reaction like this.
There was another silence, though a shorter
one.
"I don't want to be a pig about it," Gary
said at last, more calmly this time.
"You're doing a fine imitation," said Jim,
but smiled.  "And I'm a farm boy, so I know a pig when I smell one."
Gary shoved him in the shoulder, almost
exactly the way Jim himself might shove Lillian if she said a thing like
that.  Jim relaxed, and ventured to say, "If you don't come and help
me spend these credits, I'll have to buy Jackie Jones a pearl necklace
to use them up."
"And lie to your grandmother?"
Actually, Jim thought his grandmother would
find Jackie Jones very interesting, but he said to Gary, "So help me out."
Another pause.  Nothing more Jim could
do.  Gary would take the gift or turn it down.
"I'll come, but I don't know about Sondra."
"Good."  Jim was so relieved he reached
out and caught at Gary's sleeve. And then, recovering, he let go and sat
back at his end of the seat. "Good."
 
*****
New Year's Eve
***
The Metreon, from the outside, looked exactly
like the kind of building that made people say, 'Oh, what a perfect 20th
century survival!' though Jim never understood why that was wonderful. 
This building looked blockish and unbalanced to him. The party being replicated
- sort of - was the 1999 gay ball called the Mondo-Millenium;  afterward
the whole building would be available for public use except the big-screen
flatvid thing, still being restored.  Lillian told Jim all this on
the way there, but Jim just couldn't see what all the fuss was about.
But he was surprised at the wild, almost
alien curves and angles that met his eyes inside, and the way the glossy
wood and the white plastic panels and the metal struts, pipes, and grilles
went together in their daffy postmodern way.  And the air of excitement
and pleasure that the whole crowd gave off was as intoxicating as the champagne
that was just everywhere he looked.  He was handed a glass almost
as soon as they got in the door and turned down two others while he was
still carrying the plastic flute, nearly untouched.
"I take it," he murmured to Lillian, "we're
all supposed to be of age here."
"Nobody asked me when I reserved the table,"
she said, clutching her date's hand as if she was afraid the girl would
bolt into the crowd.  Sumiko, her name was.  Gary and Sondra
were behind them.
Jim hadn't, in the end, brought a date
himself.  Maybe Ruth would come after all;  maybe he'd find another
single person in the crowd milling in front of him; or maybe he'd just
be with his friends, which after all had been the main point of the evening. 
That, and spending Grandma's credits.  And that was easy.  The
tickets alone had put a sizable hole in Grandma's credit chip.  And
Lillian, when she revamped the reservations, hadn't skimped on anything.
They had a table near the dance floor,
an area called the Night Kitchen, the small stage for the live band towered
over by huge cartoon characters dressed as chefs.  The dance floor
was edged with all kinds of light equipment, and Jim really wanted to get
a look at it, to see if it was really antique or reproduced, but nobody
was allowed:  there were security staff members beside every installation. 
The light itself was phaser-bright but intermittent, tied into the music
somehow, changing color, flashing.  They could scarcely see the plates
of old-style hors-d'oeuvres:  little sausages wrapped in pastry, tiny
smudges of pate on crisp wafers, edible straws filled with some sort of
soft cheese, and all sorts of other unlikely finger food.  Crayfish. 
Snails.  The weirdest were little orange puff things - he thought
they were orange - that when he pinched one, turned out to be the consistency
of insulation foam.  None of it was anything Jim had ever eaten before,
he thought, or if he had, it hadn't looked like that.  And the champagne
just kept coming.  There was supposed to be non-alcoholic stuff somewhere
but everything Jim tasted was . . . not non-alcoholic.  Which was,
on the whole, OK with him.
They'd hired the clothes they were wearing,
and Jim had taken care to get fladvids of all of them as they milled around
before leaving Lillian's place;  he knew that his grandmother would
be dying to see them.  Lil was dressed warp-fast, in a short-skirted
outfit with wild long fringe.  It was more 1920s than 1999, but Jim
didn't have the heart to say anything.  Usually Lillian went more
butch, and it was fun just looking at her with color on her eyelids and
cheeks and earrings dripping from her ears.  She had to stop pulling
on her neckline, though.  Jim made a mental note to tell her.
Sumiko was wearing what would have been
a formal kimono if it hadn't been so short, which made it look weirdly
like an exercise wrap with trailing sleeves in too-gaudy silk.  Jim
was grateful Zelda was still not among the mentionable.  He didn't
even want to know what she would have looked like - or acted like, once
she'd gotten wrapped around some of this champagne.  At least Sumi
was friendly.  She kissed Lil's cheek when they got back from one
of their dances, a gesture Jim couldn't remember Zelda making the whole
time he'd known her.  Jim approved, though he was afraid moving too
fast would spook Lillian.
Sondra was draped in a lot of gauzy bits
that kept threatening to simply float up and show whatever they were theoretically
covering.  When Jim danced with her, a fast whirling kind of dance,
he realized the whole dress was less precarious than it looked, which was
sort of disappointing.
Jim did a lot of dancing, a certain amount
of talking, ate in a gingerly way if the stuff didn't seem too strange,
and drank sparingly, not wanting to get sloppy in front of - well, anyone. 
The hired clothes were another reason not to get out of control. 
The shop clerk had said it was a tuxedo, but Jim had balked at the cut
of the jacket and that sash thing, so he was just in shirt-sleeves. 
He was glad, though he noticed that some other people were wearing the
whole ensemble and it didn't look as ridiculous as he had thought. 
But the room was warm despite its high ceilings and moving air, and he'd
folded his cuffs back as it was and opened the collar.
Gary had insisted on wearing his own, dark-colored,
soberly cut clothes, and perhaps he'd meant to be unobtrusive.  Instead,
the sheer understated sexiness of his snug half-sleeves and v-neck stood
out against all their peacock colors and crazy styles.  Sondra kept
running her hand along Gary's bare forearm, too, or playing with the hair
at the back of his neck, so she obviously felt the outfit was a success.
Late in the evening, when Jim and Lillian
were just back from a dance set and everyone was disheveled and flushed,
Lil turned to Jim with mischief in her face.  "You've danced with
strangers, and you've danced with me," she said, enunciating carefully,
"and you've danced with Sumi, and you've danced with Sondra, but you haven't
danced with Gary."  She was standing behind Gary, and waggled his
shoulder back and forth.  "It's very rude, isn't it, Gary?"
Sondra looked on with a half-smile that
Jim didn't quite like.  There was a pause of a few seconds, and then
Gary said, "If you want to?" and stood, looking down at Jim as if he were
the reluctant one.
"Sure," Jim said.
As they walked away from the table, Jim
said, "OK, what's the hitch?" knowing there must be one.
"I can't dance," said Gary.  "I never
learned.  Sondra and I went up to that Wild Things place and just
walked around there."
"How did you get out of it?"  Jim
asked.  "I would have given a lot at the time.  Even being homeschooled
after . . . I was 14, even that didn't get me out of going to dance class."
Gary didn't answer.  They walked together
through darkness shot with glare, spots and flashes and lines of colored
light moving away from and back to the improvised stage.  The windows
from floor to ceiling on the patio-side pulsed with the reflections. 
In the dark times blacklight found Jim's shirt and made him feel like a
beacon.  Music shrilled, growled, shook their bones, and came up through
their feet.  They stood at the edge of the dance floor to watch the
gyrating bodies, not trying to speak.  The song stopped, and some
people left the floor and others went on to it.  When the music started
again, it was much more subdued, woodwind and drum and bell sounds. 
Jim recognized it as an Andorian circle dance for pairs.  "Try this,
it's just walking in a circle, I promise.  Come on, surprise Sondra."
Again a pause before Gary said, "OK."
Jim walked onto the dance floor and held
out his hand to Gary.  "Like shaking hands."  And then as Gary's
hand came to meet his, he caught it in both his:  "Hold my wrist,
like this," grasping the handful of Gary's bone.  Jim let his other
hand drop;  Gary's fingers closed around Jim's wrist, warm, and of
course covering more skin than Lil's or the other women's.  "Now walk
with the drum-beat," said Jim, raising his voice a little to carry over
the sound, "and I'll tell you when we switch directions."
The lights flashed and moved, increasing
speed slowly, making everything throb in time with the music. "Don't look
at your feet," said Jim, "please."  Gary raised his head, but his
face was blank, as far as Jim could see it in the moving waves and lines
of color.  His hand on Jim's skin was neutral too.  Gary had
picked up the rhythm well - three steps faster, one slower, three faster
again - and began at last to relax into the movement, so Jim did too, and
smiled.  Gary's eyes flicked past Jim to the other couples dancing.
"OK, change hands," Jim said.
They did, with only a slight fumble, and
walked in the other direction.  "Well, you're right," said Gary, "it
is easy.  But we're not doing it the way the others are."
"No," said Jim, a little embarrassed, "but
I wanted you to get the hang of the steps first."  He slid his hand
up Gary's arm now as they walked, and Gary did the same, as the other couples
had already been doing, so that as they walked faster they also drew closer
together.  Jim was very aware of the hair under his fingers, the smooth
skin under his palm;  of Gary's hand, ruffling the hair on his own
arm and warming his own skin;  of Gary's face and body nearer with
every circle they walked.
"Change hands," he said as he touched the
crook of Gary's elbow.
They did, back at the wrists again, and
Gary smiled for the first time since they had left the table.  "I
get it," he said, and this time he was the one to slide his hand along
Jim's arm, just that little bit, then more, and Jim followed until they
held each other's elbows and circled almost too closely to keep their steps
apart.  In the dim colored light Gary's eyes were too dark to read,
nearly too dark to see, but his pale skin was luminescent, and when he
smiled, his teeth caught the lights in blue flashes, like Jim's shirt did.
And again they changed hands, and again
slid warm palms along each other's skin, and Jim remembered that Andorians
considered this dance too intimate for anyone but life-partners and family
members to do.
Then as they were closest, the music stopped
and the dance floor was almost completely dark.  Some couples, Jim
knew without looking, were kissing;  some hugging;  some stepping
quickly away.  He and Gary just stood, still gripping each other's
arms, their faces only inches apart.  The lights came up, just normal
yellow-white, and they had not moved.
"This is the free-style part," Gary said,
holding on, staring down at Jim.  "Right?"
"Yes," said Jim.
Gary touched Jim's face with the tip of
one finger, and moved it across until he reached just the corner of Jim's
mouth.
Jim was not in control.  Usually he
hated that.  If he had been in control, he would have pulled Gary's
hand from his face;  he would have moved away and found a joking comment
to make, something that friends said to each other.  He actually tried,
but his hand wouldn't grasp, just rested on Gary's.  Gary was the
one whose eyes moved, looking over Jim's head, and it was Gary who pulled
away.  His finger left Jim's cheek;  his arm left Jim's grasp; 
his body heat was gone.
Jim couldn't be disappointed, could he? 
It must have been the way Gary walked back through the crowd, faster than
Jim expected, so that he didn't keep up and other people separated them. 
In the new darkness and noise of the next dance, Jim told himself that
he wasn't disappointed, he was just disoriented, and a little dizzy from
the circling dance-steps and the champagne.
He turned, peering, trying to get his bearings
and go back to the table, but someone else grabbed him by the elbow. 
A woman's hand.  A short woman, head tilted back, he couldn't see
her properly, and then a spotlight ran past and Jim said, "Ruth!"
"Jim, darling," he thought she said, and
he put his other hand into her hair and kissed her.  It was like a
dream, the dark and the music and her body flowing into his. Not real at
all, and so he just fell into it, gathered her as close as he could and
sank into her kiss.  He played his tongue over her teeth and under
her tongue to tease her in that tender spot, and suckled her upper lip,
and kissed down to her neck, and she rubbed his back, murmuring too softly
to hear through the music.
"I missed you, I missed you," he said into
her ear, because surely that was what he was feeling.  She buried
her face in his neck.
The lights came up again, between sets,
and Jim said, "When did you get here?"
"I got your message when I got home, later
than I really planned, and just dressed up and left again.  I wanted
to be here at midnight."
Jim looked down at her composed face, and
played a little with her hair.  "I'm glad."  One hand fell to
her shoulder.  "Come on, come and meet everyone."
But she leaned back, and when he took her
arm she still wouldn't move.  "Not right now, please.  I just
want to be with you.  Isn't there somewhere . . . we can just walk
around for a little while?"
This reminded him of what Gary had said,
so Jim answered, "There is, but I'm not sure . . ."  He turned and
saw the passage into the main mall, and he and Ruth made their way out. 
They could have just walked back and forth here, but it was hardly romantic,
the lighting ordinary and the passers-by weighed down with trays and dirty
dishes. So they stopped one of the zillion waiters and asked her the way
up into the Wild Things place.
"Oh, it's darling!" Ruth said when they
saw this child's daydream of a jungle.  Walkways arched up and around;
strange beasts smiled fiercely from trapeze-like wires;  nothing was
real.  The plastic leaves were large, muting even the pin-pricked
lights of the city that reached through the vast dark windows. Jim and
Ruth walked on flat green artificial turf past gnarled, garishly painted
trunks twisting this way and that;  pillars and benches seemed to
be made of blocks of stone, but were only more plastic, painted. 
When they reached the ramped walkway, Jim put his hand on the rail and
discovered that it was not real wood either.  They both looked around
for a moment.
"Cute monsters," said Ruth.  Then
they climbed the ramp, farther into the shadows, holding hands at first
but then with arms around each other's waists, ducking under artificial
vines and dodging artificial tree-branches.  Just where the walk turned,
they stepped into the far corner and could see the cityscape through the
foliage;  they stopped to look and then to kiss, and Jim ran his hands
over the body he was beginning to know so well. When he held her breasts
like this she always moved closer, into his hands, and this time she moaned
softly in her throat.  Still, after they'd necked and groped for a
while she stepped away, took his hand again and pulled him back to the
railed walk.  He followed, a little frustrated but not enough to make
an issue of it.  They went to the end of the walkway, a little platform
raised above the turf, also with a view of the city.  There they stood,
Ruth's head on Jim's shoulder, and they might have been alone, but for
the remote sound of the band and the crowd.
Suddenly, a speaker somewhere above them
coughed a little static and then amplified the voices chanting in the Night
Kitchen:  "Ten . . . Nine . . . Eight . . . "
Jim turned Ruth to face him, cupped her
face in his hands.  "Almost midnight," he murmured to the full lips
so near his.
"Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Happy
New Year!" shouted the speaker in many voices.
Jim leaned in to kiss Ruth;  his eyes
closed, and in the dimness of the false jungle it seemed the only light
was the little sparkle behind his eyelids, a private version of the light
show on the dance floor.  How soft her lips were, how wet and giving
. . . it would be different with Gary . . . he banished the stray thought
and pressed his tongue into Ruth.  Sweet, she tasted sweet and sharp
together like the champagne punch.  The skin of her throat was smooth
in his hands.  He passed his thumbs over the nearly-hidden lump of
her adam's apple, and she swallowed reflexively.  He slid the thumbs
up to her jaw, stroked up to her ears, back into her hair.  She pushed
her body against him, rubbed a little back and forth, and just that easily
he got hard, all the stimuli of hours focussed at last.  Her hands
went down his sides, over his hips, back up to the waist of the rented
pants with their old-fashioned zipper.  He leaned back a little, breaking
the kiss, his hips forward, wild for those small fingers to find the clasp
and undo the little metal tracks and . . . "Here?" he whispered, wanting
to hear her say yes with her mouth, see it in her eyes, as well as feel
it in those creeping fingers.
And he was sure that she would, but it
was someone else's voice, below their feet somewhere, that said "Yes .
. . yes . . . " hoarsely, in a range that could have been man or woman. 
Jim and Ruth both froze.
"Now," said the voice distinctly, and it
was definitely a man.  "Take me."  Jim pulled Ruth closer and
bent his head to hide his snuffle of laughter in her hair. The other couple
must be under the platform where they stood, probably behind the fake tree
trunk that held it up.  No way to slip past them if he and Ruth wanted
to leave.  And he hated interrupting people almost as much as being
interrupted.
Ruth might have thought of the other couple
as more than erotic background noise, or not;  anyway after that first
few seconds she thrust her fingers into Jim's waistband again, her body
against his.  She opened the button at the top and fumbled with the
zipper, one hand running up and down along Jim's re-hardening cock, outlining
it through the fabric.  Waves of sensation beat through Jim and for
once he just stood still, or as still as he could, reaching back to grab
the railing behind him.  She untucked the long white tails of the
shirt, reached through the opening in his briefs and worked his erection
out into the cooler air.  Then she went down on him, and he shuddered
at the chill where she was no longer against him, the heat where her mouth
surrounded him, the friction of her hands along his thighs and her tongue
on the end of his cock.  He opened his legs, bracing himself, and
she moved closer between them, kneeling between his ankles, her breasts
just above his knees, and her hands still stroking.  She squeezed
his thighs up right below his buttocks and he thrust forward helplessly
into her mouth and she did it again.  So good.
"Ah . . .oh," said the voice, and it was
as if the other man was making the sounds Jim felt choking in his own throat,
as if the fingers teasing him and the mouth milking him were a stranger's. 
Jim swallowed, and the taste of Ruth's mouth was still faintly in his. 
He concentrated on it, savored it, felt the warm pulling, swirling, squeezing
and rode the feeling until it burst.
The bumpy texture of the railing made his
hands ache.  He was leaning way out, his head hanging back, his mouth
open though he thought he hadn't made any sound himself.  The voice
below was still grunting and moaning.  Ruth let his cock slip from
her mouth and laid her cheek against him, still holding his hips. 
He stood straighter and she kneeled back.  He put himself back into
his pants and zipped them, then knelt himself to take Ruth in his arms
again.
"Happy New Year," she whispered.
"Happy New Year," Jim repeated, his hands
running up and down her sides, her back.
"Uh!" said the voice, and then fell silent. 
After a moment there was subdued rustling, some thumps against the hollow
plastic tree.
"I think we can go now," Ruth said against
Jim's neck.
"Is that what you want?" Jim murmured.
"Yes."  So they got up.  "Tuck
in your shirt," Ruth said a little louder, and there was a renewed flurry
of sound below.  Jim had an impulse to step over to the rail, lean
over it, and say something about how much fun they'd all had.  But
the couple below was scrambling like mice surprised in the pantry, and
he didn't have the heart to embarrass them even more.
By the time he and Ruth were back on the
lower level, no one was there.
And when they reached the table, Lillian
greeted them with, "Gary took Sondra home, Jim.  They just stayed
for midnight and then they went."
Jim looked at the empty glass and crumpled
cloth napkin on the table at Gary's place and felt a surge of some feeling
he wasn't sure of, except that it wasn't good.  Then Ruth squeezed
his arm closer to her side and he pulled himself together and introduced
her.  Lillian was narrowing her eyes, trying hard to keep Ruth in
focus, but obviously not quite succeeding.  Sumi wasn't even trying,
but flashed a big smile.
Ruth sighed.  When he looked at her,
he found an odd expression on her face.  It was - yes, it was the
expression he'd seen on the faces of his primary school teachers when the
class was being unruly:  not anger, but a kind of weariness. 
For an instant, even as he moved his arm around her waist and saw her face
soften into a smile, he felt the gap in their ages and saw a time coming
when it would be each other they were tired of.  His other hand closed
on cloth and when he looked, he found himself holding Gary's napkin, and
again raw feeling overtook him.  Gary wasn't here.
Ruth was.  "Jim?" she said, as if
to prove it.  "Darling?"
He picked up the glass by its rim and said,
"Sit here, babe."  She did, and he picked up Sondra's stuff too and
put it in the middle of the table, then sat there himself, and waved at
a waiter for more champagne.  This was his party, and it wasn't over
yet.
 
