Jessica,” she confessed, waving toward her friend. “She says I’ve been irritable lately. She’s a big believer in sex to treat … everything. Irritability, exhaustion, insomnia, the common cold. She doesn’t understand that it doesn’t work for everybody.”
“So you came here to placate her.”
“I figured I’d stay for a while, then creep out to a hotel somewhere and let her yell at me in the morning when she’s too hungover to put much energy behind it.”
“So if you are not interested in drunken children in spaceport bars,” he asked, “what do you do? Surely there are people on your ship.”
That was not a short-answer question, and it was a far more personal subject than she should have been comfortable discussing with someone she had just met. “Shipboard … can get messy. There’s only two hundred and twenty-six of us, and it gets very insular. You either have to be serious, or casual like Jess.”
“And can you not find true love on board your ship?”
How easily he leapt from sex to love. Strange, how familiar he felt to her. “Sometimes.” She thought of Danny, of his crooked smile as he tried to charm her that morning. It would have been easier than she wanted to admit to say yes to him, to have met him tonight, to have fallen right back into everything that had gone wrong. “But reality tends to strangle it.”
She caught sympathy in his eyes, and braced herself, but he was perceptive enough to let it go. Definitely not a boy.
“So on your ship you must choose from casual lovers or untenable affairs,” he said. “I can see why you were persuaded to come down here.”
“It did make some sense at the time,” she told him, relieved to have the subject return to the present. “In practice, though—my God, is there anything less alluring than a pack of strangers so drunk they won’t remember their own names, not to mention yours? How do people do this?”
“There are alternatives to drunken fools, you know.”
“You already said you weren’t interested.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, lifting his drink. “I’d forgotten.” But he couldn’t suppress the half smile on his lips.
She began to understand what they were doing. “Story of my life,” she said lightly. “The only men worth talking to aren’t interested.”
And at that they were looking at each other, and something inside of her turned. And she understood, in that moment, what came so effortlessly to Jessica in places like this.
She dropped her eyes, and saw him set down his small glass, looking back into the mirror behind the bar. “How much time off do they give you?” he asked her.
“Twelve hours, by the clock,” she told him. “I have to report back by oh-nine hundred hours tomorrow.” She took a breath; nerves had come upon her.
“That is not a lot of time,” he remarked, and she wasn’t sure whether to attribute his tone to disappointment or disapproval.
“It’s enough for some,” she said. “Usually it’s enough for me.”
He looked over at her again, and she felt her face grow hot before she looked up to meet his eyes. His gaze, no less intense, had become serious, and she thought perhaps he was finding her unexpected as well. He shifted a little, turning toward her.
Without warning the lights went off, and a rowdy cheer rose from the crowd. Elena blinked, disoriented; the dark, while diluted by the bioluminescent sidewalks outside the bar’s windows, was more absolute than anything she ever experienced back home, where the ship’s operational lights were everywhere. She had forgotten to watch the time, and now they had hit the Dead Hour. Everything but emergency systems would be off-line for nearly an hour.
After a few seconds the bar’s interior was lit with a bank of portable lamps mounted high on the walls; the room was nearly as bright as before, but the light was cooler, and everything was faded to monochrome. Her companion was painted with light and shadow, lending drama to the strong angles of his face. He looked pale in the blue-white glow, and strangely unreal; she found she wanted to reach out just to see if he was really there.
And then she was startled by a man lurching between the two of them, his hands slapping into the bar as he kept himself from stumbling to the ground. He had bright blue eyes and hair as jet-black as her companion’s, but his eyes were rheumy and unfocused, and he wore a deep scowl. She did not recognize him—he was not part of the entourage that had coalesced around Jessica—but he must have been in the pub for a long time. He was very, very drunk.
He straightened himself up against the edge of the bar, and turned to look at her. “You do realize what you’re talking to,” he slurred, his voice overloud.
This one she was less inclined to be nice to. Beyond his attitude, his timing was abysmal. “You do realize who I’m talking to is none of your business,” she snapped.
It was a tone that had effectively driven away many men over the years. This one was too drunk to listen. “You military types,” he spat bitterly. “You come here and you flood our city and you talk to us because we’re quaint. I’ll bet you think pirates are quaint. But he’s nothing but a thief and a murderer.”
Her companion cleared his throat. “I believe what she means is that this conversation does not concern you.” His words were polite, but there was ice in his tone. “Perhaps you’d like to return to your table.”
“Fuck off,” the man shot over his shoulder; and then he took a step closer to Elena, millimeters from touching her. “You like bad boys, little girl? I can be as bad as you want.”
And at that, her temper flared. “What I like,” she said deliberately, holding her ground, “are people with the brains to get lost when they’re not wanted.”
At her words his face grew ugly, his brows drawing together, his lips pressing into a thin line. “If you think I’m going to let you walk out of here with this”—he spat out a word in the local dialect that she didn’t understand—“you must be a bigger whore than he is.”
None of which made any sense, she realized, but then he clamped a hand over her arm, and she got a sense of his strength, even inebriated. He moved toward her, and she felt the heat of his body and smelled the liquor on his breath, and she had just enough time to think Oh, hell, I’m going to have to hit him, before she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and his hand was wrenched off of her, and then he was on the floor.
Her companion stood over him, arms and legs relaxed, his hands tightened into fists. “This woman,” he said clearly, as the drunk stared up at him, “has made her wishes very clear.” His eyes, so light and amused when talking with her, were full of a dangerous calm. “If you ignore them again, I swear to you, you will not see the sun rise.”
She took in the two men, saw the drunk shift against the wood floor, and then drop his eyes. He rolled, with more dignity than she would have thought possible, and climbed to his feet; then he brushed past, not looking at either of them, heading toward the exit with some haste. Her companion’s eyes followed him, deadly and dangerous, until he had disappeared.
The room, which had gone quiet when the drunk had fallen, began to buzz with conversation
