Chapter 19: Intimate
Start reading from the beginning…
They remained on the “roof” for a long time, until the sun was fully set. The long shadows from the craters were no longer stretched across the ground since the entire visible surface was now dark. There was no light retention in the sky, no twilight time, because there was no sky to retain light. Once the sun was beyond the horizon, it was dark, plain and simple. Out in the wasteland of the lunar surface, Cole knew, there would be a little light reflected from the Earth casting a ghostly blue hue over the surface. The light would barely be enough to keep a person from tripping over a large rock, but it is not noticeable when any other light is near, like the light from LunaBase.
Cole led Val back to the elevator through the blackness, lit only from the lights far below in the streets of LunaBase. Those lights always remained on during the two weeks of night that the small city would endure, and when the brightly lit wall and floor outside the elevator appeared, Cole felt Val relax her grip on his arm a little. He wouldn’t have thought that this fearless woman would be afraid of the dark, but then he thought she was probably only using the dark as an excuse to hold on to him anyway.
As they entered the lab’s reception area, Cole told Val, “We’ve both been awake for a long time. You should sleep before you have to leave. The boys are probably close to being finished with the Doctor.”
“You’re right,” she replied. “I don’t want you to leave me though, not now.” Cole couldn’t tell if she was frightened because of the mission, or just liked having him around. Whichever it was, he didn’t want to leave her either. “Let’s go to your apartment for a while.”
“Um, that’s not a good idea.” Cole was suddenly nervous. “I have never really gotten company there, and it’s not very… And we’ve been away for days…” He didn’t want to just say that his apartment was a disaster, but she seemed to get the hint without him putting those exact words to it.
“OK,” she said. The way her eyes looked at him, Cole could tell that it wasn’t fear in them. “Let’s go back to my place instead.” He couldn’t speak. He just smiled, and nodded slightly. She took his hand and led him through the door that led into her hall. The hall was silent. With Chan and Audrey still on Mars, and the other two team members down in the bay, the lab was more or less empty except the two of them. Val walked quickly ahead of him, and Cole took long strides to easily keep up.
It felt a little like they were sneaking around behind someone’s back, but he couldn’t think of who would care. Obviously Dan and Art met on the project, and there had been no problem with their relationship blossoming. Chan had talked to them about keeping it professional when it counted, and warned that if they broke up, they were both still part of the team and would still have to continue working together. Cole couldn’t think of any reason that he should feel sneaky, and yet he did.
When they arrived at Val’s door, she swept into the room, holding the door for him, and then closed it behind him. “Would you like a drink or something?” she asked. “I have a little bottle of rum.”
“Sure, maybe just one. Alcohol puts me to sleep, so I never drink very much.” He sat down on her couch and looked over at the open blind, at the nearly full Earth still hanging in the sky right where it always is. “How did you get rum into the lab anyway? Alcohol’s pretty regulated up here.”
“Audrey must have smuggled it in. I had a bottle in my Seattle apartment, and when I was picking through my things here, I found it tucked away in my closet.”
Cole looked around the room. Last time he had been in here was with Audrey, while she was bringing Val’s things in, apparently smuggling that bottle in right under his nose. The thought of it made him smile to himself, especially since Val had been spying on them though the window for part of that time. Val handed him a glass with a splash of the light brown fluid in it, and held one with a bit more in it in her other hand as she sat down next to him.
“Why don’t you have a girlfriend or a wife?” she asked him without preamble, and then took a deep drink of her glass.
Before answering, he took a sip of his drink to give him a moment to think through the answer. “The time-ship has been my wife for so many years that I stopped looking at other women a long time ago. Until I saw you of course.” Val chuckled at him a little, embarrassing him a bit. He sipped lightly at his glass again and then came back at her with, “Why don’t you have anyone in your life?”
“That’s easy. No one else can keep up with me. I move around too much. I don’t really even have any close friends.”
“Really? No friends?” Cole was surprised. She was certainly nice enough, pretty too. “Somehow, I think you are lying to me.” He couldn’t fathom that no one was interested in following this beautiful woman around. She was smart, funny, and really easy going. She seemed to Cole to be the perfect catch.
“No, it’s true,” she answered. “There are a handful of other pilots that I bump into over and over again at various ports, and people that I work for multiple times that I have gotten to know. And I usually make it a point to meet my neighbors whenever I get a new place. In the end though, I’m gone somewhere else in a few months or a year, and then I will never see them again.”
