John Ringo - Cally's War

“So, do you want to get something eat?” She stepped away, but the effort had her twisting her hands.

“I smuggled in some self-heaters earlier this afternoon. We really can’t be seen out and about,” he said apologetically, looking at her as if he knew how stirred up she still was. “But on the plus side, after we get a little food, get a little energy back, we’ll still be alone.”

His eyes were so deep she was about to melt into a puddle on the ground right where she stood.

“Come on, they’re in my office,” he said.

She pulled her chair in while he got the boxes out of his desk and pulled out the start tabs.

“You know we’re going to have to sneak these boxes right back out again. Beed is possessive, jealous, suspicious—” She stopped as he placed a finger over her lips.

“We are not going to let a certain dark cloud rain all over our evening. So, would you like sweet and sour shrimp, or cashew chicken?” He gestured with the boxes.

“Mmm. I love seafood. Can I have the shrimp?” She licked her lips.

“Sure thing.” He passed one of the heaters over. It still had a couple of minutes before they could pop the top. “That must have been rough growing up. A Wisconsin farm girl with a jones for seafood.”

“Not really. When you don’t have it, you don’t have it. We had more than a lot of people. Better than living shut away from sunlight in some Urb.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, bless your heart, you grew up in a Sub-Urb, didn’t you, Pryce?”

“Yeah. We didn’t have much, but I got by.” His mouth tightened involuntarily.

“I? Not we?” she asked.

“Well, my mom wasn’t around much. Let’s just say I got by with a little help from my friends.” The words held echoes of remembered pain.

“Oh. Did you spend a lot of time in the crèche?” Doesn’t sound like he had a happy childhood at all.

“Something like that. Let’s just say we did a good bit of self-supervision,” he said.

“Sounds like you had to be self-reliant pretty early on.” Something we have in common.

“Sort of. I learned to pick good friends and trust them. And how to deal with people I couldn’t trust at all. What about you? Did you have something where you played with kids, or were you alone a lot, or what?” He took one of her hands.

“There weren’t a lot of other kids. I was a bit of a daddy’s girl. He was my best friend.” Well, Granpa, anyway. After the first landing, he might as well have been my dad.

“Fresh air. Sunshine. It sounds… wholesome. I didn’t do a lot of wholesome growing up,” he said.

“Not as much as you’d think. Daddy was ex-military. Like a lot of people I guess. But it was less wholesome and more… I don’t know… earthy? Practical?” How to explain without explaining, that is the question.

“I envy you that adult guidance. I had to figure out so much by trial and error.” He opened his dinner and the savory and slightly sweet smell of the cashews wafted through the room.

“I envy you good friends your own age. The farm was a bit isolated. In some ways I didn’t get to be a kid.” Not past age eight, anyway.

“Something we have in common. We were kids, but not kids, you know?” He was looking into her soul like that again.

“Yeah, I do. Boy, this is a heavy conversation.” She pulled the top off of her shrimp and inhaled as the steam escaped. “This smells yummy.”

“Want some rice? I only brought steamed. I don’t like the way the fried rice in these things reheats. The bits of egg are always rubbery.” He offered her a box.

“Good choice. The steamed is much better. Thanks. That smells good, too.” She gestured towards the box he’d just opened.

“Wanna bite? Trade you?” He speared a bite of food on his fork and extended it for her, cupping a hand under it in case the sauce dripped. His hand was warm against her chin as she savored the bite.

Watching him eat a bite of shrimp off of her fork drew her attention right to his mouth, of course, and she had no idea how long she’d been staring when he finally snapped out of it and reached his fork back into his heater box. She just knew that her second bit of food was noticeably cooler than her first. But she wasn’t really all that hungry, anyway. She’d eaten less than half the food when she pushed it away. Sometime during the meal she’d rolled her chair over closer to his, but she could feel the heat of his thigh against hers and close somehow just wasn’t close enough.

Obviously he thought so, too, because no sooner had he pushed his own food away, also half-eaten, than she found herself pulled into his lap with a hand cupped around her breast. Tantalizingly, too damned far down under her breast. She twisted slightly at the waist, arching into it as the movement drew his fingers across her nipple.

Naturally, the movement also shifted her hips, which made him shift and she could feel his erection hard against her leg and suddenly she couldn’t stand it. But when she tried to move to straddle him, he wouldn’t let go, rubbing a nipple between a thumb and forefinger as he nibbled on the upper rim of her ear and her hands clenched, nails driving into his shoulders. It felt like every nerve ending she had was alive and singing with heat. Suddenly she couldn’t have sat still if her life depended on it. How can he be so clumsy on his feet and so… aw, hell, who cares!

Conscious thought didn’t resurface until he came and she found herself collapsed across his chest on the floor, and realized there was a bit of a cramp in one of her quads. She couldn’t even have guessed how many orgasms had ripped through her while her brain had been on hold. All she knew as she eased off of him and to the side was that her muscles had turned to jelly. She let her head rest on his shoulder, the utter relaxation of his muscles contrasting sharply with the tension of a few minutes before. She traced her index finger through his chest hair, licking the gloss of sweat off her fingertip. It tasted of salt and something indefinable that she couldn’t have described, she only knew she was starting to crave it like a drug. But… later… after she’d rested a little bit. Or maybe a lot.

Amazingly, it turned out that silks could wrinkle after all.

Friday was always the easiest day to get out of bed, for obvious reasons. In her case, there was the extra bonus that Beed would find it impossible to get away from his wife for the entire weekend. Still, there was an extra bounce in her step, despite the slight sore muscle twinges in strange places, as she detoured by Claibourne’s Coffee on her way in to work.

One of the interesting features of base living was the excellent job they’d done of matching the lighting to normal human circadian rhythms. The unvarying quality of the light had been one of the design problems in the early Sub-Urbs that had since been blamed for a lot of the social problems they suffered during and immediately after the Postie war. The better areas of most of them had by now been retrofitted with adjustable glow paint, programmed on an optimum circadian scale. In Titan’s case, limited retrofitting had been needed, since the need for an artificial day had been obvious in the first place. At least, that had been the explanation. For whatever reason, it was interesting to see the Corridor in daylight and actually stand and remind herself that the lighting was not natural sunlight diffused through some skylight. It was a very good imitation. The plants certainly seemed to like it well enough. On this floor, the Galplas had been textured to look like an old brick sidewalk, and the rough earthen pink clashed lightly with the terra cotta planters. Honey bees buzzed around the flowers blooming in assorted hanging baskets, and the faux-neon signs in the night-business windows were dark. The place looked so different in the daytime it almost made her homesick, pointing up the alien chemical smell and the dryness of the air, so different from Charleston’s muggy salt.