*****
Interlude: Gary's POV
***
 
Gary stumbled out of bed and hit the comm
control.  The buzzing stopped.  "H'lo?"
"It's dawn," said a dreamy voice. 
"Gary, it's dawn."
"Christ, Jim, what the fuck?"
"D'I wake you?"
Gary realized finally that Jim was drunk. 
And what a sweet drunk he sounded.  It might have been a mistake to
leave the New Year's Eve party before Jim got like this.
"Yeah.  Never mind.  Why'd you
call?"
"Just . . . why'd I call? . . . I just
wanted . . . Gar, it's so beautiful, the sky is just pink 'n . . . "
"You," Gary smiled at the speaker, "are
wasted, my friend."
"I am."  Vast satisfaction in that
innocent voice.  "Your friend."
"Where are you?" Gary asked after a pause. 
"And how did you get my code anyway?"  He knew he hadn't told Jim
where he was staying.
"Rer . . . Re-routed," said Jim, "through
the Academy . . . I said it was a 'mergency."
"Really."  Gary hoped it wasn't. He'd
never seen Jim drunk and didn't know whether he'd ever had this much alcohol
in his system before.  "You feel OK?"
"Oh, ya . . . yeah.  I just wanted
t'talk."  And then he didn't.
"So talk," Gary said.  He hit the
button for visual, but nothing happened.  "Hey, I can't see you."
"'S a booth, the pickup's broke."
"Where are you?"
"Near Ruth's."
So now beside Gary's image of Jim flushed,
in that tuxedo shirt with all the tiny pleats rumpled and the neck open,
came the vision of Jim's hair disheveled, his mouth still swollen, maybe
hickeys on that tender neck.  Gary shifted in his chair.  Damn. 
At the most ordinary times Jim looked good enough to eat, and if Ruth had
. . . it was just as well Gary couldn't see him.  "Jim," he said,
and heard the roughness in his own voice, swallowed, and cleared his throat. 
"Jim, shouldn't you be on your way back?  In a cab or something?"
"Autocab.  Got one.  Then it
passed this booth, and I thought."
"You thought?" Gary prompted.
"Of you."  Another pause, and Gary
visualized the bright head bent, the boyish hand raised to touch the comm
unit, irrationally, adorably.  "Of you."  Gary closed his eyes.
He had flirted with Jim when Jim taught
his Ethics class, but he hadn't meant it, not really, except as distraction. 
He had tried again when they met the first time afterward, in the campus
pub, and Jim had slapped him down, in a nice way.  They had gone around
together and picked up girls together (or tried to - hard to count Miss
Jones), and been friends, and Gary wanted that;  he wanted an ordinary
friend, like other people had.  He was sure Jim had dozens of friends.
"I wanted to dance with you again," said
Jim, sounding forlorn.  "Would you?  If you's . . . you'd st-
. . . if you ha'n't left?  Or did you leave so you wouldn't have to? 
I wouldn't make you, Gary."
The tone caught at Gary's throat. 
"No, I know."  And he would have held that warm, sweet-scented, relaxed
body in his arms, moved clumsily after him as the music played, ached with
wanting what Jim now seemed ready to give.  If Gary could let him
get that close.
"I missed you.  Ruth was there but
I missed you."
"I'm sorry."  And he was.  Sorry
to have brought Ruth into the picture at all.  Sorry he'd ever said,
'go to this lecture, I know he'll be there - how do I know?  I just
do.  A guess.  Ask questions, be noticeable.  And if you
can, go with him afterward, impress him with how nice you are, and he'll
be easy.'  He'd been right.  He was very, very sorry to be right.
"Gary," said the voice of his friend, the
unknowing beneficiary of his matchmaking skills, the most beautiful guy
he'd seen for years, "Gary, you looked so good tonight.  Las' night. 
You know."
"I know.  Thank you."
"Gary . . . I wanna tell you.  OK? 
I wanna tell you."
"Yes, OK, tell me."
"OK?"  Then silence.
Only Jim could play this drunken-echo game
and make Gary hang on his every slurred word.   Gary wasn't going
to encourage him any more to make what he suspected was a confession. 
Of course, if Jim felt . . . something . . . he'd be easier to manage,
but Gary almost didn't want to hear it.
"God you looked good," said Jim. 
"Sondra kept petting you . . . your arm . . . I wanted to.  Wanted
to feel your skin.  And then we danced."
They'd only touched each other's forearms,
but the memory came back to Gary so strongly that he grabbed the armrests
and pushed back in his chair. And afterward -
"After, you touched my face," Jim was saying,
"and oh, I didn't want you to stop.  Gary?  Are you listening? 
Why'd you stop?"
"I . . . I'm listening."
"I want to kiss you.  I wanted it
then."
"Yes," Gary said, knowing Jim was not likely
to remember this in the morning.  "I know."
"You're so.  You're so."  Jim
sighed gustily.  "If I wasn't with Ruth.  You know.  I'd
be with you.  I'd want that."
Gary tipped his head until it rested on
the high back of the chair.  He wondered, forcing the distraction
on his mind, if he could find a chair like this for his dorm room. 
It was one of the very few things he missed when he wasn't here.
"Could I?  See you?  Come there?"
"No, Jim."  He wouldn't tell Jim where
he was.  It would just start a million other questions.
He gave himself a second to imagine confiding
in Jim, not tonight, of course, when he wouldn't remember, but for real. 
'This is where I'm staying, this is how I got stuck staying here, this
is where I come from, this is what I used to do to stay alive . . .' no,
he really couldn't.  Couldn't imagine how this sheltered boy would
react, whether he'd decide Gary was some sort of charity case or curiosity
or . . . whatever.  The gleam that came into the Admiral's eye when
he realized that Gary wanted to take the entrance exam, that he could put
Gary under that kind of debt - if he ever saw that, or anything even a
tiny bit like it, on Jim's face he might hit out, might lose it the way
he almost had in the gym that time.  And then he hadn't even had a
reason.
Jim was still babbling.  Even drunk
he had the kind of voice Gary could listen to for a long while.
". . . so good doing things with you. 
Fun.  'N hearing your voice, Gar, I like talking to you 'n hearing
you talk.  D'you?  Gary?"
"Yes," Gary admitted.
"Yes?  Did you say yes?"
"Yes, I said yes."
A pause.  "Yes what?"
Now Gary was the one who sighed. 
"Jim, go home.  To the dorm.  You need to sleep."
"Yeah?  Think I should?"
"I do."
"I'm not sleepy."
"You will be."
"Will I?"
If he were here, Gary wouldn't keep trying
to argue;  he'd just make Jim lie down and let him tell the ceiling
how not-sleepy he was, for the minute or so it would take.  Like a
child.  Like a few children he'd known, except they had better reasons
than this for having a hard time getting to sleep.  The old anger
swept up from chest to throat, and he forgot this was just Jim, just the
babbling and spurious energy of somebody who'd been drinking champagne
for hours.  "For god's sake," he snapped, "will you get in the cab
and go back to the dorm?  It's, what, around four in the morning? 
Fuck, Jim!  I want to sleep if you don't.  Hear me?"
"I hear."
"Good night."  And Gary really should
have turned off, except he didn't trust Jim to break the connection and
go back to the cab.  So he waited.
"Goo'night," said Jim, forlorn again. 
Then a pause, but there was no break-sound.  "Gary?"
Gary rubbed his eyes, pinching the bridge
of his nose between strokes.  Of course.  "What?"
"I'm sorry.  I'm sorry, Gary. 
I woke you up, di'n't I?"
"Yeah, you did, and I want to go to sleep
again now."
"Yeah, good idea.  Go back to sleep. 
To bed."  Jim sighed again.
"And you get into that cab, OK? Shut the
comm off and get into the cab."
"Yeah, I will."  But he still didn't.
Gary waited.
"Gary?"
"What, Jim?"
"You mad?"
"If I say I'm not mad, will you get into
the damn cab?"
"You're mad.  I'm sorry, Gary. 
Di'n't mean to make you mad."
"I know.  I'm really not mad. 
I'm really tired.  OK, Jim?  You understand?  I want you
to stop talking.  Turn the comm off.  Get into the cab. 
Go home.  Go to bed.  Understand?"  Jesus, drunks and children
and dogs, you just had to say little things over and over.
"OK."  Pause.  "I'm gonna turn
it off now."
"Good, Jim, do that."
"Good night," he said, suddenly clear,
and louder, as if he'd leaned into the audio pickup.  "Gary. 
Sleep tight.  Sweet dreams."  And then he really did turn off
the comm.
Sweet dreams?  Did Jim's mother tell
him that when she tucked him in?  Gary wouldn't have been surprised. 
His own goal was no dreams at all, thanks very much.
He pushed himself out of the chair and
went back to bed, only to lie looking at the ceiling himself, seeing that
vision of Jim in the booth full of faint, rosy light.  Sweet enough,
certainly.  But a dream?

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

*****
March, Jim's Senior Year
***
Jim didn't know why Gary wouldn't have
sex with him.
All Spring Break he wondered about the
possibility, especially after the day Jim went up to the attic to roust
Gary out of the window alcove where he seemed to be spending the week. 
Jim ended up wrestling with him and would have won but that Gary pulled
him into one of the hotter kisses he'd ever had.  Gary rolled them
both over, cradling Jim's head in his hands and crouching over him like
an amorous vampire.  Jim craned his head up and pulled Gary down,
but Gary resisted, kept the position he'd taken, touching Jim only where
his legs straddled Jim's waist and his hands held Jim's skull and his mouth
drank from Jim's.  Pulled back a little and nibbled Jim's lips. 
Moved in again and slid his tongue along the roof of Jim's mouth. 
It seemed to go on for a very long while, and Gary's eyes were closed the
whole time, and Jim was hard and felt just the nudging tip of Gary's cock,
and then suddenly Gary let go and stood up.
"No.  I . . . No," said Gary, as if
in answer to some unspoken demand.  He shook his head and clenched
his fists.
"Gary - " said Jim, and then his mother's
voice called to them.  Lunch was ready.  Gary vanished down the
stairs.  Jim sat up, feeling dazed.  He could still taste Gary's
tongue and the soft places it had rasped were tingling.
"Jim?" - his mother's voice, still remote.
"Yeah, Mom, coming," he said, and he nearly
had been, and that made him grin.  He got up, dusted himself off,
slapping the back of his shorts, and went down.  But Gary wasn't at
the kitchen table.
"He's washing his hands," said his mother,
"and you could stand to do the same.  How on earth did you get cobwebs
in your hair?"
"Oh, we were in the attic," Jim said.
She shook her head but said only, "Use
the kitchen sink," so he did, and was just smoothing back his hair and
reaching for a towel when he heard her say, "Sit anywhere," and Gary's
voice mumbling some reply.  Gary seemed absolutely incapable of talking
to Jim's mother, who usually charmed his friends in no time flat. 
Jim couldn't figure it out but right now he didn't think about it - he
could feel where Gary was in the room without even looking, like a stove,
warmth beating against his skin from Gary's direction.  And when he
turned and sat at the table, every movement of Gary's hands and arms and
jaw drew Jim's eyes.  It was all he could do not to stare, to sit
and eat himself, so not counting a few remarks his mother made about the
weather and the food, they ate in silence.  Jim cleared away his plate
and put it in the washer and would not have been able to say what had been
on it. Gary reached past with his own plate and Jim looked up and met his
gaze at last.  Gary's eyes were wide and dark;  his mouth still
seemed flushed, and all Jim wanted was to grab and kiss him again, but
couldn't bring himself to do it in front of his mother.
"You haven't even seen the barn yet, have
you?" he asked, his voice involuntarily low.
"No," Gary answered.
"Come on, then, I'll show you."  He
led the way out the back door, across the porch and down the three wooden
stairs, along the path edged with narrow flower beds where nothing yet
bloomed.  Again he knew without turning how Gary first hesitated,
and then followed closely, and then, self-consciously, dropped behind again. 
They passed his mother's little bower with the long wooden swing hanging
between arched trellises covered with bare vines, and the tool shed like
a toy version of the barn. The path ended and Gary caught up to walk beside
him across the grass.
"Aren't barns pretty much alike?" Gary
asked.
"Depends what's in them."
"What's in yours?"
"Horses . . . and a hayloft."  Jim
smiled.  "Don't you want to see the hayloft?"
"Oh, no," said Gary, "no more cobwebs." 
He reached out, tentatively, and Jim stood so still he almost wasn't breathing,
but all Gary did was hook a cobweb out of the hair above Jim's collar,
without even touching him.  "You had that whole list of things to
do - " the ghost of Gary's rakish grin was on his face - "I don't even
remember them.  Mmm, say again?"
"We could go riding," Jim suggested, though
his heart was not in it.  "Do you like to do that?"
And suddenly the moment twisted, anger
flared on Gary's face and his hand, still half raised, snapped down to
his side.  "Where do you think I've been living?  When
did you think I'd learn to ride a horse?"
"Now, if you want."  Jim tried desperately
to get back to the warm spot they'd been in.  "Gar, it's easy, I've
taught people before."  He reached out to grasp Gary's arm, but he
stepped away.  "Or we don't have to, it's just a thing to do." 
A small smile.  "I'd rather go back to what we were doing in the attic
anyway."
Gary's face was immobile.  "Show me
the horses," he said.
He was still pale and stiff in the barn,
and when Topaz thrust her head over the half-door of her stall, he stepped
back, out of the way of her questing nose.  Jim realized Gary had
never seen a real horse, certainly not closely enough to realize what large
animals they were.
Tope nudged Jim's shoulder, and he rubbed
up and down her nose and patted her neck until her ears stopped flicking
back and forth and the white edge around her eye was gone.  Now if
he could get Gary to settle down he'd be two for two.
"Gary, come touch her," Jim said in his
most soothing voice;  "she can feel you're nervous."  He kept
his own hands on the horse as Gary stepped forward, and they stroked the
warm fur together.  And Gary did relax, gradually, and then looked
up at Jim and smiled the way he hadn't in - Jim wasn't sure how long, but
in the state he was in twenty minutes felt like forever.  "She's the
one I want to saddle for you," he said now over the tenderness and lust
burning in his chest.  He hadn't felt this since Ruth.  The last
thing he wanted to do was walk away to where the saddles were - he wanted
to go on diving into Gary's brown eyes - but Gary looked away and began
to rub the horse's neck, and Jim felt he had promised.  Maybe Gary
needed space.
He pulled his hands away with an effort,
and said, "Stay with her," and went for the saddle.  He checked it
over and put it on the stand and came back to get Topaz, and Gary moved
aside and watched hard, but impersonally, seeming more interested in the
process than in Jim doing it.  Jim wondered how long he had wanted
to learn horseback riding and exactly why he hadn't.  But some of
the blood must have gone back to his brain at last, because he knew better
than to ask.
Jim led Topaz out to the paddock, and Gary
followed.  Jim mounted, demonstrating, and then dismounted, very aware
of Gary's eyes on his back, or his ass, or his legs . . . Jim hoped the
interest was sexual but was no longer sure. When he turned, Gary's look
was enigmatic.  "You try," said Jim. "Take as many tries as you need
- Topaz is a good, steady girl."
Gary's face was set, and he moved past
Jim and took the stirrup from him without speaking.  Gary's foot in
the stirrup, Gary's hands on the saddle, Gary's muscles tightening as he
braced himself - Jim did have a pretty good view, and part of his mind
enjoyed it while another part automatically assessed the position and the
amount and direction of the thrust Gary was using.  It wasn't quite
right, and Topaz shifted her weight, and Gary caught his ribs on the saddle,
slid, and dropped down again.
"That usually hurts," said Jim, "your ankle
OK?"
"Yeah, mmm, yeah," Gary said absentmindedly,
eyes moving from horse to stirrup to saddle.  He took his forward
hand off the saddle horn and patted Topaz's neck.  "Good girl," he
said, and Jim felt a surge of satisfaction at the tone of Gary's voice. 
Gary readjusted and took a breath and heaved himself up into the saddle,
not as smoothly as Jim had but better than most beginners.  He sat
for a moment looking between the horse's ears, then around the paddock
from his new height, then down at Jim.  The sun edged his figure with
light and he looked calm and confident.  Jim took a few steps and
put his hands on Gary's leg and Topaz's side and smiled up at his gorgeous
friend,
and he knew his heart was in his face but he didn't care.  Gary smiled
down.
It was a moment Jim would remember for
years.
"I could have sworn this horseback riding
thing included moving around," said Gary.
They worked in the paddock for a couple
of hours, then rubbed Topaz down and took a walk over one of the trails
they might ride later, and talked about horses and riding, and Jim talked
about teaching his young cousins.  That was the first time the constraint
came back, a little, and Gary looked sidelong at Jim and asked in a voice
that was not as casual as he obviously meant to be, "You have a big extended
family?"
"Not so big," Jim said, "Mom's an only
child and Dad only had one brother - like me.  So there's Uncle Peter
and his three kids, and Grandma Evans, Mom's mother - now.  Dad's
father used to live here, help Mom out, until he couldn't any more." 
Grandpa had died of a stroke while Jim was lost on Tarsus, and even his
things were mostly gone by the time Jim got back.  He didn't want
to talk about that, but the memory pulled in the corners of his mouth and
he saw Gary looking curiously at him.  "And you?" he asked to get
away from the topic.
Gary looked away.  "No."  He
said no more and Jim did not push him.
They were walking along the top of a tree-lined
ridge and had reached a gap in the high brown weeds and the bundles of
sticks bristling with small green leaves.  "Oh look," Jim said unnecessarily,
and they both paused.  The field below was planted in soybean, and
little clusters of green dotted the dark furrows;  the sun was low
enough to light all the buds and leaves and grass as if from within; 
the clouds streaked across the sky were getting dimly gold and rose though
the sun was not actually setting yet.
"I suppose," said Gary harshly, "that someday
this will all be yours."
"No," said Jim mildly, having seen this
reaction in other people, "mostly Sam's, I think.  My older brother.
Sam's more likely to live here, or on Earth anyway, and he's already engaged
to Aurelan, and they plan to have kids. Mom knows what it's like when the
main owner's in space somewhere all the time.  Not good.  You
and I, Gar, we're not farmers."
Gary was watching Jim again.  When
he didn't speak, Jim glanced over and caught him at it, and for a long
moment they just looked before Gary said, much more softly, "Do you mind?"
"No.  A little.  Well, truth
is, sometimes I mind a lot and sometimes not at all.  I want
space.  I want to go a long way and do a lot of wild important things
- " he laughed a little - "and command aa ship, and all that.  But
maybe, maybe someday I'll want to come back, raise horses, be more than
just Uncle Jim who has the same guest room whenever he's got Earth shore
leave.  But by that time probably Sam's kids will be grown and doing
it all themselves, they won't want some old spacer getting in their way. 
I don't know."  He paused, looked down at the path, scuffed a toe
under one corner of a fist-sized rock and tried to pry it out of the ground. 
Gary's eyes were still on him, he knew, but it was easier not to meet them
just now.  "Right up until last year, I still kind of assumed I'd
marry somebody, and if they had a ground job and could telecommute they
could live here, be company for Mom, you know.  But Mom went through
that and I've been thinking it isn't - " he laughed again because the phrase
made him self-conscious - "isn't fair to anybody to make them wait that
way.  I've seen it with Mom and Dad."   He gave up on the
rock and looked up.  Gary was still watching, his face quiet and open. 
If only he was like that more often, or just sweet and hot the way he was
in the attic, if only people weren't so damn complicated and full of secrets,
if only the wind wasn't chilly and the sun getting low, so they could just
lie down in the grass and let their bodies do the talking.  But it
was almost dinner time.  Jim took Gary's hand and held it firmly and
said, "We'd better get back."
For a little while Gary's fingers tightened,
and he wasn't angry or withdrawn, but he let go of Jim's hand and walked
ahead on the path, and all the way to the farmhouse Jim looked at the muscular
back and wondered what the hell was going on.
The next morning, Jim woke with a half-remembered
dream and an erection and lay running hands over skin and imagining -

Jim gets up, throws on his robe, walks down the hallway to Gary's room, and though he'd heard the
bolt slide shut the previous night, it's undone now;  the door is just ajar and he sees the light;  Gary left the curtains open. Jim touches the door and it swings inward.  There is the corner of the bed, the blankets mussed, the mound of Gary's feet, the shape of his body under the covers.  He is lying on his back with one arm across his face.  Jim goes in as silently as the sun and treads through patches of warm light to the bed.  He trails his fingers across the lightly furred forearm to the hand, and Gary raises the arm and looks at him.  Yes, just like some of the looks before, like he wanted to swallow Jim whole. Jim pulls down the covers slowly, slow-ly, feeling Gary's skin with the tips of his fingers, and Gary just lies there watching.