“That seems like a lonely way to be,” Cole said thoughtfully.
Val turned it right back around on him though and said, “It’s not like I’m holed up in a top secret prototype time machine that I can’t tell anyone else about…”
It was Cole’s turn to chuckle at her. She was giving him a pretty hard time this evening, so he thought he’d make this conversation about her instead. “Well, I hope you realize that this isn’t just another one-time assignment you’ve been hired into. This is more than a single flight. You are THE pilot of the first time machine even invented. You may be the only person to ever fly it.”
“It’s your ship. You can’t tell me you’ve never flown it before.”
“Not through time though, not like you did, and will again. I’m not a very good pilot. It takes real skill to keep the ship on course while the universe is changing around you. If you are flying too fast, you could get clipped by a comet, or an asteroid, or even a planet! Those are not things you need to worry about while in normal time, because their courses through space are normally reliable and constant. They don’t speed up or move backwards like they do when time changes.” He looked at her admiringly, and sucked down the rest of his rum. “My ship, my life’s work, my wife of the last… I don’t even remember how many years… it’s all yours now. It’s yours to fly, and to make history in.”
She tipped her glass back and finished her drink as well. “Well, I shouldn’t be flying it for a little while now. I’d hate to wreck it while under the influence of alcohol. Chan would kill me!” She flipped her shoes off her feet and onto the floor, putting one foot up onto Cole’s lap, sliding down so that she was almost laying on her sofa, letting her other foot fall to the floor.
Cole set his glass down and looked at Val’s small foot, with her toenails painted a red that matched her hair almost exactly, resting on his thigh. His eyes followed the length of her leg to her small hips, a little narrow even for someone as small as her he thought. The bottom of her shirt had pulled up just a little when she slouched down into the couch, and the pale skin of her belly showed, with just a hint of her navel visible beneath the hem. His eyes continued up across her chest to her smooth white neck, and her small pink lips. Everything about her was small, he thought, as every pilot is supposed to be. Her red hair fell into her face a little, covering one eye as she smiled knowingly at Cole. “If I didn’t know any better,” he said to her, in a low, soft voice, “I might think you were trying to seduce me.”
“Why Mr. Sydney,” she said, in the sweet, light voice of someone much younger than she really was, “Of course I’m trying to seduce you.”
Cole leaned forward, pushing her foot up onto the back of the couch, and put a hand on the seat next to her hip. He crawled up over her until he was looking down into her smiling face, his thighs nestled between hers. She slithered beneath him a bit further so she was flat on her back looking up at him. The alcohol had reddened her cheeks a bit, making her freckles less obvious with the added color in her complexion.
He brushed Val’s hair out of her face, so he could see it better, and the stands of it slipped softly though his fingers. Leaning forward to her, their lips met once more, warmer from the liquor they had drank. Cole fell into her completely, mentally and emotionally, losing all sense of time and location. There was nothing in this universe with him except her, and he felt like little sparks were flying between them. After a few moments of this, she squirmed a little, and Cole pulled back from her. She wriggled free of him and stood up, crossing the room toward the door. At first, Cole thought that she was going to tell him goodnight and hold the door for him, but then she turned out the light. Cole stood up, smiling a smile that she probably could not see. By only the light of the Earth shining in, he could see her silhouette move over to the window, underneath which was her bed.
She turned to look at him, and he could see the curves of her body clearly as she was lit only from behind. “Close the blinds,” she said quietly, as if to herself. As the blind began to roll down from the top of the window, he watched as her hands went to her waist, elbows out, and she slid her hands upward along her body until she was holding something over her head. With the dark edge of the unfurling tapestry slipping behind her shutting out what was left of the light, the last thing Cole saw between him and the open window was Val tossing her shirt to the floor. “What are you doing way over there?” she asked, a smile in her voice.
The tapestry behind her only let in a small amount of the outside light, as if it were way past twilight. The stars in the picture were very dim, and the glowing orb of the moon was almost invisible. During the weeks of daylight, Cole imagined, they were probably brighter, like an actual moonlit night would appear with white stars, and a moon barely bright enough to cast a shadow in the darkness. Now however, it provided barely enough light for Cole to find his way to the bed, to his Valentina, leaving his shoes and his own shirt behind. Her body warm in his arms as they slowly eased themselves into the bed, Val began kissing him once more, and Cole let all of his thoughts fall away. There was no longer any need for talking tonight.