Or Jim says to Gary, "Turn over, I'm
sure you're stiff from riding yesterday, let me help," and Gary flips back
the covers and turns onto his stomach.  He sleeps nude, just as Jim
does.  For a moment Jim can't even touch him, looking is so good,
all those muscles and that skin Gary's clothes have been covering. 
A streak of sun from the window falls across Gary's ass.  Jim doesn't
want to scare him off or rush this, so he starts up on Gary's shoulders,
rubbing, digging in his fingers, and the muscles are pretty relaxed already
but are so warm and wonderful to touch that he keeps manipulating them. 
Over the hard edges of shoulder blades.  Down the bumpy ridge of the
spine, circling with his thumbs here, here, here, down either side.

Jim turned on his side so he could
knuckle either side of his own spine while his other hand was on his cock.

Down to where the natural indentations
are, and by this time Gary is breathing harshly into his pillow and his
ass is tight . . . Jim hits it with the flat of his hand, the slap sounding
loud in the quiet room, and Gary jumps.

"Huh!" Jim half-laughed, aching hard,
his eyes shut so tightly he saw wheels of light.  He stroked his own
ass.

No, Jim doesn't spank him.
He just brushes his fingertips across the tight skin.  Gary shivers. 
Jim circles with both palms on Gary's ass, then runs his hands down the
backs of Gary's legs clear to the soles of his feet, where he'll begin
to massage in earnest.  He picks up one of those broad feet, strong
and flat like Gary's hands, and begins to knead it with his thumbs --

Despite the fact that he had already
stopped pumping himself and was trying to hold back, Jim could no longer
keep himself from coming, and he twisted into the sheets and gritted his
teeth as the semen spurted out of him.  Then lay still.  What
a mess.  And he never even finished the fantasy!  He sighed,
wiped himself with the drier part of the top sheet, and then got up, shivering
a little, and stripped the bed.
Gary's door stayed bolted.  After
breakfast Jim drank a slow cup of coffee and looked at a newscast, still
trying not to think about Gary in bed, and then went upstairs for a sweater. 
As he was emerging from his room, Gary came out of the bathroom, a towel
around his waist and another one over his shoulders, moving as if his legs
ached.  Jim's fantasy came back to him so vividly that though he gripped
the doorframe with both hands, what he felt was Gary's skin.
"Hullo, Jim," said Gary.
"How are you?"  Jim asked him, and
then clenched his teeth and did not mention stiff muscles or massages.
"Slept great," Gary said.  "Too great,
huh?"
"We're on vacation," Jim shrugged. 
"There's no schedule."  And Gary grinned and walked past to his room
again, and Jim gazed after him and wondered.
He did that a lot, the rest of the day
and the next, as they did most of the things he'd told Gary they might
do - well, he skipped the girl-watching, and Gary didn't seem to miss it. 
He was doing a lot of Jim-watching, and Jim certainly didn't mind but could
have done with some more Jim-touching, of which there was damn little.
At night in the yard, rocking in the swing
and gazing at the field of stars they both meant to explore, Jim slipped
his arm around Gary's waist and felt his back straighten, then relax. 
A few seconds later, Gary leaned out to raise his arm and then resettled
with his elbow on the back of the swing and his hand in Jim's hair. 
It was cozy, but definitely not all Jim had in mind.  He had been
careful and self-controlled, and almost nothing had happened all Spring
Break.  There wasn't much of this free time left.  He waited
only a few more minutes and then said, "Gary."
"Umm?"
Well, he sounded relaxed enough. 
Jim brought his other arm across, turned slightly so he held Gary closer,
and said, "Gary, why aren't we fucking?"
Gary pulled away sharply, stood up, walked
away from the swing and the house without saying a word.
After a stunned second, Jim got up and
went after him, not quite running.  "Gary?"
Gary stopped but didn't turn.  Jim
caught up to him, reached out, thought twice and didn't touch the rigid
shoulder.
"Let me go!" Gary said, as though Jim had
grabbed him.  "Let me go!"  And this time he was the one
who almost ran.  Jim didn't follow.  He went back to the swing
and sat for a while, though he didn't really believe Gary would come back
there.  And he was right.  And the stars were eventually too
indifferent, so he went inside and got himself a cup of decaffeinated coffee
to warm up before he went to his empty bed.
His mother came into the kitchen while
he was drinking it, took in his expression and Gary's absence, and came
to the table, wrapping her robe more tightly around her and retying the
belt.  She pulled his head over to kiss him on the hair, and held
him for a minute or so.  Then she let go.
"I hated being eighteen myself," she said
cryptically, and went back upstairs.
The next morning they all pretended nothing
had happened.  Well, nothing had.  That was the trouble.
There was only this day left of the break
and it felt like a year.  The weather even soured, cloudy and windy
and not-quite-raining.  Gary spent most of it reading again, though
at least now he was doing it in the living room and not in the attic.
That evening, the last before they were
going back to California, Jim didn't want to go to bed and Gary didn't
seem to want to, either.  Jim's mother went upstairs at around eleven,
and then Jim and Gary just read, silently, under their separate lamps. 
The house was very quiet.  The shadows up around the ceiling and down
the corners of the room seemed thicker than usual.  Jim stole glances
at Gary, noting the light on his hair and forehead, shoulders and legs,
crossed ankles and feet, and on his hand as it rose and languidly tapped
the Next key.  Then Jim turned a page of his own and read, and turned
another page without having looked at Gary and kept reading.  And
then he did look up and found Gary gazing at him.
Mysterious.  Ambiguous.  Sexy. 
Jim stared back.
Gary set the bookpadd on the table and
got up, and for a crazy moment Jim was certain he was going to walk across
the rag rug and pull Jim up out of the chair and kiss him.  "I'm turning
in," Gary said instead.
Jim wanted to say, 'I'll go with you. 
I'll tuck you in.  I'll blow you, would you like that?'
"Good night," he really said, but he suspected
his other thoughts were showing clearly enough.
Gary hesitated.  "I'm sorry," he said.
Jim looked at the unrevealing face. 
Then nodded.  By rights he should have felt embarrassed - wasn't Gary
saying he didn't want him? - but instead there was a kind of dull pressure
in his chest and throat, something he didn't want to examine.
"It was a good vacation," Gary said, not
very believably.
Jim tried a social lie of his own. 
"Maybe we'll do it again sometime."
After another pause, Gary said, "Maybe,"
and then, "Good night," and left.
Jim didn't want to read any more, but he
let Gary get upstairs and into the guest room before he put his book away,
shut off the lamps, and went to his own bedroom.
He looked at the bolted door as he passed
it.  He remembered the feel of Gary's fingers in his hair.
Maybe.  Sometime.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

*****
May, Jim's Senior Year
***
Back at the Academy, Gary and Jim were
both busy, and anyway the gap between senior and sophomore made their friendship
hard to pursue.  They ran into each other sometimes, left messages
a lot . . . they sat at the same lunch table twice.  Jim had to drop
the card games they and a few other cadets had played every other Friday
night.  He was studying too hard.  All his classes were gearing
up for the big exams.  And he had just taken the Kobayashi Maru test
for the second time, gotten a "good" assessment (not good enough!),
and was trying hard to find somebody or some file that would explain what
the heck he was supposed to be doing differently.
One night, and it had to be the tenth time
he'd been through the tapes of his own trials in the simulation lab, slow-motion,
3-D, multi-POV, feverishly trying to see the test anew, Jim looked at the
clock on the projector and realized it had been - well, he wasn't sure
how many hours - since he'd eaten.  He couldn't keep going indefinitely
on coffee from the basement lounge.  He left the booth he'd been using,
still logged-in and password-locked, and made his way out of the library.
It was almost empty and only half-lit. 
At this time of year it was open all night, but between 2200 and 500 hours
there were no live librarians, just security staff, and not everything
was powered up.  Jim went a little out of his direct route so he could
walk through the Historical Documents section, his favorite part of the
library.  The very oldest and rarest books were in vacuum cases, but
books bound during the last century were on the shelves, interspersed with
tapes and disks.  The overhead fixtures were mostly off, so just a
few cones of yellow light poured to the scuffed glass-block floor, and
elsewhere a faint glow pervaded the glass and the rows of vacuum cases,
like harvest moonlight.
Jim went through the stacks and ran his
fingers over the bumps of the old spines.  There was nothing like
the feel of a real book.  Gary laughed at his liking for solid hard
copy, called him a stack of books with legs, but of course when he cared
to do it, Gary could study with the best of them.
Just as he thought of Gary, Jim heard his
voice.  The sound was soft, not close by, and he wasn't sure it was
even real, but just as he was telling himself that fatigue and sexual frustration
excused a lot but that he could not allow himself to actually hallucinate,
he heard another voice speaking, more distinctly, though he still couldn't
hear much.
" . . . say no? . . . point of paying
. . . "
Jim walked toward the sound and heard what
was definitely Gary's voice murmuring in reply.  Then the other again.
" . . . like you belong . . . "
The tone was so vicious that Jim stopped
in his tracks for a moment, and then moved again in a rush.  But either
he made more noise than he realized or what he'd heard was a parting shot,
because when he found the study table in the corner with its green-shaded
lamps, Gary was alone there.
In front of him an open book and a padd
lay on the table, but Jim didn't think for a moment that he'd overheard
a study session.  Gary was staring down at the page, though, so Jim
slid into a chair and waited.
Gary looked up warily and Jim wanted, quite
simply, to kill whoever had made him feel like that.  Whatever Gary
had gotten himself into (and what was it?), Jim wanted to protect him from
it, so fiercely that he couldn't immediately think of anything to say but
"Tell me," and heard the words come out of his mouth with horror, knowing
that Gary would not and fearing how he would react.
Actually Gary didn't get angry.  He
just looked for a long moment, his expression slowly shifting from wariness
to something Jim couldn't quite read.  Then Gary shrugged one shoulder
and looked back down at the book.  He must have guessed that Jim had
not heard much.
Eventually, Jim tried again.  "I've
been in the sim lab since," Jim tried to pinpoint it, "uh . . . "
"Since uh?"  Gary asked with a little
smile.  "If you can't remember, Jim, it's really pathetic."
"Low blood sugar," Jim said.  "I'm
on my way to get something to eat.  Come along?"
"I'd better.  I'm not sure you can
find the mess hall."  Gary closed the book and stood up.
"Very funny, Mr. I'm About To Leave My
Padd Behind."
At the door to the mess, Gary paused, and
then went in nonchalantly.  Actually, the room was empty except for
Jorgenson, who did all her studying there and had better be looking for
an assignment without stringent physical requirements, and Ren Mori and
Tia Chavez, definitely not studying in a corner.  Jim programmed
a chicken sandwich with a side of those little soysnack cubes in bright
colors, and a glass of milk.  Gary got himself soysnacks and coffee. 
They sat away from the others, near a dark window, and Jim ate in silence
as Gary chatted brightly about underclassmen Jim knew and on-campus events
and so forth, popping the cubes in his mouth.  A phantom Gary mocked
Jim from the window pane.  The real one seemed no more touchable than
the reflection.
Jim knew he was being glum but couldn't
seem to come up with anything to say.  Gary watched him eat two or
three soysnacks and then said, "So what were you doing in the sim lab?"
"It's the Kobayashi Maru.  You know
there's that big secrecy thing, so I can't talk about it."
"Are you telling me," Gary smiled over
the edge of his coffee cup, "that the Academy star, Midshipman Lieutenant
James Kirk, did less than perfectly on a command simulation?"
"Not good enough."
"OK, what are you going to do differently
next time?"
Jim shook his head.  "I can't think
of anything," he said.  "That's the trouble.  I've watched every
damn frame, I've found tiny errors the bridge crew made, I've picked up
six design flaws in the simulation - the lights in Ops are the wrong color,
on the lower right-hand display -" Gary rolled his eyes, and Jim grinned
reluctantly.  "Yes, I know, that's not useful!  I just mean I've
really looked.  I just don't see any way I could have - given
different commands.  Won."
"Maybe you can't win."
Jim looked up, and Gary swept a hand across
the air between them.  "No, uh-uh, of course I didn't mean you
couldn't win, because of anything you did.  I mean, maybe it's a no-win
situation."
"How can it be?" Jim asked.
"Jim, for god's sake, of course it can. 
The universe is full of no-win situations."  Gary's eyes had gone
dark again, or maybe it was more that he pulled in his chin and shadows
fell over them, but when he looked like that Jim knew he was thinking something
he wouldn't share.  "Full of them.  Yeah.  Even for you."
Jim himself was thinking of the voice he'd
heard from the darkness of the Historical Documents stacks.  He knew
that if he raised the issue again he still wouldn't get any answers, and
might provoke Gary into anger or withdrawal, so to keep himself from asking
he picked out three of his favorite soysnacks, the green ones, and looked
at them for a moment before putting the first one in his mouth.  By
the time he'd swallowed it, he'd thought of a remark.  "I don't believe
in a no-win situation."
Gary was watching him.  His slow,
sexy smile distracted Jim completely.
"Then," Gary said, his voice low, "you'll
have to change the rules."
Jim sat, not breathing, the snacks still
in his hand.
"Change.  The.  Rules." 
Gary took the second snack from Jim's fingers and ate it.  Jim reached
out and Gary guided his hand and Jim's fingertips were in Gary's mouth
and he ate the third snack, teeth just grazing Jim's middle finger, the
wet inside of his lips so warm it sent a shock wave up Jim's arm and throughout
his body.
"Gary," said Jim hoarsely.
"Mmm." Gary closed his mouth on Jim's fingers
and ran his tongue across the tips.
"Gary," Jim said.
Gary pulled Jim's wrist down and Jim clutched
at Gary's hand and said, "Damn you, don't tease me this way."
"I'm changing the rules."
"Then change them."
"All right."  Gary extracted his hand,
and stood up, and pulled his food tray to the edge of the table, bending
over and pitching his voice low.  "We get rid of this junk. 
We go back to the library, to that locked sim booth.  I fuck you. 
Those are the new rules."
Jim stood too.  "We'll see who fucks
who."
"Isn't it whom?"
"I'm changing that rule."
Gary laughed.  "Oh, go right ahead,
Jim.  You wild rebel.  Change the grammar rules."
Jim smiled, took a step closer, around
the corner of the table.  "OK," he said, "now 'Gary fucks Jim' means
that Gary gets on his hands and knees and takes Jim's cock up his ass." 
Another step.  He took the tray from Gary's hands and put it back
on the table.  "How's that for a new grammar rule?"
Gary asked in a breathless voice, "What
does 'Jim causes gossip' mean?"
"This," said Jim and grabbed Gary's shoulders
and pulled him in for a kiss.
It wasn't like the kiss in the attic. 
Jim was conscious all the time that they weren't alone.  Gary gave
him some tongue and Jim just closed his teeth on it, gently, teasing the
end with his own.  The kiss tasted like soysnack.  Gary started
to laugh into Jim's mouth.
Jim pulled back.  "Yes, well, we can
do better than that," he said.
"Oh, yeah," said Gary.  "So let's
get the hell out of here and do better."
As they ditched the trays, Jim wondered
whether they really had caused gossip.  He didn't care - at the moment
he would have fucked Gary in the middle of the common at noon - and it
wasn't like there was a regulation against sex among cadets.  But
Jorgenson's nose was still buried in her book and Tia and Ren were gazing
at each other, and Jim just wondered.  He'd know eventually, though,
and meanwhile he was going to have sex with Gary.  After all this
time.  He could hardly take it in.
He grabbed Gary's hand as they left the
building, still in the half-circle of light around the doors, and pulled
him to the side where there was a bench in the shadow, but they didn't
even sit down before they were kissing again.  The concrete bench
pressed its cold rough surface into Jim's calves and Gary's tongue pressed
into his mouth, not still now, and his own slid around it.  Gary's
hands pulled through Jim's hair, grabbed his neck, slid over his shoulders
and down his back.  Jim's hands cupped Gary's ass, that beautiful,
beautiful thing he'd looked at so many times and had to see naked. 
Had to.  He wasn't getting enough air.  And Gary's nose was
pushed sideways under Jim's cheekbone.  They broke away from the kiss,
gasping and aching and laughing like fools, bodies still so clamped together
that their erections couldn't even rise.
Jim squeezed Gary's ass again.  "Why
are we going all the way to the library when there's a wall right here?"
he asked.
"Because - " Gary was still gulping in
air and wheezing with laughter - "if I don't see you naked - I'm going
to lose my mind.  And.  It's too cold."
"My room then."
"Too far away."
"Fuck you, Mitchell, you're teasing again."
Gary leaned in, took Jim's lower lip between
his teeth, and ground them gently, the lower teeth moving in a little circle,
and then let go, and Jim pushed into the contact but Gary grabbed his head
and held it away, only an inch or so.  "I thought fucking me was the
plan," he said very softly, the air from his mouth puffing against Jim's. 
"How long do you want to wait?"
Jim closed his eyes and groaned. 
"Oh, yeah," said Gary, and Jim felt fingers stroking around his
ears and along his jaw and up his cheeks and across his eyelids, and he
was shaking and couldn't seem to open his eyes.  "Yeah, Jim, yeah,
you're so ready, you're showing me now," and his thumbs were circling just
at the corners of Jim's eyes, and Jim felt as if he were falling, as if
he were burning up in short repeated flashes, as if he were going to explode
right there, his balls were tightening and in a second it would be over. 
He grabbed Gary's wrists and pulled the hands away and hauled his eyes
open.  Jim pushed his knuckles against Gary's shoulders, and Gary
took one step back, hands loose in the air, still smiling.
Jim opened his mouth and nothing came out. 
He swallowed and croaked, "Library."
It was still too long, too far away. 
Jim didn't trust himself even to touch Gary, even to look at him, and they
walked beside each other but about a meter apart, the wind blowing between
them.
One of them had to go through the revolving
door first, though, and Jim quickened his pace - and so did Gary - so it
was a kind of race.  Jim won this one.  Into the dim space of
the lobby, up the wide shadow-filled staircase, round the landing, up again
- all too long.  This time, there was no detour through Historical
Docs.  Jim looked at the floor ahead, at the end of the corridor,
at the doors to the sim lab.  At Gary's hand reaching for the bar
or the handle.  Jim swallowed.
His booth wasn't the one nearest the door,
though at least it wasn't way at the back of the lab.  Jim's hands
were shaking as he keyed in his password.  The booth door seemed to
slide open in slow motion.  He stepped inside;  Gary did; 
the door shut.
And now Jim could look.  And now Gary
pulled off the shiny cadet tunic, and under it was skin Jim had seen in
Iowa, but without the towel and with the nipples drawn tight, a pinkish
caramel color that made Jim's mouth water.  Jim reached but Gary grabbed
his wrist and blocked him.
"You strip too," Gary said.  So Jim's
view of Gary taking off his boots was momentarily blocked, but fortunately
the tunic was over his head by the time Gary's hands were at the fly of
his pants, and again Jim was frozen, staring helplessly as Gary slid the
black cloth over his hips.  Either he wasn't wearing underwear or
he peeled them down with the pants.  His pubic hair was a darker cocoa
brown than the hair on his head, and his cock stood up thick and solid
and uncircumcised, and Jim got his own pants down in record time, the elastic
of his briefs dragging painfully over his own cock and the legs of his
pants still tangled with the tops of his boots.  He pushed at the
top of one boot, stepped out of the tangled mess on that side and then
the other and finally, finally, finally felt Gary all along his
body, like one of his fantasies.
"Jim, oh boy, Jim," said Gary, and they
clutched each other, and Jim was making some sort of noise too but he wasn't
sure if it was Gary's name.  He had waited so long for this he could
hardly feel it.  He was so hard he didn't know what to do about it. 
They hardly moved, didn't even kiss, just stood pressed together feeling
each other's warmth and breathing for a while.
Then their hands began to move, almost
at the same time, brushing and stroking and kneading each other's skin. 
Jim raised his hands to dig his fingers into Gary's thick short hair, pressed
into his scalp, dragged down to trace his hairline, wanting to touch every
part of that body he had been staring at for so long.  He traced the
rims of Gary's ears, fingered the small lobes, and he pinched the right
one while his left hand dropped to rub up and down the big vein in Gary's
neck.  Gary put his cheek on Jim's hair and Jim rubbed the tendon
and the collar bone and his other hand was at the edge of Gary's shoulder
blade, and then he lost track of the touching-everywhere plan and both
hands just slid irresistibly down to Gary's ass.  Cupped it, not grabbing,
so he could feel the hair ruffle as he moved his hands, up and down. Gary
slid his face against Jim's without ever lifting his head, pushing hard
against Jim like a cat, and his mouth was open and his ass was pressing
back into Jim's palms and his cock moved against Jim's - then they did
kiss again.  Their mouths were open so far that Jim's jaw ached a
little, but that was nothing next to his cock, and then Gary moved back
just far enough to slide his hands in between their bodies, fingertips
and knuckles across the tops of Jim's thighs and then in behind his sac
- "Oh!" said Jim, and then even louder as Gary moved his fingers and Jim's
knees gave and they dropped down to the floor, "OH!"  His shoulders
and the back of his head brushed the carpet but his back was arched so
hard he pulled himself up to a half-sitting position, Gary bending over
him and hissing, "Ssh, Jim, ssssh, the security guard," and Gary's hand
covered Jim's mouth while the other still teased his balls, and he bit
Gary's palm and grunted into it as he came.
Jim collapsed, back flat on the floor. 
He licked Gary's hand where he had bitten it.  Gary's eyes were glazed,
his face was beaded with sweat, and he was still hard.  He brushed
his wet palm up to Jim's hair and his other hand stroked Jim's now-limp
cock, rubbing sticky wetness from Jim's skin onto his own.
"Your rules," Jim said, his voice thready,
and Gary smiled or bared his teeth and moved his handful of semen farther
down between Jim's legs until he found Jim's asshole.  Jim squirmed
helplessly as he felt Gary's wet fingers work their way toward it, and
he spread his legs but that wouldn't make him any less new to this. 
It felt scary, it felt ticklish, it felt so good and full already
and he knew it was just the beginning, Gary only had the very tip of one
finger in.  Pressing outward, round and round, pressing in, and there
was the knuckle, goddamn, was this what women felt?  He could feel
everything, the hardness of Gary's nail and his other fingers pressing
around the opening and his palm flat against the skin under Jim's sac. 
All Jim's joints were loose and his muscles were only responding to the
jolts of sensation from his ass.  Gary slid the finger all the way
in and then all the way out, and Jim made a sort of "uuuooooh" noise, pleasure
and then disappointment.  Then two fingertips were pressing in together
and Jim moved his hips uneasily and Gary said, "Relax, come on, Jim," so
he let go on purpose, concentrating what was left of his mind.  First
one nail and callused fingertip and then the other, then both the first
knuckles, were going in and stretching him sideways, farther in and scissoring
open and shut.  Jim was hardly breathing, grabbing air between the
movements of Gary's fingers but never much at a time, trying to say his
name, "G- Gar-" and stretching his legs so far apart that he felt the pull
across his thigh muscles.
"Ssh, Jim, take it easy," Gary said, and
his voice was unsteady too.  His lips brushed the side of Jim's knee
and then lower down along the thigh, and Jim moved that foot awkwardly,
bumped Gary's side and slid across his ribs, wanting every inch of contact
he could get.
"All right," Gary whispered and took his
fingers all the way out and put his cock there instead.  Pushed in,
agonizingly slowly, leaned forward, pressing Jim's legs up and back until
his knees were almost touching his shoulders, and it was a strain but Jim
wanted to hold this position all night long.  Gary pulled out and
pushed in, out and in harder, and the slick friction was already inflaming,
firmer and softer at once than his fingers, but then Gary shifted his grip
and pushed in harder again and hit a spot that made Jim nova.  He
felt a sound happen in his throat, if he could have called it feeling next
to the explosion inside him, but literally did not hear himself, and then
Gary kissed him and kept pounding that fiery bursting spot, and all Jim
could do was suckle Gary's tongue and try to hear his own whimpers, try
to be in contact with the earth, try to get some sensation from his back
against the carpet, his hands clutching Gary, and his cock being rubbed
between their stomachs, because surely there was something wrong with losing
his mind so completely.  "Jim, Jim," Gary whispered against his lips. 
Jim felt him shaking, thrusting faster, and then an odd soft gushing pressure
and Gary put his forehead against Jim's chest.
For a little while neither of them moved
at all.  Then Jim took what felt like his first real breath since
they came into the sim booth, and pushed his thighs against Gary's confining
arms.  Gary dragged back and Jim lowered his legs, which he thought
would probably hurt like hell in a few minutes, not to mention tomorrow,
and his ass hurt now.  He knew he could not sit up yet, but he reached
for Gary, grazed his cheek, grasped weakly at the side of his head, and
Gary came back to lie on top of him.
With an enormous effort, Jim rolled onto
his side and held Gary to him when he tried to move away.  "Just want
to breathe," he said, or meant to, but the words were slurred.  He
swallowed, licked his lips, and tried again.  "Don't go anywhere." 
There, that was even recognizable Standard.  Any time now he might
even get his own voice back.
"No," said Gary, and his voice sounded
choked.  Jim moved his hand, vaguely at first but with growing control,
stroking the side of Gary's face and his hair, and kissed between his eyebrows,
his forehead, his eyelid.  The lashes seemed wet, and he licked Gary's
eye tenderly before he pulled back to look.  Gary stared back gravely,
his full mouth held in a slight pout like a child, and Jim kissed him there
too, even more gently, little tiny kisses with his lips barely open. 
Gary took a deep, shaky breath and then another, closed his eyes, and every
part of his body seemed loose and soft.  Jim kissed his forehead again.
"Jim," Gary whispered like a sigh.
"Yes."
"You never did this before."
"No, not this."  Kissed Gary's eyebrow,
brushed the hair the wrong way for the pleasure of its tickling against
his lips.
A sharp exhalation, which Jim thought was
meant to be a laugh.  "I think . . . there must be a rule against
corrupting innocent cadets."
"No, don't think so.  But," he smiled
when Gary opened his eyes curiously, "I'm sure there is . . . about making
a big funky mess . . . in the sim booths."
"Yeah."  Another half-laugh. 
"Yeah."
But they lay for some time not doing anything
about it.  When Gary moved to get up at last, Jim reached out and
caught his wrist. Suddenly he had to know:  "You wanted me
in Iowa?  Didn't you?  Say it."
"Yeah."  Gary smiled.  "I did. 
I'm not blind.  Sure."
"Then why not?"
"That farm is your territory.  Sim
booths . . . sim booths are mine."
It was like the time Jim broke his arm
and, for a moment, didn't feel anything.  It was like the dream symbols
he'd learned about in Psych Self-Exams, which would eventually speak their
meanings if the dreamer let them.  The voice in Historical Docs had
been ready to pay for something.  Sim booths were Gary's territory.
He realized by the look on Gary's face
that he hadn't intended to say so much.  That meant a good deal, but
at the moment Jim felt such a wave of helpless outrage against the no-win
scenarios of the universe that he couldn't feel comforted.  He sat
up so fast that he didn't notice his own pains and Gary, though he flinched
away, couldn't escape, and Jim caught him around the waist and held on
as hard as he could, face buried in Gary's side.
"Oh," said Gary softly, and let his hands
fall to Jim's head and shoulder, just resting there.
Later, Jim would remember this as the moment
that he knew, in the back of his mind, that he would reprogram the Kobayashi
Maru.  And win it.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

*****
May, Jim's Senior Year, Again
***
Between reprogramming the Kobayashi Maru,
beating it, and being called on the carpet (and then commended) for it,
Jim was busy for a solid week, and had no time to spend with Gary. 
In fact, he'd only gotten one message from him in that week, and Jim had
tried hard to believe Gary was studying, or knew Jim was studying, or ...
well, it didn't matter any more, because they were both here in the campus
pub tonight.  Jim leaned on the bar, with a beer at his elbow, looking
into Gary's cola-color eyes and pitching his voice to cut through the noise
of the cadets around them.
But suddenly Gary was distracted, and Jim
followed his gaze to the door.  People were streaming in, and one
of them was blond and broad-shouldered and loud in a red Security or Engineering
uniform, his Irish accent too lilting to be true.  Jim had always
suspected Finnegan of putting that accent on.  In fact, he'd said
so, once, to another cadet. That was back when he was too new to know how
gossip traveled or that Finnegan considered "plebes" fair game.  Then
Finnegan heard about it, tracked Jim down, and beat him up, slowly and
with a great show of condescension - as if, at twenty, he was doing 15-year-old
Jim some favor.  After that, Jim had kept his ideas of authentic ethnicity
to himself.  And spent a lot of time trying to evade and cleaning
up after Finnegan's ideas of reprisal.  Jim had also found out, around
the same time, that Finnegan's father was the Admiral in authority over
the training cruises for the Academy, certainly not someone he wanted to
offend.
But surely Gary hadn't come to the Academy
until Finnegan had already graduated?  So who was he looking
at?  And then Jim saw another blonde head, a complex arrangement of
curls and braid, and the head turned and it was Ruth.  Ruth, with
Finnegan!  Here!
She didn't look as if she were having a
good time - or, frankly, as if she had chosen to come here.  For one
thing, in this mob of cadet uniforms and jumpsuits, short kimono and jeans,
singlets and sweats, shorts, tunics and T-shirts, she was in a long formal
gown.  It had white lace on one side and black on the other with some
sort of orange frill, and she was even wearing long earrings.  Jim
shook his head, glad not to have to dwell on it or go on feeling the slight
pang it still gave him to look at her.  Gary was right here, with
him, and he went back to his interrupted invitation.
"Anyway, Gary?" - and Gary turned back
to Jim - "So there's this two-week break after the end of exams and before
the big training cruise, for me anyway - a few people are still taking
Kobayashi Marus and so forth, but I'm free, and I thought I'd go home. 
Say goodbye to people, see Mom, but mostly bum around.  Want to come
along?"
"Oh, no, Jim baby, Gary can't do that,"
said that detestable Irish lilt.  Damn, Finnegan always could sneak
up on him.  Jim turned in confused irritation and found both of them,
Finnegan and Ruth, like ghosts come to haunt him.  "Can ya, Gary?"
Finnegan asked, and Jim looked at Gary's miserable expression and knew
the main answer, but still not why. For once, Finnegan didn't keep him
waiting.  "'Cause he'll be with us in the Finnegan household, home
'n' dry, like usual.  Gary here's practically me adopted brother,
didn't ya know, Jimmy?  Me father's taken him under the fam'ly wing. 
Admiral Finnegan's proto-jay, here," and Finnegan patted Gary's
arm, and Jim felt absolutely ill. Gary knew Finnegan.  And had never
said so, though Jim had talked about the pranks and the beating. 
Gary knew Finnegan well.  How well?
Gary said nothing at all.  For a dreadful
moment, the roar of talk around them swept past and left them stranded,
looking at each other.
"I didn't know that," Jim forced out at
last.
"Ob-viously not, Jimmy me boy,"
Finnegan gloated, and Jim knew he was being irrational, but he was seconds
away from slugging him right in his grinning mouth.
Gary turned his back on all of them and
grabbed his beer, gulping from the mug.
"Jim," said Ruth in her soft voice, "is
there an old jukebox here or not?  I heard there was, but Mick didn't
seem to know about it."
This was not possible for anyone who'd
ever been to the pub before, and Jim was certain that Mick Finnegan had
been one of its best customers and maybe still was, but this was no time
to look a gift excuse in the mouth.  "I'll show you," Jim said and
took Ruth's elbow, and they twisted through the talking, laughing crowd.
The jukebox was an antique, all right,
a good 250 years old, and had been elaborately rebuilt around a modern
musicvendor, so it still played.  Ruth prompted Jim to tell her everything
he knew about it, and under her tact he gradually relaxed a little. 
She picked out a favorite song and paid for it, and since it was one they
had often danced to, Jim pulled her into his arms when it began, and they
swayed together to its beat.
"Oh, Ruth," he said after a while. 
The bittersweet irony of this situation nearly overwhelmed him.  She
looked up gravely, and he tried to make a joke of it.  "Fancy meeting
you here."
She smiled sadly.
"You know," he brushed her jaw with the
tips of his fingers, "you look beautiful, but I have to ask - why are you
dressed this way?"
"Mick," she answered, and it was enough,
but she went on, "Mick told me we were going to a formal reception and
dance.  Even when he picked me up, I didn't get it . . . he's in uniform,
after all . . . "
Jim's mouth was actually open to say that
Finnegan was and always had been a mean bastard, but at the last moment
he realized she might feel obliged to defend him, and the last thing he
wanted to do was quarrel with Ruth. "Oh, Ruth," he said again.
She put her head on his shoulder and the
dance became a straightforward hug.  It occurred to Jim that this
tableau might well be Finnegan's plan for Gary, but he didn't care enough
at the moment to stop.  Let Gary see.  Let him feel some of the
confused bitterness Jim felt now.
"Jim, when we came in . . . I mean, are
you with Gary now?"
"I don't know," he said, the absolute truth
of it frightening him.  "It's all confused.  Oh, Ruth, with you
it was so simple, why isn't it simple now?"
"I don't know either, Jim," she said.
He made a decision.  He cradled the
back of her head in his hand, lightly, feeling the carefully-arranged curls
in his palm.  "Ruth," he said tenderly, "let's have one more simple
night.  OK?  Wouldn't it make you feel good?  Oh, Ruth,
it'd feel so good to me."  He held her shoulders and pulled her back
to look at her face, and she didn't look as if she were planning to say
no.  "We could really go dancing," he coaxed, and they both smiled.
"All right, Jim."
"Call me darling again, sweet Ruth? 
Just for tonight?"
"All right, Jim darling."
They didn't run into either Gary or Finnegan
on their way out.
Of course, it wasn't as simple as it had
been.  The two who were not there were in both their minds, and the
limits of their single night stood like walls around them.  Yet Jim
did take comfort in being with Ruth, and he thought she enjoyed herself
too.
They went to the reception, after stopping
at Jim's dorm so he could change into his dress uniform and pick up his
invitation - actually, this event was primarily for graduating cadets,
but Jim hadn't intended to go because underclassmen were not invited -
and they danced, and ate hors d'oeuvres at a table decorated with orange
flowers, real but looking almost exactly like the fabric ones appliqued
to Ruth's dress.  Jim scooped one out of the bowl of water where it
lay and blotted it on the tablecloth and gave it to Ruth, who laughed and
raised it to her face.  Its scent, pleasantly sharp like a marigold
but stronger, stayed on Jim's hands.
She held it until they danced again, and
then returned it to the bowl.  This was a slow song, and they moved
to hold each other as if the past eight months had never happened, and
they were still lovers, and Jim was only waiting for the right moment to
ask her to think about marrying him.  Her body warmed through the
close-fitting lace.  Actually the outfit was more pantsuit than skirt,
Jim realized as the dance pressed them together and their steps intertwined. 
Jim felt her legs around one of his, her inseam rubbing against his upper
thigh.  He tightened his arm around her waist.  Her breasts were
soft against his chest.  She lifted her face to his and he kissed
her, just a light pressure.
It was a relief to be able to just assume,
not to have to change the rules.  "Where should we go?" he asked her,
certain that she understood exactly what he meant and would answer.
"I want another dance," she said quietly. 
"Then . . . my apartment, if you want."
She hadn't really called him 'Jim darling'
since he'd asked her to.
The next number was faster-paced, and when
he swung Ruth out he could see her nipples erect against the lace, and
when they moved around the dance floor he noticed how many other reception
guests also saw how beautiful and sexy she was.  And she danced well; 
he'd forgotten how much fun it was, dancing with her.  Actually they
had two more dances because the next one was slow again and he just gathered
her close and rocked her.  So warm and lovely.  "Babe, sweet
Ruth," he murmured, and she snuggled closer.
"Mick calls me that," she said thoughtfully.
"I guess he's a baseball-history fan too,"
said Jim, thinking how strange it was to have anything at all in common
with Finnegan.  Much less a girlfriend.
And much less Gary.
No use thinking about that right now.
He buried his face in Ruth's hairdo and
kissed the top of her head.  The music was ending.  "Ready to
go?" he murmured, and she nodded.
There was a rank of autocabs outside the
door and they got in the nearest one.  Ruth keyed in her address. 
Then they settled into the seat and each other's arms.
There was such familiarity in these kisses
that Jim fell into them without thought or comparison.  Ruth didn't
like the fierce invasion of his tongue;  she lapped and nibbled and
sucked at his lips but always pulled back if he moved in too hard. 
When she paused, he rubbed his cheek against hers and trailed little, gently-sucking
kisses over her jaw and down her neck, brushing aside the wires of her
earring, to the inch-wide cloth on her shoulder.  Meanwhile his hands
too had been roving, the yielding roughness of the lace a tactile game
he enjoyed so much he almost didn't regret that it separated him from her
skin.
He slid his tongue under one strap while
his fingers teased at the other, and as she arched her back and neck, he
licked down the edge of her neckline to its lowest point, between her breasts
but too far above them.  Then over the lace again, and she was leaning
back in the corner of the seat as he circled one nipple with his fingertips
and the other with his tongue.
"Oh, yes, Jim," sighed Ruth, "use the lace,
it feels so good."
So he pinched and licked upward a little
more, making sure to move the lace against her tightening skin, and then
he switched so that his mouth was on her other breast and the cloth he
rubbed with his palm was wet.  She moaned.  It seemed forever
since he'd done this and it was as easy and satisfying as if he'd never
stopped.
Lace down her side, lace on her round hip,
lace in the soft hollow that fluttered with her shallow gasps as he found
her navel, so he shifted back into the other corner of the seat and leaned
down and used his tongue there too, while his hands moved out and in around
her thighs.  The folds of material were a nuisance now, and though
he loved brushing the dampness of her lace-covered crotch and hearing someone
other than himself say "oh," so helplessly, he wasn't really sorry when
the cab stopped and he knew that soon she'd take the lace off and then
they'd fuck.
He sat up but so did she and in a moment
she had tightened her legs around him and pulled herself into his lap. 
He heard the lace scrape across the cloth of his trousers and felt her
fitting herself around the hard lump of his cock.  She squirmed a
little and he thrust uncontrollably, his own head back and his eyes half-closed.
Then she laid her hands flat on his chest
and lunged up, off him, past him and out of the cab.  She stood then,
visibly shaking, on rain-dark pavement spattered with blue and green from
the lights on her building's exoskeleton, while he recovered, sat up, and
put a credit chip through the feebox, his own hands unsteady.
He got out, turned to her and put an arm
round her waist, and they were as near as they could be and still walk
up the little staircase to her door.
"When did it rain?" he asked, but she just
shook her head, unlocking the door with a swipe of a key card that still
reminded him of a little plastic tongue, only flatter.
The building was really more a boarding
house than an apartment complex, and the foyer was furnished with a rug,
a coatrack and a little table.  Further down the hall was a ceiling
light that edged the objects on the table but gave little sense of what
exactly they were, even if Jim had been interested.  Ruth paused,
looking, but turned back right away and took his hand, and they went up
the stairs to her rooms.
Again she used the key card, and then the
old-fashioned knob like the ones at home in Iowa;  she reached back
to the wall to turn on the light manually.  Her bed was still covered
with a puffy down comforter and six pillows, and she still had scented
candles on the dresser and the windowsill and the table.  She moved
to light them and Jim said "Ruth -" in protest at the delay, but she just
looked puzzled and he didn't want to argue with her now any more than he
had in the pub.
So she lit them while he sat on the edge
of the bed.  Then she turned the overhead light off. "This outfit
is complicated to get out of," she said, "and I'd rather not have an audience. 
I'll be right back . . . darling," and she smiled over her shoulder, just
enough to bring out her dimples in the shifting candlelight, and went into
the bathroom.
Jim took a long breath of the mingled floral
odors of the candles, and then got up and began to undress methodically. 
The little armchair with the flowers on it was still in the nearest corner
and he draped his uniform pants and tunic over the back, and dropped his
socks and briefs in the seat, and his boots in front of it.  Ruth
hated a mess and this was more or less tidy.  Then he went back to
the bed and rolled down the comforter and the blanket, and after looking
around a little and not seeing a better place, he put that mass of bedding
on the chair too.  Then he went back and sat on the bed again. 
After about ten seconds he got up and resettled, back against the heap
of pillows at the headboard, displaying himself a bit, touching himself
a bit more.
And then she did come out of the bathroom,
and the light behind her made her seem to glow.  She was still wearing
lace, but this time a short white negligee that he remembered was tied
down the front with little ribbon bows.  She had taken her hair down,
so it flowed around her shoulders.  "Oh, Jim," she said with humor
and desire plain in her voice, "Are you showing off?"
"Aren't you?" he asked.  "Come here,
Ruth."
The lace had been fun before but now he
wanted her skin, and so he moved to the edge of the bed and, hands on her
waist, positioned her between his legs, and kissed the base of her throat,
down the channel of her breastbone where the skin was smooth and sweet
as milk, down to the first bow, which he untied with his teeth.  She
pulled his head up and fed on his lips as she had in the cab, and for a
while he let her, gathering her closer and holding her warmth to him. 
Then she slid her hands down to his chest and pushed a little, so he sat
back, and wetting her lips she slowly pulled the second bow apart. 
He smiled.  She untied the third bow and shrugged out of the negligee,
and he saw she hadn't even bothered to put on the matching panties.
He had to have her on the bed now. 
He leaned forward, braced his foot against the bedframe, wrapped his arms
around her and lifted her clear of the floor, and she squealed, an unlikely
sound but a funny one, and they were both laughing as they rolled over
into the pillows.
In a way they were starting all over; 
they'd both cooled off a lot since the cab.  But he'd been thinking
about her naked body since they danced together at the reception, if not
before, and he had a whole mental list of places he wanted to reacquaint
himself with.  Her breasts, the right one a little smaller than the
left, and the nipple, he remembered, more sensitive - he sucked it now
and she writhed under him and he smiled against her skin.  She had
a mole up high on her inner arm and he turned her elbow outward to find
it and nibbled there too;  that didn't please her as much but he enjoyed
it.  Her scent was sharper there, he could smell her sweat under her
perfume, and he licked the arm and then the side of her breast to try and
get that scent into his mouth and keep it.  She felt for his head
and brought it back to the nipple and he suckled again, happy enough there
to stay for a while and listen to her little pleased murmurs.  Actually
he preferred what he was doing with his hand on the other breast, a rhythmic
squeezing motion that reminded him how really soft she was.  She pushed
up on his ribs and they shifted around so she could be on top, and she
straddled him and leaned her breasts down to his mouth again.  Yes,
all right, he could do this for a while more, and she ran one hand up and
down his side, lightly and then more firmly and farther up into his armpit,
then over onto his chest.  That did feel good.  And better when
she pinched one of his nipples, and better still when she wormed her hand
between them down to the thicker hair below his waist.
Now he pushed up on her shoulders and she
sat up, looking at him as if she didn't know why.  "Don't tease,"
he said, and she grinned a little and then grasped his cock with her little
thin fingers, her breast glistening in the candlelight where he'd sucked
it and her face gone grave and attentive.  He stroked up and down
her back and flank and she moved her other hand absently on his chest as
she grasped and pulled and milked him into complete hardness.  Then
she levered up to lick the tip, just the tip, and he stroked between her
ass cheeks and forward into the wetness of her pubic hair, tangling his
fingers there and just brushing her labia, which he knew she liked. 
One finger farther forward, yes, there - she started and he knew he'd found
it, so he backed up and snaked his finger forward again, another little
nudge, another, and she almost collapsed across his hips.  Then she
sat
up in a rush and turned and straddled him, rubbed herself against him and
he could feel her wetness on his skin, and he took her by the waist and
turned them both on their sides.
"No, let me, let me," she said and rolled
them back, knelt up over him and reached for his cock and opened herself
over it with the other hand, and there, the wet folds of her touched him,
and there, his hands were on her waist and she was settling down on him,
and now she was moving forward and back, up and down, side to side, all
over, holding his forearms.  He almost laughed at her wild gyrations,
but couldn't because he was groaning and thrusting as far up as he could
against the yielding bed. "Oh, oh, oh, o-o-o-o-oh!" she said, her sweet
voice rising as he'd heard it so many times before, and then as she always
did she announced, "Now, Jim!  Now!" and was still except for little
slow shudders that gripped him and sent him over the edge too, and they
were climaxing together, something they'd rarely managed.  She rocked
forward again, pressing her clit against him, he guessed, and he pulled
her down to suck her breast again and she shook a little more.  And
then relaxed, as bonelessly as if she were out cold though he knew she
wasn't.  He let her nipple slip out of his mouth and rubbed his cheek
against it.
They lay still for a few moments, until
he began to wonder if she'd given up asking little goofy questions out
of the blue, and then she said, "Why baseball history?"
Baseball history.  He had to think
for a moment, as usual.  Oh, yes, "Baby - 'babe' is like baby, right? 
So there was this baseball player, back in the 20th century sometime, named
Ruth, called Babe Ruth."
"Was she famous?"
"No, sweetheart, it was a man.  Ruth
was his last name."
"Oh."  She was quiet for a few seconds,
maybe thinking, but apparently still had trouble with it.  "A man."
"You're much sexier than he was,"
Jim said, smiling.
Another pause.  "If I think about
this for a while, will it make sense to me?" she asked.
"Probably not, it's just a tiny joke. 
For me, anyway, it happened by mistake, and then I noticed it and thought
it was kind of funny, and then I got used to calling you that and didn't
think about it any more."
"Do you really think that's who Mick is
thinking about too, when he calls me Babe?"
There was something he hadn't really wanted
to be reminded of.  "Don't know, Ruth," he said, sighing.  "I
never have understood how Finnegan thinks."
Now, though, he *had* been reminded, and
he began to feel that this interlude was nearly over, and to wish for his
own bed and his own things around him, and fresher air than this sex-laden
flowery smoke.  He stirred, and she pushed herself up onto one elbow
and looked down at him.  "You're thinking of going," she said without
reproach.
"A little.  It's nice here," he said,
stroking her.
"It was nice, tonight, with you," she said,
and kissed him lightly.  "But if you need to go, I understand."
He took another deep breath, not sure what
he really did need.  But she was right, he couldn't really stay until
morning.
"Well . . . " he said, and she laughed
a little and kissed his chin once more.
"Want to shower first?"
"Mmm, no, not a shower."
"Well, use what you want," she said. 
"The green towels are fresh."
So he did get up, and she rolled back into
the bed, seeming perfectly contented.
He didn't shower, which would take too
long, and was somehow too domestic.  But he did clean himself up with
a damp washcloth and splash cold water on his face to wake himself up,
and he wet down his hair and combed it back.
Then he came out and dressed under her
eyes, which felt awkward, but his clothes were on the chair so there was
no help for it.  He put the covers back on the bed, too, while she
lay there, and that amused them both.  Then he was ready;  she
sat up, and he perched on the edge of the bed and took her face between
his hands.  "Ruth, you are too sweet," he said.  "You were wonderful
to me tonight."  He kissed her forehead.  "Make Mick treat you
better."
"I can take care of myself, Jim. 
And I didn't do this tonight just for you."
"Good, I'm glad you enjoyed it."
"Couldn't you tell, Jim?  Jim darling?" 
And they were both smiling and Jim's heart was hurting, but he did have
to leave eventually.  He kissed her one last time.
"Ruth," he said, heard the longing in his
own voice, and stopped.  He thought she'd understand why he didn't
say goodbye.  He left the room without looking back, and closed the
door behind him in the dark hallway, and the air smelled sharp and lonely. 
He took a deep breath of it and went down the stairs.
Then something else, something familiar,
teased his nose just as he was at the front door, and with its handle in
his hand, he turned back curiously.  Light came in through the crack
in the door and fell gently on the table in the foyer, where one of the
same orange flowers lay that he had seen at the reception, and had given
Ruth as a joke - but surely she had left that bloom behind?  Yes,
he knew she had:  she couldn't have had a flower with her in the cab
without his noticing.  Where had this one come from?
He looked more closely and noticed a sheet
of paper nearby.  "Good girl," it said in big black letters, and then
initials that were too tangled for Jim to read, like a monogram.
Jim felt ashamed of himself.  Reading
someone else's notes.  He turned away and went through the door, pulling
it closed behind him.  He knew the way to the nearest muni stop. 
He felt empty and out of place here, and he wanted to get back to the Academy
grounds and sleep.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

*****
Still May, Jim's Senior Year
***
Jim keyed in his password and the door
of his dorm room opened, but the lights weren't on.  He stepped in
anyway, saying "Lights," but nothing happened.  "Lights, one hundred
percent," he tried again.  The corridor was only half lit for the
night but this was a complete, stifling darkness.  "Systems check,
lights," he said, expecting to hear the computer say 'Working.'
"Lights ten percent," said Gary's voice,
and a dim illumination showed Jim the suddenly alien space of his own room.
Gary got up from Jim's bed.  He was
naked.  He walked toward Jim slowly, and Jim looked at the body he
had only seen like this once before - and then not quite like this. Gary's
cock was nearly flaccid, completely covered by the soft sheath of skin,
gathered at the tip.
"I've been doing myself on your bed," said
Gary, and now he was right in front of Jim, and then he moved like a guard
dog attacking an intruder, and Jim was slammed against the wall, held by
Gary's hands on his arms and the cruel glint in Gary's eyes.  "While
you were doing the girl."
Jim responded without having to think: 
he was angry himself.  "Right.  She's an old friend.  Ruth."
"You fucked her.  Don't give me 'old
friend.'"
"I did."  His own hands came up and
grabbed Gary's arms.  "I fucked her.  Smell her on me, Gary? 
I asked and she said yes and I fucked her and we both enjoyed it. 
No secrets, no weeks of wondering.  Are you asking if I'm sorry? 
I'm.  Not.  Sorry!"  He was shaking Gary now, and Gary kept
his neck straight and glared into Jim's eyes the whole time, riding back
and forth in his hands.
Yet, Jim realized, there was something
else beside anger in his face. "No secrets?" asked Gary softly, and the
sound crawled up Jim's spine, and he let go.
But Gary went on.  "Why do you think
you ran into her tonight?"
"What do you mean?" asked Jim, though he
thought he knew from the tone of Gary's voice.
"Mick brought her because I asked him to. 
I met you at the pub so he could bring her there.  A set up, Jim. 
I did it."
"Then what the fuck are you so angry
about?"  And hurt;  there was pain in the brown eyes too, but
Jim couldn't think about that now.  "Was I supposed to bring her here? 
Was it a threesome I spoiled?  And what about your adopted brother? 
Or is he working the hidden camera?  Finnegan!"  he yelled
the name, though he didn't really think Finnegan was there.  But then,
he'd been wrong before, this evening.  Anyway Finnegan didn't appear.
Jim grasped Gary's waist when he tried to step away.  "Set me up! 
You've been fucking setting me up all along!"
"I knew it was an act, all that innocence,
all that goodness.  I knew it, I just had to see it, had to see you
just walk away."  Suddenly Gary leaned in, slid his arms up Jim's
to his neck, bent his head and spoke nearly touching Jim's lips as he had
outside the mess hall, "Now stop pretending.  Come down here in the
mud with the rest of us."
Jim pushed him away so hard he staggered,
and Jim's own elbows bounced back into the wall.  "Get dressed and
get out of here," Jim said.
Gary stood still, and ran his hand up and
down the side of his body.  "You want me to get dressed," he said
languidly, and rubbed his chest with the other hand, "do you?"  Both
hands down to his thighs, and then up to his nipples, and then, slowly,
down over his stomach.
"Yes," said Jim.
"And now?"  Gary stroked his cock,
running the backs of his fingers along the lengthening shaft.  He
took one step, and was under a ceiling light; recessed, its beam came straight
down and struck the dark rough hair, the planes of shoulders and the curves
of pectoral muscles and arms ... and his cock, rising into the light as
he rubbed it, the head reaching out of the foreskin, gleaming.
Jim swallowed.  "Yes," he said.
Gary tilted his head back and the light
spilled over his face, and he fingered his own balls and thrust his hips
forward.  "Say yes again," he said, "you sound so good when you say
yes."
Jim gritted his teeth and ignored his own
arousal.  "Gary!"  he snapped.  "Stop it!  For god's
sake, I'll call Security if you don't get out!  Now get your clothes
on!  I don't know what game you're playing but I'm not. 
Do you hear me?  Get out of my room and don't ever break in here again. 
I'm changing my lock code tomorrow.  Today, I mean."
Gary's hands slipped away from his cock
and he stood straighter, but he didn't move otherwise.  "You can't,"
he said.  "I changed the access.  I left your lock code as alternate,
but it's not the main one any more."
This wasn't just something Gary would be
reprimanded for - if Jim called Security now, Gary would be expelled and
arrested.  "You've lost your mind," said Jim.  "What did you
think you were doing?  Gary, why?"
"I wanted to come in here," Gary spoke
evenly, as if what he was saying were ordinary.  "I wanted to touch
everything.  I wanted to try on your clothes and taste your toothpaste. 
And jerk off on your bed."
"Any of that, all of it, if you hadn't
broken in, if you hadn't done this," said Jim.  "Did you think I wouldn't
let you in?  I've imagined you here over and over.  Gary - "
his throat closed.  He shook his head, swallowed, cleared his throat,
but his voice was still rough when he spoke again.  "You ruined it. 
I want you to go."
"No, I won't.  Can't," Gary said,
voice dropping.  He turned, and the movement seemed aimless; 
he wandered to the armchair in the corner and sat in it, then drew up his
legs - was he cold? - and curled into the curve of the padding, arms loosely
around his knees.
Jim stepped away from the wall.  "Why
not?"
Gary buried his face in the crook of one
elbow.
Jim looked around for Gary's clothes and
finally spotted them in a heap beside the bed.  He went to get them. 
Though the dim light made it hard to tell, Jim thought Gary really had
jerked off in the tumbled sheets.  He took the clothes over to Gary
and crouched down in front of the chair.
He wanted to be angry but the figure huddled
in front of him looked too defeated and lost.  In fact, while he was
trying to think of what to say, Gary shivered, and Jim found himself rubbing
the chill flank nearest him.  "Gary," he said, and somehow his voice
had gone soothing, "Gary, tell me what's going on."
"Closer," Gary muttered, so low that Jim
was already leaning nearer before he registered what the word was.
"Gary?" he asked, his mind grasping at
alternate explanations.
"Good ... keep rubbing, it looks like sex. 
Say something sexy."
Jim didn't know why he was going along
with this, but said, "Gary, your skin feels good."
"Not real convincing."  Gary rubbed
his forehead back and forth on his arm and Jim decided he'd save the comments
on Gary's stage direction for later.
"Gary, baby, why didn't you just tell me? 
How you felt?" Jim said in what he hoped was a sexy growl, and leaned even
nearer, until his head touched Gary's and he might have been kissing Gary's
ear or thereabouts.
"Finnegan is recording."  The
murmur was even quieter.
"When this is over I'm going to kill you,"
whispered Jim, meaning it, or anyway meaning something very painful.
"Finnegan first."
"You got that right.  Where is he?"
"Don't know."
"So let's stop the game and find him."
"No.  Can't.  Listen, Jim. 
It's important.  It's important."
Jim had never heard him sound so desperate. 
"What?"
"Listen, we have to fool him, we have to
fuck."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not."
Jim rubbed Gary's leg and didn't reply.
"Trust me," Gary said, voice thinning into
a whisper.
Jim sat back, squatting now beside the
chair, nearly an arm's length from Gary, who raised his head.  His
expression was tragic, and then utterly blank.  Jim cupped Gary's
face in his hands, rubbed his thumbs across the full lips, and said for
Gary and for the recording, "How can I trust you, baby?"
Gary's lips parted and one of Jim's thumbs
tipped into his mouth.  Jim pushed in, feeling Gary's teeth and tongue,
and Gary sucked the thumb for a second and then bit down, hard enough to
make Jim jump and pull his thumb back out.  "Don't call me baby,"
said Gary, a glint in his eyes. "Call the blonde bitch anything you want
but call me by my name."
Jim slid his hands to grasp Gary's whole
head and stood, pulling Gary up, and Gary awkwardly followed.  Jim
wasn't being gentle, and he pulled Gary's face to his and kissed him, teeth
hard enough against teeth to bruise both sets of lips between, and Gary
grabbed handfuls of Jim's back and squeezed hard.  "Gary," Jim said
when he broke the kiss, and then bit Gary's chin, not as hard as Gary had
bitten his thumb, and said "Gary," again, and bit high up on Gary's cheek,
harder.  "Gary."  No, it wouldn't be hard to fuck him. 
Now when he pulled back, there was a different glint in Gary's eyes, which
Jim thought were watering from the pain.
"You have something with you, I hope,"
Jim said to him.  "Because otherwise I'm fucking you dry."
"Had it with my clothes," said Gary, "did
you lose it?"
"You look," Jim said, and pushed him away.
He was going to strip for the recorders. 
He didn't know how he felt about it or why he was doing it.  But before
he could unfasten his dress tunic, Gary grabbed him by the forearms and
said, "Don't think you're running this."
Several things to say, more or less to
Gary and to Finnegan's recording, went through Jim's mind.  He chose
one almost at random.  He reached out for Gary, ran his hands firmly
down the bare chest and stomach and upper thighs, then up his sides, then
drew him closer and rubbed down again to his ass, then up again until one
hand cupped the back of Gary's head and the other curved over his shoulder,
his own fingers even with his eyes.  All this time Gary had stood
still.  Jim said, pitched to carry beyond their embrace, "I want to. 
Let me."  Slid one hand down again, slowly, slipped his fingers into
the crack of Gary's ass, rubbed in and out of it.  Gary sighed and
leaned his forehead against Jim's hair.  "Yes, let me.  Yes. 
Tell me.  This excites you.  You want me this way."
"I ... want you," said Gary, not qualifying
it but sounding almost honest.  As honest, maybe, as either of them
could be tonight.
"Gary."  Jim rewarded him with a better
kiss, moving swiftly into his mouth but not trying to hurt him, licking
at Gary's tongue and sucking it into his mouth, holding him.  Holding
his ass again, circling his hands on the cheeks, squeezing them, almost
the massage he'd imagined in Iowa.  But it would be better not to
think of Iowa.
Jim reached between them and pulled Gary's
half-erect cock upward, between their stomachs.  Then he took Gary's
hips in his hands and fit his cock between Gary's thighs, and rubbed against
him, rubbed the cloth of his pants against Gary's skin and his own. 
It felt rough even to Jim, and Gary squirmed as if to move away but Jim
held him.  Then Gary began to work his hands into Jim's clothes, moving
the hem of the tunic up, sliding his hands into Jim's waistband and trying
to work around to the fly, and soon they were struggling, Jim to hold their
position and Gary to undress Jim.  Gary scratched his nails up the
skin of Jim's back, and Jim shivered all over, once, and again.
"This is what you want too," said Gary,
staring down into Jim's eyes, and Jim couldn't have denied it even if there
had been no tape to record his answer.  Gary in his room, in his bed
- he hadn't been lying when he said he'd fantasized it.
Jim's stillness let Gary slip his hands
around between them and in a moment Jim's pants were unfastened and Gary
was pushing them down, palms flat against Jim's legs.  Warm. 
Strange, Jim thought, how even though Gary had seemed so cold in the armchair,
his hands now were so warm.  Gary took off Jim's boots and tossed
them, and then the pants, away.  Jim's hands settled on the sides
of Gary's head, moved in circles around his ears, in his hair.  Gary
knelt up and took Jim's cock in his mouth as simply as if he did it every
night.  For all Jim knew - the bitter thought ambushed him - Gary
did do this with someone every night.  Jim stepped back, pulling himself
from Gary's mouth.  The air was chill on his wet cock.
Gary looked up, and then stood, and they
stared at each other.
"Bring the lights up," said Jim.
"Lights, forty percent."
That was better, not glaring but much brighter
than Ruth's bedroom.  "I want this to be different," he said right
out of that thought.  "I want to change the rules.  I want a
scenario I can win.  We can win."  Gary raised his chin and Jim
stepped in again and held the sides of his face, felt the warmth of his
body, looked into his eyes.  "Come with me.  I've been
in the mud, I'm a farm boy.  That's where things grow, Gary." 
He pulled Gary's head down to his shoulder and spoke directly into his
ear.  "This is ours if we make it ours.  Forget Mick.  Make
love to me."  He kissed Gary's ear, probing and tracing its curves,
and Gary quivered and kissed Jim's neck, then swung his head up and it
was just Gary and Jim, they were alone, Gary tasted so good and he was
licking fire into Jim's mouth, it felt like, and holding Jim's waist under
the tunic, hands nearly spanning the small of Jim's back.  Jim's hands
were all over Gary's skin until he scarcely knew what he was touching.
Gary broke the kiss and ducked his head
and took a fold of Jim's tunic between his teeth as if to tear it, then
let go.  "Take this fucking shirt off," he said breathlessly.
Jim moved his arms to do it and Gary stepped
back once to let him, and then again, eyes huge and fixed on Jim, and then
seemed to force his head to one side, then the other.  Looking for
his clothes, Jim supposed.
Jim pulled the tunic over his head and
dropped it, then strolled past Gary, nearly touching him, to bend over
the heap of clothes by the armchair.  Gary watched him.  Jim
found the soft gelpack of lube and brought it back, walking out of his
way to brush past Gary again, to the bed where he stripped off the wet,
tangled topsheet and cover.  Gary was right behind him now, and took
the gelpack from his hand as he turned, opened it, and cupped one of Jim's
hands in his own to spurt the clear gel into it.  Then he moved his
hand away just far enough to put gel in his own palm too.  He dropped
the pack and reached for Jim's cock with both hands, stroking and lifting
it and, as it hardened more and stood up, smoothing on the gel.  Jim
swayed on his feet with the delicious swelling, slippery feeling, and pressed
his empty hand flat on Gary's shoulder, urging him to the bed.
Gary sat and then lay down and then rolled
away onto his side.  He lifted one leg, and Jim rubbed gel between
his fingers and then there, between Gary's cheeks, back and forth and around
the opening and into it, and Gary pushed back almost immediately, taking
the whole finger faster than Jim would have put it in.  Jim kissed
his shoulder and massaged his ass and wanted another pair of hands to stroke
the rest of him, he was so beautiful in the half-light, his dark head tousled
and his back beginning to arch and his hands on his own cock.
Two fingers now, and Jim remembered to
tuck the nail of the index finger against the front of the middle finger
and he moved them in and out in smooth sweeps, and Gary rocked back and
forth.  Jim couldn't see well enough, so he murmured into Gary's ear,
"On your stomach," and kissed him on the neck and then near the spine as
he moved.  Gary grabbed the pillow and stuffed it under himself, and
Jim knelt between the strong thighs and stroked them, then separated Gary's
ass and looked at the glistening opening.  He felt a little awkward
as he used his hand to position his cock, but he was new to this too and
feeling awkward now was better than hurting Gary by not being in the right
place.  He pushed a little and Gary pressed his shoulders into the
mattress, tilting his ass up even farther, and Jim leaned over and licked
his back as he rocked in, a little, a little more, hands holding Gary's
hips and then sliding up his sides and then back down to his hips for each
new stroke.  The way Gary gripped him was unbelievable and the way
his profile looked, eyes closed and lips ajar against the mattress, was
beyond what Jim had imagined.  He wished he could reach to kiss Gary,
or even that he'd let Jim call him by any of the silly, sweet names so
easy to use for girls like Ruth, but instead Jim thrust deeper and Gary
braced his hands and pushed back.
"Yeah, Jim, fuck harder," Gary said, eyes
still closed, "harder, harder!"
And Jim did, sweating and straining, hearing
the slap and feeling the jolt of each thrust, and Gary really was on all
fours now, and the bed creaked under them.  Tighter, faster, harder,
and Jim knew it wouldn't take him long now - a few more - maybe one more
- "Gary!" he cried, coming, "Gary!" and collapsed onto Gary's bent back.
Gary twisted under him and spilled him
onto his side.  Jim heard a wet sound as his cock slipped from Gary's
ass.  Feeling wrung out, Jim lay unmoving, eyes closed, as the bed
tilted under him.  Then he was rolled onto his back and felt a knee
on each side of his ribs, and when his eyes opened, the first thing he
focused on was Gary's hard-on hovering over him. The foreskin had retracted
and the broad head was completely bare, the color of a cherry caramel.
Jim had seen a picture of someone lying
flat and being mouth-fucked - it hadn't looked like anything he wanted
to try tonight.  He stroked up Gary's legs until his hands were flat
against Gary's pelvis and his forearms braced against Gary's thighs, for
the contact but also for the leverage.  Gary was staring at him, just
staring, his face in shadow.  Then suddenly he bent down and buried
his face in Jim's tangled hair to murmur, "Mick wanted face-fucking."
Jim turned toward him, said, "We're not
doing this for Mick," and pushed, and again harder when Gary resisted. 
Then he let himself roll onto his side and Jim put his fingers into Gary's
sweaty hair and kissed him, face and throat and chest, hands on his skin
and licking some of the sweat there, and then again because it tasted so
good and because Gary fell onto his back and said "Oh," and moving on,
Jim felt a little dizzy but couldn't tell whether it was tiredness or the
nearness of Gary's cock or the feeling of Gary pliant under his mouth and
hands.  He felt like dropping to sleep and he felt like he couldn't
possibly ever stop touching Gary.
Tasting Gary.  He nearly was. 
This was something he'd done before though he was no expert. He settled
on one elbow and wrapped the other hand around Gary's cock and took the
head into his mouth.  As always it felt twice the size it had looked. 
Smelled musky and exciting.  Tasted salty and ... Jim couldn't have
described it except that it was so different than a woman tasted, so good
and more Gary somehow than his face was.  Jim sucked and licked and
sucked again, and Gary tightened and relaxed the long muscles in his thighs,
not really thrusting, and Jim rocked the heel of his hand against Gary's
balls and tongued him in every way he could think of, even tucking under
the band of the foreskin, which seemed to jolt Gary each time Jim did it. 
Gary moved his hips faster and took gasping, short breaths and Jim could
feel him getting to the edge, hanging there for a few seconds that seemed
to take much longer, and then coming in the rush that always startled Jim
a little, and he took a lot of it in his mouth but pulled back an inch
or so and a lot spilled out too, back down Gary and onto Jim's hand.
"Oh, Jim," came Gary's voice, sounding
far away and full of such mixed feelings that Jim couldn't tell what they
were.  Jim wiped the back of his hand on Gary's thigh, the nearest
dry spot, and licked at the semen.  "Jim," said Gary in surprise
and pleasure and so Jim kept going, leisurely, cleaning Gary off with his
tongue and, for variety, his fingers, while Gary rubbed his shoulder and
head and whatever was under his hand.  He looked as exhausted as Jim
felt.
The very thought of talking was too much
to face though Jim knew that once he wasn't quite so wiped out, he'd want
to slam Gary into the nearest wall and make him say everything, everything
he'd been withholding, his whole damn life story if Jim could get it out
of him.  He shoved weakly at Gary who slid over very slowly, and Jim
reached around the mattress and pulled the edge of the sheet out and around
them as far as it would go when he was pressed full length against Gary. 
Jim was damned if he was leaving this bed for a long while and didn't want
to be colder than he had to be.
When Jim was just dropping off, Gary got
up, and Jim made a sound of protest and held on as much as he could, which
wasn't much at the moment.  Gary smoothed his hair and kissed his
temple, and then after a second's pause, kissed his forehead and his cheek
lingeringly before he got up anyway, and Jim fought his way out of sleep
and pushed himself halfway up on his elbows to see Gary vanish into the
bathroom.  That was probably all right, so Jim collapsed to the bed
again, and was nearly asleep when Gary climbed in, pulling something over
them as he settled back against Jim.  Warm.  Good.  Jim
turned toward him and slipped down into real sleep at last.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

*****
Still May, Jim's Senior Year
***
There are dreams that don't let go easily,
and yet don't rest in memory.  It was that kind Jim woke from, very
slowly, as if pulling each small piece of consciousness away from the clinging
web of the dream.  He was wrapped closely in bedcovers.  Light
lay on his eyelids.  He was alone in the bed.
Why was that strange?
He opened his eyes and the view was the
same as always.  He took a deep breath, letting his eyes close again,
wondering what time it was but not wanting to roll over and look at the
chronometer.  He wished the room had a window.  It was easier
to get up when there was sunshine, or anyway natural light.
Light.  He'd left his on, apparently. 
Weird.
A sound in his ears.  Again. 
Small, nagging, repeated in little bursts, a kind of tapping, then a pause,
then again.  Like little footsteps on some very smooth surface. 
Mice dancing.  No, too small for that.  Ants.  Ants tap-dancing. 
He heard a longer burst of the sounds now, rippling, and he was too curious
to lie still.  He lifted his head carefully and forced his eyelids
open.
OK, the end of the bed was just as usual. 
Sort of.  Bedding all twisted, and this was the spread over him. 
The sound was coming from -
"Oh," he said aloud, though not much sound
came out.  Gary was at Jim's computer terminal, doing manual entry. 
He had on his pants but no shirt, and his hair was wildly rumpled as if
he'd gone there straight from the bed.  Jim's bed.  Jim began
to remember.
What was Gary doing to the computer?
"Gary," said Jim, sitting up.
Gary tapped at the keypad a little more
before he turned.  Looked at Jim, his eyes as warm as if he hadn't
broken into Jim's dorm room and slammed him against a wall and gotten him
into God only knew what kind of weird shit with Finnegan and some sort
of vid recording of Jim and Gary having sex.
Jim remembered saying, early on, 'When
this is over, I'm going to kill you,' and it looked like it was time to
do it.
Except that Gary was smiling at him. "Hullo." 
Smiling, and getting up, and sitting at the edge of the bed, and touching
Jim as if they were ordinary lovers.  "You have no idea," said Gary,
"how incredible you look when you're asleep."  Gary's arm around him,
his hand warm on Jim's back, the other hand smoothing back his hair, loving. 
He hadn't known Gary could be so loving.  "Yeah," Gary said. 
"I've never, ever seen anything like it."
"Is the recorder still on, or do you want
something new?" asked Jim quietly, the pain of Gary's tenderness and falsity
raging in him like fire.
Gary went rigid as stone, and didn't move
at all.  The hand at Jim's back, the other on Jim's neck, simply rested
there as if no longer animate.
It was amazing how everything Gary did
had the power to move Jim so deeply.
Jim took Gary's hand off his neck, and
held it when Gary would have pulled it away, and gripped Gary's other shoulder
as hard as he could.  "It's time you talked to me," he said.
"No," Gary said, and then added before
Jim had time to protest, "it's time I showed you."  After a moment
he leaned in and kissed Jim, mouth closed and lips soft, almost as Jim
had kissed Ruth when he knew it was the last time.  Jim pulled back
in a kind of panic, but Gary was looking at him so intensely that he thought
it couldn't be that - and even now he didn't want it to be that. 
Gary ran one finger along Jim's lower lip, watching it, then looked back
up into his eyes.  "Uh-huh," Gary said, and then sat up and took a
deeper breath, not quite a sigh.  "You've got clean civvies, right? 
Put some on.  Nothing fancy.  Can I borrow a shirt?"
Too much like Gary last night, saying he
wanted to touch Jim's things and wear his clothes, sounding crazy. 
And with Gary's shoulder under his hand Jim realized that nothing he owned
would be big enough anyway.  He shook his head.
"A T-shirt?"  Gary persisted. 
"You haven't got an old stretched-out one?  We can't wear uniforms
where we're going."
"You've got clothes, Gary.  We're
not on Mars.  Go to your room and get some."
A pause.  "Yeah."  Gary looked
down at his hand in Jim's, then up at Jim's face.  "I just . . . I
woke up and you were right there, right with me, you hadn't even rolled
away.  And I thought, this is Jim, he's . . . . " He looked down again.
Jim wanted to pull Gary's head onto his
shoulder.  Or he wanted to kick him right off the end of the bed.
Wanted to feel Gary's mouth parting under his tongue, or Gary's lip splitting
under his fist.  Anger flashed in his mind like a lighthouse beacon. 
He took his hands away and used them to pull himself backward on the sheet,
and Gary looked up warily but without surprise.
Neither spoke.
Gary got up and went back to the desk. 
Just brushed the edge of the keypad with his fingers.  "I put your
access code back the way it was," he said, not looking at Jim.
"For now," Jim added.
Gary's fingertips traced the length of
the pad, slipped to the surface of the desk.  "Will it make a difference
if I promise not to do it again?"
Jim did think, but could only say, "I don't
know.  Will a promise make any difference to you?"
Gary didn't move for several seconds. 
"Should I just go?" he asked then.
Jim imagined it.  Tried to. 
His life back the way it was - when?  October?  Going to the
campus pub, to parties, cruising around, waiting to be attracted?
Never finding out what had happened last
night?  No, impossible, he was already involved there.
So it wasn't a real option even if Gary
had offered it honestly.
"Show me how you did it," Jim said at last.
Gary grinned.  "It won't be hard for
the man who hacked the Kobayashi Maru," he said.
It didn't even take long.  Once Jim
knew, once he'd been shown, he could see how vulnerable the whole system
was.  "This is terrifying," he said.  "We should tell somebody."
"Still trying to get me thrown out?" Gary
asked, but with humor.
"No, but . . . "
Suddenly Gary's face was pressed against
his, and Gary's breathy laughter was right in his ear.  "Oh, Jim,
you're priceless," he said, "you just never stop . . . " and kissed him,
on the skin between ear and sideburn, then on the cheekbone, then beside
the nose, his arms sliding around Jim's bare waist, his fingers into the
tops of the briefs Jim had pulled on when he got out of bed.  Jim
felt tickled, electrified, turned on - and completely suspicious. 
He got his hands on Gary's shoulders and held him off.
This close, he could see how Gary looked
at his eyes one after the other, then at his lips, then licked his own,
and Jim knew he had about one second to ask, "Is this for real?" 
Gripped harder, shook him, repeated it.  "Gary.  Is it? 
Real?"
"Yes," said Gary clearly, still looking
at Jim's mouth. "Real.  The realest thing.  Ever."  And
then as Jim had known would happen, Gary's lips brushed his, pressed closer,
parted, and Jim found his head tipped back and his mouth full of Gary's
tongue and his throat vibrating with a wanting sound. He was still angry,
he reminded himself, but his cock had reminders for him too, and he slid
off the computer chair and he and Gary were on the floor and rubbing against
each other as if they had both forgotten that Gary's pants and Jim's briefs
were in the way.
Dimly Jim remembered that Gary had said
something about getting dressed and going somewhere, something about showing
Jim, and he got as far as "Weren't we -" and the feel of Gary's sliding
body and the sight of Gary's throat stretched out above him simply . .
. stopped Jim from caring.  Instead of finishing the sentence he moved
his head up and licked the throat, kissed it, and Gary's elbows gave and
they rolled over.  Jim straddled Gary and rubbed against him, and
with each movement they both got harder and the cloth between them more
damp.  It felt good to do it but even better to look down at Gary
and see him lose himself in the feeling.  Gary moved his arms above
his head and then out to the sides until he found the leg of the desk to
hold on to, and just put the other palm flat on the floor.  His eyes
slid shut and he moaned, and after a pause moaned again, rocking his hips,
moving his fingers against the floor as if trying to dig them in.
He was so out of control that Jim got a
little of his own brain back, and he knelt and held Gary's hips down when
he pushed up, nipped him above the waist while he was undoing the pants
and pulling them down. Gary wasn't wearing underwear.  Jim's cock
strained anew against his briefs as he slid the waistband over Gary's hips,
breathed in the scent still heavy from last night, and saw Gary's cock
hard and his foreskin rolled back.  Gary writhed under his hands and
Jim loved it, loved every movement and every sound he made.
"Suck me again, Jim," Gary said. 
And of course Jim could do that without needing to move them to the bed
or find the lube, without even having to take his own briefs off.
If he wanted to just do what Gary told
him.
But of course it wasn't like sucking him
was any sort of hardship.
While Jim was thinking, or doing what passed
for thinking at the moment, he was stroking the hard length of Gary's cock,
now grasping and squeezing, now just tracing the veins with his fingers
or playing with the foreskin, feeling its softness, pulling it up and smoothing
it back, and Gary was thrusting up into his hands and still begging, "Your
mouth, Jim, suck me, Jim . . . " a sound that was undeniably sweet. 
Gary wanted it;  Jim wanted it;  what was Jim waiting for?
He rubbed the wrinkles around the foreskin's
band as he lapped at the satin-slick head, then wrapped his lips around
it and moved the skin over the shaft up and down as he sucked.  Jim
developed a rhythm, strong pulls as Gary thrust up, tonguing the head in
between, and then Gary's speed increased and Jim couldn't keep up.
So he stopped.  Pulled his mouth off,
lifted his head, looked at Gary, who tried to follow Jim's mouth but had
to drop back, groaning, "Ohhh," and then, "Don't stop."  And then,
"Please."
Music.
"Cool down," Jim said, voice low and anything
but cool.  "I'm going to take your pants off." Gary reached for him
and Jim retreated, beyond his fingers' touch unless Gary sat up.
He didn't sit up.  Jim pulled the
pants completely down and off, not fast but not too excruciatingly slowly,
without letting his hands touch Gary's skin.  He pushed the mound
of cloth out of the way and skinned out of his briefs as well, and then
sat at Gary's feet looking at him.
Gary put his forearm over his eyes. 
"What?" he asked.
"Don't hide," said Jim, and Gary slowly
put the arm down.  Jim's gaze swept from his half-lidded eyes down
the damp skin of his chest and stomach to his cock, which was shrinking
back into its covering skin.
"I wish I'd seen you sleeping," said Jim,
and picked up Gary's ankles and moved them apart so he could kneel in between
them.  He was completely aware of Gary's body, the sandpaper-rough
skin on the outside ankles and the smoother skin on the inside ones, under
his thumbs - his fingertips slid back to the tough Achilles tendons before
he set the feet down, not touching his own legs. Gary took a quick, deep
breath but lay still.  He was almost flaccid now.  Jim ran his
fingers along the warm calf muscles, in the curling hair, and saw Gary's
cock move, a little.  So he kept doing it, for a while, slowly.
"I like that you're not cut," he said. 
"You know, a girl I went down on had these amazing lips, I mean on her
cunt. They were kind of like your skin.  They closed around her, they
even twisted a little at the end, like I bet you do when you're really
not up at all."
"You may never know," said Gary. 
He moved his arm again, bent it under his head, and settled as if to show
he was willing to watch Jim for a long time.
Jim tried not to smile but his mouth stretched
a little anyway.  He slid his fingers up to the backs of Gary's knees
and circled in that smooth, tender skin.  Jim couldn't see the little
jolts through Gary's body but his knees raised a tiny bit each time. 
And his cock was longer, more of the head showing.
"The first guy I blew," Jim went on, feeling
a strange need to establish that he had a past too, "grabbed my ears and
shoved so hard down my throat that I really thought I'd vomit.  It
wasn't good."
"Bet not."
"I thought of it last night."
Gary's voice was gentle.  "I'm better
than that.  When I face-fuck."
"I've taken it deep since, but it never
does much for me."
"We'll see, sometime."
Jim pressed his fingers up between tendons
to the muscles on the backs of Gary's thighs, as if that were an answer.
And perhaps it was.  And perhaps Gary's legs closing on him made another
kind of promise.  One or both aroused Jim, but he clamped down on
it.  He wasn't ready.
"Jim," Gary said, and then paused, and
then asked, "Do you want me to beg again?"
"No, lie still." Not yet, he meant. He
had moved up between Gary's legs, and they were snug around him now. 
"I waited so long to touch you. You made me wait so long."  His palms
moved flat on Gary's furry thighs, back and forth, over and over, and it
was almost like stroking himself.
Gary let his head fall back to the floor,
and his arms lay limp above it.  His eyes were shut.  He opened
his mouth, said nothing, licked his lips.  "For this," he said at
last.
"Yes," Jim said.  Absolutely for this,
this abandonment, the way Jim's hands were the only thing that moved Gary,
the way his lips hung slack and his cock stood up, the way Jim's hands
could cup the bones of Gary's hips and circle there, and now, the way turning
fingertips slightly toward the groin made Gary's head jerk suddenly and
a new, lower groan come from his mouth.  Jim bent over Gary's erection
and it strained upward as if it knew he was so near. He breathed on it
and Gary's stomach contracted - he was evidently trying that much not to
groan again.
Jim was holding onto himself so hard that
his breath was making a slight wheezing sound.  He lowered his head,
pulling outward on Gary's thighs, letting his hair brush Gary's cock but
otherwise not touching it. Lower, and he put out his tongue and licked
the nubbly skin of Gary's balls, and Gary shook with every stroke. 
It was like licking dried ice-cream, the way it dissolved so fast the shape
of it changed with a touch, because Gary's balls were tightening, changing,
hotter, every time Jim's tongue found them again.  Jim slid his hands
under Gary's ass and felt the muscles rigid as they could go, hard as the
floor beneath them, and when he raised his head Gary made a sound that
brought the hair up on the back of Jim's neck.
Neither of them could wait longer. 
Gary couldn't beg now, but Jim didn't need the words now anyway. 
He took one last look at the surrender in Gary's face and then closed his
eyes and gulped over his cock, opening his throat and stretching his lips
to the hair at the base, grabbing Gary's ass and rubbing himself helplessly
on the carpet as Gary immediately came, jetting so far into Jim that he
couldn't taste any of it, could scarcely feel more than the pulse of it
and the power of having made this happen.  And for now that was enough,
and his own cock twitched and spasmed under him.
When it was over, Jim let Gary's cock slip
out of his mouth, pushed himself up between Gary's legs, and looked down
at the semen blobs and smears on the carpet and at his cock, chafed redder
than in arousal by the tight-woven fiber.  It did hurt, had stung
at the time, but then he'd been too far gone to care.
It looked like Gary still was. Or maybe
it was a kind of shame that kept him lying with his eyes shut while Jim
sat up. After a few more seconds with no response from Gary, Jim got to
his hands and knees and crawled up Gary's side, bent over his head, picked
it up with both hands and turned it face upward.  Gary opened his
eyes but his expression was unreadable.
"Gary?" Jim asked.  "Are you OK?"
"Do you remember," said Gary slowly, "me
telling you to let me go?  In Iowa?"  His head was a dead weight
in Jim's hands, and his arms and legs were still sprawled where orgasm
had left them.
"I remember.  I didn't know what you
meant."
Gary blinked.  "It's too late now,"
he said.  "To let go.  It was already too late then. If you let
go now, Jim, I'll fall.  I'll fall - " he gasped, and struggled up
to clutch at Jim wildly, and Jim held on as Gary tried to press every part
of his body into Jim, holding so tightly that Jim could hardly breathe,
or perhaps that was only the surge of feeling taking him like a wave. 
Gary's face was pushing so hard against Jim's neck and collar bone that
Jim could barely understand him when he said, "Don't let go."
"No," said Jim, holding him.
"Don't."
Jim grasped the back of Gary's head, put
his cheek down into the hair too, and said, "No, I won't.  I won't
let go." Without really meaning to, he found himself rocking back and forth,
not much, but enough to soothe both of them.  It took a long time,
though, before Gary's arms began to loosen, his muscles softened, and he
gradually relaxed in Jim's arms.  And then, although Jim stopped rocking,
they still rested together.
Separating was like waking up, like recovering
from orgasm, like returning to a daily life profoundly though invisibly
changed.  Jim wasn't sure which of them began to move, and it was
a slow process, with pauses between each lowered arm, each shifted leg. 
They couldn't look at each other's faces.  When both were kneeling
on the carpet with a foot or so between them, Gary rubbed his face with
both hands as if to dry it, though Jim knew he had not wept.
If Jim had held on to anyone that way,
he'd have felt like the world's fool when he got over it, and so when Gary
let his hands fall on his thighs and sat looking at the carpet, Jim wanted
to make that distress go away too.  He bent forward, lowering his
head, and kissed the back of Gary's nearer hand, and then rocked back,
got to his feet, and touched the back of Gary's head lightly as he said,
"I'm hungry.  Are you?"
"Yeah," Gary said without looking up.
"Well, do you want to shower?  And
I could look and see if I've got anything that'll go over these shoulders
of yours."  He just brushed one with the tips of his fingers as he
spoke.
"You go first," said Gary, and his voice
was sullen.  "It's your bathroom."
Jim crouched down again, now behind Gary,
put his lips to the nape of Gary's neck, murmured, "You're not fooling
me, Mitchell," and then kissed him. Gary's whole body seemed to resonate
with the slight movement of Jim's lips, and Jim touched his forehead to
the same place, just for a moment, and then stood again, euphoria rushing
through him like laughter. "OK," he said, "I'll go first if you want. 
There are some stupid games in my computer memory if you don't have anywhere
new to hack into.  Or I've got a chess program too, though I'm not
taking that long a shower."
"OK," Gary said.  Jim left him to
whatever private recovery he needed.
He washed himself vigorously but impatiently. 
He was happy, his earlier anger only a memory, and he was certain they'd
figure out something to do about Finnegan. He wanted to get out in the
sunshine with Gary.  He wanted to see Gary smile.  There were
a million things he wanted, and they could only start after he got out
of this shower.  He turned the water colder, reminding himself that
he couldn't just leap on Gary the minute he got out there.  Actually,
the coolness felt good where he'd rasped his skin on the carpet.
When he turned to step out of the shower
cubicle he found Gary seated on the head, waiting for him.  Last night
that would have felt ominous.  Now Jim assumed that Gary felt the
same as he did, would rather be in the same room instead of separated even
by a wall.
Jim stood still, smiling, dripping, and
let Gary look him over.  When Gary's expression didn't change and
he didn't move, Jim's smile slipped a little, but he refixed it and asked,
"Hand me the towel?"
Gary passed it to him without comment. 
Jim put it over his head and dried his hair.  At least then he didn't
have to think about what was on his face, or what was on Gary's, for that
matter. He turned toward where he knew the towel rack was - a habit, he
always seemed to face the towel rack - and dried his chest and his arms,
and as he bent forward to dry his legs he felt Gary's tongue on the small
of his back, where the shower water still clung.  Jim stopped dead. 
Gary licked twice, and smiled against his skin.  Then he took the
towel from Jim's loosened hands and as Jim stood up, began to dry from
shoulders to waist.
Jim began to suspect that Gary meant him
to be off-balance permanently.  Surely that should be worrying. 
Yet as he stood under the terrycloth, pushed this way and that by Gary's
hands, he didn't worry about it. And when Gary passed the towel to him
again and stepped behind him into the shower and closed the panel between
them, all without a word, Jim wasn't surprised.
Jim hadn't done it on purpose, but he suspected
it was a useful attitude to cultivate.  While he was with Gary. 
He touched the closed shower-panel with the tips of his fingers and saw
Gary's vague pale shape turn toward him, the pattern of the splashing water
altering, washing the panel from new angles.  But neither spoke. 
Then Jim hung up his wet towel and got Gary a dry one, and left the bathroom.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

*****
Still May, Jim's Senior Year
***
They got out of the muni at a stop that
had been newly built, on a clean, sharp-cornered slab of concrete. 
At its edge were flower boxes planted with petunias in glaring colors and
strewn with little bits of paper and other small debris.  The buildings
on this street were similarly bright-colored but not completely cared for: 
the grass in front of one too high;  the new paint on another not
quite matching the old.
Gary walked briskly and with assurance
down the block, Jim following with the bag Gary had asked him to carry
over his shoulder;  it was lumpy, but not heavy.  Gary's own
similar bag swung and thumped softly as he strode.  Gary pushed impatiently
at the sleeves of the sweater Jim had lent him, greyed and stretched out
in the laundry freshman year, and resettled the bag, still walking. 
Then, suddenly, he darted across the street, seizing the moment when no
vehicles were in sight, and went between two ancient storefronts, through
a tiny alley like a burrow.  Jim thought of a rabbit hole.  They
emerged into a small parking lot where the paving was cracked and small,
sticklike weeds straggled onto the old concrete;  there was only one
flitter parked there, but five or six more or less rusty bicycles. 
A wider alley beyond led them to a steeper, and considerably less busy,
street.
Here everything looked patchworked, concrete
and stone and sheet-metal and brick and plastiform all jumbled together,
from the walks underfoot up the sides of the buildings. People sat on stairs
and in the shade, and walked at various speeds along the pavement or in
the street.  There were practically no flying vehicles, and not even
many wheeled ones;  that--plus the broken-out windows Jim saw from
time to time--gave the scene a weirdly deserted air in spite of the pedestrians. 
Sometimes voices called out, perhaps to Jim and Gary, but Jim couldn't
really understand what they said and Gary didn't respond.
Gary turned again, and they climbed in
a new direction, then went down, then up again.  He didn't seem to
need the street-signs, which was fortunate:  not many were intact.  
Eventually they went up a steep, narrow stair between cracked brick walls
and arrived on a kind of plateau, like nothing Jim had expected.
In a large, clear, paved space was a building
complex made of metal, like a vast sculpture installation.  It looked
almost lacy and gleamed a pale cream color.  Accents of gilt and purple
and red were picked out behind the elaborate superstructure, interspersed
with ebony-black panels.  When Jim looked more closely he saw that
the lace was made of pipes and the panels were solar-power catchers. 
The other dark patches were windows.  It was an odd design, but eye-catching
and cheerful.
The paving around it dipped near the building
walls, as if they had moats, though the spaces were dry;  other parts
of the paved yard rose into curved seats and tables.  There were trees
in pots, though they didn't seem to be growing very well.  All this
open space, however, was full of activity and mess - mattresses, blankets
and rugs rolled up or spread out, furniture stacked and draped with clothes
or topped with boxes, people everywhere, more than Jim had seen on the
whole way from the muni stop, talking and running and carrying and arguing.
Suddenly a huge voice came from the buildings,
obviously some sort of loudspeaker.  People yelled back and covered
their ears and generally acted as though they had often heard it before
and did not want to hear it now.  "RESIDENTS VACATE IMMEDIATELY,"
it said. "CLEANING PROCEDURE WILL BEGIN IN ONE HOUR.  CLEANING FLUID
IS TOXIC.  REPEAT.  CLEANING FLUID IS TOXIC.  RESIDENTS
VACATE IMMEDIATELY.  REMOVE ALL POSSESSIONS. CLEANING FLUID WILL DAMAGE
YOUR THINGS. CLEANING FLUID WILL HURT YOU.  LEAVE NOW."
As the blast of sound died down, Jim heard
a voice nearer, on a more human scale.  "Professor!  Professor!"
Gary turned this time, and smiled. 
A child - or perhaps not a child - ran up to them.  Jim could tell
neither age nor gender.  The arms and legs were thin to fragility,
and the face was bony, shadowed by an enormous brimmed hat.  The hands
which reached out to Gary were large and heavy-knuckled.  The whole
person, including the hat, stood somewhat below Gary's shoulder-height.
Jim's stomach twisted at the thought of
the last time he had seen anyone so thin. But perhaps it was some kind
of illness.  Something unavoidable.  Not hunger.
"Hey," said the waif, "Professor, how you
riding?"--hands on Gary's arms below the pushed-up cuffs of the sweater. 
And even the voice gave no clues --male?  female? old? young?
"High, Redeye, riding high," said Gary.
Redeye raised a pointed chin and as daylight
got under the hat brim, Jim saw the reason for the nickname:  the
right eye was so shot with red that it almost glowed.  The other,
whose iris could be seen, was a pale gray color, limpid and expressionless
as water.
"Cutter down in?" Gary asked, standing
easily under the clutching hands.
"Nah, up.  Cleanin' day, Professor."
"How'd you know?" Gary asked and Redeye
laughed, or Jim thought that was the meaning of the thin sound that issued
from Redeye's mouth.  Now Gary put one hand on the pointed shoulder
and moved it back and forth, a movement that would have been shaking if
it had not been so slow and, Jim thought, so gentle.  "Why don't you
move earlier?  Why is it like this every damn month?"
Redeye shrugged, thumb moving back and
forth on Gary's forearm; looked past Gary at Jim. "Goldilocks gotta name?"
Gary glanced back too, and then his eyes
seemed caught by Jim's and he smiled slowly.  "Sounds good. 
Goldilocks."
"Cutter be hot now."  Redeye's hands
dropped away from Gary and the brim of the hat came down again.
"Forget it," Gary looked back at Redeye,
"Cut's my deal.  OK?"
"OK."
"Where's the equipment?" asked Gary, clearly
changing the subject.
"Cutter up with it."
"Inside?" Gary positively yelped. 
"Still inside?"  He was already peeling the bag from his shoulder
as he asked, and hardly looked at Redeye's nod in reply.  "Fuck! 
Jim, leave the bag--Redeye, watch 'em."  And he was off toward the
nearest doorway.  Jim ran after.
Inside, the walls were splashed with color
and the staircase was narrow and dark, but Gary went up without pause and
Jim followed.  On the second floor, Gary turned down one of the side
corridors and went past a row of open doors to one that was shut. Casually
he palmed the lock, and the door slid open.
Inside was a makeshift lab of some kind--not
chemical or medical, that was all Jim could tell. There were three substantial
hulks of machinery, sitting on tables, and an assortment of tools and data
storage discs, tapes, solids and canisters.  Cutter, whoever he or
she was, wasn't there.  One table was empty, however.
"God damn!"  Gary shouted, but turned
while the shout still hung in the air to open a closet and pull out storage
containers, one in each hand.  "God damn, goddamn, goddamngoddamn"
--he put the containers on the tables, oopened them, and began to scoop
tools and data storage into them, and Jim moved forward to help. 
Gary continued to swear, with a bit more variety, as they worked.
"RESIDENTS VACATE IMMEDIATELY," chanted
the loudspeakers, bone-shakingly loud at this distance. "CLEANING PROCEDURE
WILL BEGIN IN FIFTY MINUTES ... " and the rest of the warning was unchanged. 
Gary didn't look up, and judging from the movement of his lips, didn't
stop swearing.  Jim gritted his teeth, which of course did nothing
about the noise.
A movement at the door made Jim look over,
and he saw a slim brown man with a thin line of mustache and dramatic cheekbones. 
He wore odd tubes of fabric on his arms, separate from his T-shirt - sleeves
from a missing shirt, or perhaps a sweater - anyway they were pale and
covered from the bulge of the biceps to the wrist.  The oddity drew
Jim's eyes.  The man's hands were on the doorframe and he was looking
at Gary, just flicking a glance at Jim occasionally as if to make sure
he hadn't moved.
The loudspeaker stopped, and at almost
the same moment, Gary saw the man in the doorway.  "Cutter, you bastard!"
Gary yelled.  "God damn it!  Why is this stuff still here?"
"Hadda find somebody to carry it," said
Cutter, and stood aside to let in two enormously muscular men, one black
and the other pale as sand, who had evidently been behind him in the corridor. 
"'K, Jer, this one, and Oregon, that one," gesturing to the two biggest
pieces of equipment, and the two heaved them up and carried them out without
a word.  Jim felt about the size of a peanut next to them, and stood
hastily out of the way.
"Anyway," Cutter was saying, approaching
Gary like a stalking creature, a panther or a wolf, "you wasn't hurryin',
was you?  Not early?  Not checkin'?  Just here on a visit,
you think?  Bringin' Starfleet boy there to show?"  He took Gary's
head between both hands.  There was less than a hand's breadth between
their bodies.  Cutter just looked for a few seconds, and then said
much more softly, "Lookin' pretty, baby," and kissed Gary's forehead.
Gary stepped back, and Cutter let him go,
hands slipping to his sides.  "Don't call me baby," Gary said, but
not heatedly.  And then, as if nervous, "Look, there's no time. 
We gotta get this stuff out, Cut."
"I know," said Cutter, and turned back
to the nearest table, where Gary had been working, and his gaze crossed
Jim's.  "Got a name?"
"Jim," said Jim, at the same time that
Gary spoke.
"Goldilocks, Redeye called him."
"Red ain't no fool."  Cutter's eyes
had never left Jim, but they showed no expression, blank and black as wet
pebbles. "You in the bear house now, Goldilocks.  How you like it?"
Jim felt his eyes narrowing.  "I'm
holding my own," he said evenly.  "Helping out where I can. Like now."
"And we'd better get on with it," said
Gary, reaching in front of Cutter to pick up a tester and a disk.
Still looking at Jim, Cutter relaxed just
perceptibly, his mouth a little wider in what Jim thought was the beginning
of a smile. "Ya," he said, and turned to the closet to get a storage container
of his own.
Oregon was back soon, and from his conversation
with Cutter, Jim guessed that Jer was guarding the equipment.  He
could only guess:  Oregon's speech was stranger than Redeye's to Jim's
ears.  He thought there was probably Spanish mixed into it. 
Maybe a few other things.  Cutter gestured and Oregon took the third
big machine out of the room.  While he was gone, the warning blasted
their ears again.  Forty minutes now.
By the time Oregon was back again, the
three containers were full, and Cutter stacked them in Oregon's arms. 
Gary pulled out new boxes and they went on working.  When the second
table was cleared, Jim folded up the legs, then did the same with the one
that had been empty when they got there, and Oregon grabbed one with each
huge hand and pulled them out of the room.  Another warning sounded,
and Jim rubbed his abused ears but Oregon, on his way down the corridor,
didn't so much as flinch.
The last table was clear and the empty
containers pulled out and stacked when Oregon got back the fourth time. 
Each man grabbed whatever was nearest and left the room.  Jim, last
to leave, paused at the door, but Gary called back, "Leave it, leave it
open," so he did.
Oregon led the way to the edge of the paved
area, near the staircase that Jim and Gary had climbed.  Jer and the
machines and Redeye and the bags and all the storage containers were grouped
there.  And a woman who looked like an office worker, holding what
looked like a specialized-function padd.  Gary took a step to the
side and stopped, blocking Jim, the containers in their hands bumping.
"Shit."  Gary's head was still turned
toward the stranger.
"What?" asked Jim.
Gary looked at him searchingly for a moment. 
"Look, you work for me.  A tech literacy program, pilot, privately
funded.  Got it?"
"I hear," said Jim, unsure how far he wanted
to commit himself.
"Good."  Gary strode away, and Jim
followed again, not liking the pattern of this afternoon at all.
They both put their containers down as
the woman watched curiously.  "That's all, then," said Gary authoritatively.
"Gary Mitchell?" asked the woman.
"RESIDENTS VACATE ..." began the twenty-minute
warning, and Jim saw Gary saying "Yes" to the woman, but she waited for
the noise to end before she tried to go on.
"The renter of Block A, Room 254?"
"That's me.  Also Room 256."  
Gary looked the woman up and down, just this side of insolence.  "You
the rent-collector?"
"I work for the Housing Authority, yes."
"So let me check in and then we can get
right back to work after the cleaning sequence."  Gary looked around. 
"Where'd Redeye go?  Redeye!"
The waifish person in the big hat materialized
like magic - or, perhaps, had been somewhere behind Oregon or Jer all along,
and now slipped around them, which Jim thought came to much the same thing
- and handed Gary one of the bags withouut being asked.  Gary rummaged
in it for a moment and brought out a credit chip.  "OK."
"Who are you?" the Housing Authority woman
asked Redeye, who shrank back, hatbrim down.
"Redeye runs errands for us at the Technical
Literacy Program," said Gary, interposing as smoothly as if the question
had been directed to him.  "She lives in the neighborhood."
"Not here?" The woman's head swung toward
Gary, her eyes intent.
"Of course not here.  I have single
occupancy.  A room for me and a separate room for the program. 
I filled out all the forms;  you should have links there."  Gary
craned his neck as if to get a look at the padd; the woman pulled it in
closer to her body.  Gary stood back, smiled at the woman, and spoke
earnestly.  "I think it's so terribly important to live among these
people to truly understand them.  Of course, I don't live here *full*
time."
The woman now looked Gary over, evidently
registering his casual but not shabby clothing.  Even the mutant sweater,
Jim had to admit to himself, looked good on him. "Of course you don't,"
she said, her tone not quite businesslike but not clearly friendly or amused
or even sexy, as far as Jim could tell.
Gary smiled again.  Jim recognized
it as the expression Gary had used in the Ethics class.  Jim wondered
if Gary would say it had worked better on him than it evidently did on
this woman, who went on without changing expression, "You have the rent."
"Right here," Gary said, offering the chip. 
She took it and passed it through the reader on her padd, then gave it
back so daintily that Jim thought her fingers never touched Gary's. 
Then she tapped a few commands into the padd, then turned it toward Gary,
who picked a stylus out of the side of the thing somewhere, and signed
it.  He tried the smile again, and now she unbent very slightly, the
lines of her mouth a little less stern.
"It's a good thing you're doing here,"
she said.
"They do the work," Gary said earnestly,
with a gesture at the ragtag group behind him.  Jim caught a sardonic
glance from Oregon to Jer.  "Well, next month, then," Gary said, and
the woman nodded and moved away.
Jim waited until the ten-minute warning
had sounded, when the Housing Authority person was well away, had collected
several rents and was engaged in argument with someone swathed in shawls
and scarves, waving as he or she gestured.  Then he came up behind
Gary, who was seated on the concrete talking to Redeye in a low voice.
"--don't think so, Red, I think he borrowed
that idea from one of the guys he'd been reading himself, you know? 
I haven't looked it up, though.  'F I find the book, send it to Cut,
say next week--"
"Gary," Jim said, not thinking much about
how he felt about any of this, so he hardly registered that there was some
kind of actual tutoring going on here.
Gary looked up, then got up, moved the
both of them back among the storage containers before he said, "What's
the matter, Jim?"
"Could you tell me something?" 
His voice was louder than he thought he'd intended, so he cleared his throat
and tried again.  "Where are we?"
"This is my permanent address.  You
know, everybody at the Academy has to have one."  Gary paused, then
opened his mouth, but didn't speak for a moment too long--the loudspeaker
started up again, and a loud honking horn, too.  "ATTENTION RESIDENTS: 
CLEANING PROCEDURE WILL BEGIN IN SIXTY SECONDS."  Four honks, at second
intervals, then the speaker, "FIFTY-FIVE SECONDS."  Jim stared, and
Gary was as motionless though he must have seen all this before. 
The honking went on;  the loudspeaker counted down.
"FIVE.  FOUR.  THREE.  TWO. 
ONE.  CLEANING PROCEDURE HAS BEGUN."  And it was true--there
was a gushing noise and liquid of some sort spouted from the lacy web of
pipes on the outside of the building.  "STAND WELL AWAY FROM THE BUILDING. 
CLEANING FLUID IS TOXIC."  A few children dashed forward and skipped
back, and adults hauled a couple of them away.  Fluid also streamed
down the wall, then spurted unevenly from what must be drainage holes,
and then pumped steadily for about a minute, as the speakers roared, "THE
HOUSING AUTHORITY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE OR LEGALLY LIABLE FOR INJURIES, ILLNESS,
BIRTH DEFECTS OR DEATH THAT MAY RESULT FROM BEHAVIOR THAT THESE ANNOUNCEMENTS
FORBID.  ALLOW FIVE MINUTES TO PASS FOR EVAPORATION OF REMAINING FLUID
AND AERATING BY BUILDING FANS BEFORE ENTERING BUILDING.  THANK YOU
FOR ACTING AS RESPONSIBLE TENANTS."
And then, at long last, it fell silent. 
A foul, cutting, chemical stench wafted from the building as the cleaning
fluid sat in the little moat surrounding the outer walls.  For a moment,
everything seemed drowned and muted by the smell and the lack of that outrageously
noisy voice.  Jim sat down on a storage container, and looked up at
Gary without speaking.
"It's a long story," Gary said at last. 
"I'm gonna tell you, Jim, I brought you here to show you and then I was
going to tell you everything.  I still will.  But I can't now. 
I've got to get all this stuff back inside, or see that it gets in. And
... well ... but later, Jim, honestly, I will, really I will."
As far as Jim could tell, looking into
the brown eyes, this was a sincere, though nervously repetitive, statement. 
He stood, put one hand and then the other on Gary's face, low, little fingers
straying onto the warm neck.  He leaned forward, still slowly, but
Gary didn't pull away even though his eyes shifted back and forth a little. 
Jim kissed him, slowly, opening his mouth and fucking in and out with his
tongue in case Gary needed a reminder or what side they were both on. 
Gary tilted his head a little backward but Jim went on kissing until Gary
made a little sound in his throat that somehow made the rest of the day's
mystery less important.
Then Jim eased away, enjoying the blurred
look of Gary's eyes and mouth.
"Better get this stuff upstairs again,
then," he said, and stepped sideways as though to get over to one of the
folded tables.
Gary reached for his waist, pulled him
close again.  "We've got a few minutes before we can go in."
"Well, then ..." but Jim had a mischievous,
perverse feeling under his ribs, and instead of moving closer, he said,
"... you could finish whatever you were talking to Redeye about."
Gary's eyes narrowed.  It was hard
to tell how serious the expression was.
"All right, then," he said, and walked
away without a glance over his shoulder.
Jim shook his head.  Be careful what
you ask for.
Eventually the lab stuff, tech stuff--whatever--and
Gary still hadn't explained it--was back in the rooms, and Jim shook out
his arms and tried to roll the stiffness out of his shoulders.  "Work
hard, huh, Goldilocks?" Gary teased him.  The huge guys had gone,
Redeye had slipped off, and Cutter was still in the room putting things
back in the chaotic working state they'd found them in.
"Watch out.  Next time you're in Iowa
I'll show you what hard work is."
They walked about halfway down the corridor
to the stairs, seemingly on their way out, but Gary paused suddenly, and
looked away when Jim stopped too.  "Gotta tell Cut something," he
mumbled.
"OK," said Jim as patiently as he could,
turning back too.
Gary's hand caught Jim's arm.  "No,"
he said, "wait."
"I'm not waiting around in the hallway." 
Jim was tired of being ordered around and of feeling out of place.
Gary's hand tightened, and he stared as
hard as if he'd never seen Jim before.  A long silence dragged by
before he said, "Please," for the first time since they had left the dorm. 
He put his free hand on Jim's cheek, and said slowly, "I'm asking ... if
I ask you, please, will you wait?  Outside?"
"No," said Jim.
Gary's hand brushed back into Jim's hair
and his fingers moved slowly, massaging Jim's scalp;  Gary's expression
was totally absorbed, intent, the muscles of his face sorting into a blank
tension that Jim took a moment to recognize.  He hadn't seen anyone
in that gutwrenching fear since Tarsus.
"Who is Cutter?" Jim asked.  "What
can he do to you?"
Gary's other hand slid up Jim's arm, brushed
into his neck, around his throat, up around his ear, Gary seemed unable
touch Jim's skin enough.  "I was a fool to bring you."
"Gary."  Jim moved his head to one
side as if trying to see around a barrier.  "What are you afraid of?"
"You."
"You can't be," said Jim.  "What do
you mean?"
"You," Gary repeated, pulling Jim closer,
kissed his forehead slowly, almost reverently, and then put his cheek on
Jim's head.  "Damn," he said, "such a fool," still gathering Jim
into his body, tighter, moving his hands up and down Jim's stiff back. 
"Just let me ... just this time ... " and he nuzzled into Jim's neck, put
his fingers through Jim's hair, touched him all over, held him as close
as if he were never going to touch Jim again.
Jim felt an impulse to say, 'I'll protect
you, I'll help you, I won't let go,' but held back.  If he had learned
anything lately it was not to assume he understood what was going on. 
He put his arms around Gary but said nothing.
"Sweet," said Cutter's voice, and Gary
let go and turned back to the doorway where the older man stood. 
Jim followed back to the lab, and after a moment's hesitation, into it.
"You show off too much," said Cutter dispassionately. 
"Now you got somethin' for me or not?"
Gary took some disks from his bag. 
Cutter held out his hand but Gary jerked the disks up, then said, "Special
job."
"Ya?"
Gary shrugged.  "Use for whatever's
up, but do me a composite--linear, flat, real-time, no-blur, no animation. 
Not a sim.  You'll need to bring up the light and the sound. 
The yellow one's the best pickup, I think.  Edit for--" he faltered,
swallowed, "Mick, and anything about Mick, about being taped."
"You on it," said Cutter, not a question.
"Yeah.  Sure."
"Goldilocks too."
For two seconds the room was totally motionless,
silent.  Even Cutter seemed not to breathe.
"Yeah," said Gary then, and he never looked
toward Jim, but the muscles at his jaw twitched and his hands closed into
fists and then opened.
Now Jim knew.
Cutter took the disks from Gary and put
them on the table without looking at them.  "One copy?"  he asked.
"Yeah," said Gary, his voice small and
tired.
"When Mick comes?"
"Tell him you've got it already."
"Pay'im?"
"No."  Gary paused, then shrugged. 
"Whatever.  You decide."
Jim unclenched his teeth with an effort. 
"What," he said, slowly and carefully.  "Is.  This.  For."
"Later," said Gary, still looking at Cutter.
"Now!"  Jim took a step forward, but
Gary didn't turn.  "Now, Gary!"
Gary began to shake his head;  Jim
reached for his shoulder and spun him, the other hand closing hard before
he'd really decided, so it was with a kind of surprise that Jim saw his
own fist connect, saw Gary's chin snapping up and Gary staggering back. 
But it felt good, in that moment, almost as good as fucking him, so Jim
meant the second punch completely, the one that doubled Gary over and made
him choke.  Then Gary's fists clenched too, came up to hit back but
just grazed Jim's cheekbone, and then Cutter was out from behind the table,
catching Gary's arms and pulling him back around the corner, so the table
and the editing machine and Cutter's wiry shoulder all stood between Jim
and Gary.
Jim dropped his hands.  Cutter, eyeing
him, relaxed.  Gary wheezed, bracing himself against the edge of the
table.
Cutter looked at his bent head.  "Baby,"
he said, "you gotta learn to brief y' boys."
Jim didn't stay to hear Gary's response.
He ran down the stairs, narrowly missing
someone on the landing--shadowy figure, long dark hair, a voice calling
after him without the words registering--by the time he stood in the doorway
looking out at the concrete yard, there was a reason for the pounding blood
in his head and throat.  But ordinarily a few breaths would settle
it and this time it kept on.  He stared across the yard at children
in a remote corner, on their knees on the ground, perhaps drawing on the
pavement or taking something apart.  He heard Cutter's and Gary's
voices so clearly that he almost turned to look: 'Goldilocks on it.' 
'Yeah.'
Jim walked to the nearest of the concrete
tables and sat down, his eyes still turned idly toward the children. 
He kept on seeing images, hearing voices, memories like flares of static
breaking the blank silence of his present mind.  'We're not doing
this for Mick.'Gary's face so close he could see the pores of his skin. 
'Don't let go.  Don't.' The way he'd grabbed the desk-leg. 
'Use for whatever's up.' Cutter's face when he first looked at
Gary.
His own voice again:  'How can I
trust you, baby?'
The children were sitting up, standing; 
they were yelling;  one struck out at another, who ran away, around
the side of the building.
It had been a stupid thing to do, Jim realized,
but couldn't see himself going back into the building, climbing to the
lab, trying to find something to say.  He stood, leaning on the table,
hands flat on its sandy-rough surface.  Looked at the door. 
Walked away, across the yard, down the narrow stair to the street.
As he walked down the slope, he heard footfalls
behind him.  While the street was by no means deserted, he thought
he was being followed, and so he crossed the street on a diagonal, passing
a group of people cooking meat over a raised metal pot of coals. 
The smell of the smoke and the roasting meat followed him down the block
as persistently as the footsteps.  Jim picked up speed, still walking,
weaving past pedestrians and a child on a bicycle, but never lost the steady
tread that matched his own.
He turned an unnecessary corner because
the old storefront there came all the way out to the sidewalk and made
good cover.  Spinning on his feet, he reached out and caught hold
of his stalker, anger still balancing him on the edge of violence. 
He wanted to deck the person, especially if it were Gary;  grabbing
was reckless, but not as stupid as hitting out.
The person he was holding was Redeye. 
He had grabbed higher than he meant, the very corners of the bony shoulders. 
The hat brim tipped up, then down.  Jim let go.
"You lost," Redeye muttered, not looking
up.
Jim wasn't sure, but if he wasn't lost
now he knew it wouldn't take long.  "Show me how to get to the muni
stop."
Redeye's head turned to one side, then
the other, so slowly that Jim didn't realize until the movement stopped
that it had meant no.
 
*****
Interlude:  Gary's POV
***
Without moving, even looking up, Gary listened
to Jim run down the hallway, steps picking up speed as they grew fainter. 
When he felt the touch of Cutter's hand on his hair, then on his shoulder,
he grabbed fiercely and found a bony wrist which he held with no gentleness
or gratitude.  He was angry, he realized.
Cutter pushed nearer instead of trying
to pull away.  He hauled Gary away from the table, held him in an
iron grip and glared back into his eyes.  "Oh no," he said. 
In those two syllables was a whole diatribe about whose fault this really
was, and of course Gary already knew it all.
The anger drained away and left Gary feeling
empty again.  His eyes fell to a spot just below Cutter's collar-bone,
and for some period of time Gary could not measure, they stood in silence. 
Then Cutter's grip shifted just a little on Gary's arms, and Gary knew
that if he wanted he could move closer, put his arms around Cut's waist
and his head against the dark-clad chest.
But he also knew it wouldn't be any comfort
this time.
So he moved back a half step, and Cutter's
hands fell away to his sides.  Gary still couldn't meet the older
man's gaze, so he did the other thing he'd always done after time apart: 
he reached for Cut's wrist and pushed back the knitted sleeve.
Cutter's forearms were solid, each muscle
and tendon distinct, and not very hairy.  They were also criss-crossed
with scar lines, some so faint they were barely visible, others like cat-scratches,
others denting the copper-brown skin, others pale or shiny.  And this
one, up near the crease of the elbow, this new one red and long and barely
not bleeding.
Gary checked the other arm but there was
nothing fresh there.  Cutter, as always, stood almost docile under
the inspection.
It hadn't been so very long ago that Gary
had woken in the night to run his fingers over the scars.  Not so
very long ago that he would bend his head like this, and brush his lips
along the new scab.  Only two years or so.  Only a lifetime away.
Cutter took a long breath and his other
hand stroked up the nape of Gary's neck and into his hair.  Then,
as if Gary's touch against the skin of his arm were too intimate, Cutter's
fingers spread and tightened on Gary's scalp and pulled his head up until
their eyes met.
In that other life, while they were this
close, Cutter used to tell him what his next job would be.
"Baby," Cut said, and troubled expectation
shivered along Gary's nerves, "tell him."
"What?" said Gary, jolted back to the present,
feeling like he'd lost track of the conversation.  "Tell who what?"
Cutter's lips compressed;  Gary knew
he hated having to explain himself.  "Goldilocks.  You lookin'
at mine.  You with him, you show him yours.  Yes," because Gary
had looked away, at the disks that lay on the table like poison pills,
"Yes, you got to.  Unless ...."
Gary looked back at Cutter's face, and
though it had no more expression than usual, Gary had always known how
to read it.  Now the longing he saw there made Gary's own throat tighten.
"Unless you don't follow after him." 
Cutter's voice was so low Gary felt he was just remembering it.
"Can't," he said, "I can't leave him. 
He has no idea where he is.  Anyway .... "
"You can't stay here," Cutter finished
Gary's sentence.
"Can't," Gary said, "can't you ... move
on?"
Cutter said nothing until Gary realized
it was an answer.  And then Cutter was the one to step back, eyes
on his sleeves as he pulled them down again. Gary watched.  Cutter
looked up when he was finished, saying quite normally, "Next month."
"Next month," Gary echoed, and then remembered. 
"I'll come to help you move.  But once I, once I have that tape, there
won't be any more rent.  You should know that."
Cutter's eyebrows raised.  After a
moment he said, "We manage."
It was a sentence Gary had heard often
enough but had never felt it shut him out before.  "When I'm earning
.... " he began, more to get Cut's response than to make a real offer,
and then his apprehensions were confirmed.
"We manage," Cutter repeated flatly.
"OK," Gary said, unable to understand how
getting what he wanted and having almost everything work according to plan
should have made him feel so miserable.