Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

He rinsed the plastic tray, tossed it in the trash. Pat had only pushed her food around; hardly any of it was gone.

“Come on. Eat,” Irv said. He felt as if he were coaxing a reluctant toddler.

Pat took a couple of forkfuls, then put the package of stew down. “I don’t feel much like eating. I don’t feel much like anything.” She would not look at Irv; she kept her eyes on her hands in her lap.

“You really should, Pat. We need you-“ He hesitated. “as strong as you can be.” He hated himself for that little pause. Even more than the polite words it had been intended to replace, it called attention to what had happened.

Pat didn’t answer… For a moment, Irv thought she was disconnected from the here-and-now again. Then he saw her shoulders shaking, saw two tears splash onto the backs of her wrists before she jerked up her arms to cover her face.

She hadn’t cried before, not when Irv was there to see it and not, so far as he knew, any other time, either. “That’s right,” he urged, standing next to her. “It’ll help you feel better. It’s all right.”

“It’s not-all right.” A gasped, hitching breath broke the sentence in half. “It’s never going to be all right.”

What do I say to that, Irv wondered, especially when it’s true. Except for two of his grandparents, he had never lost anyone he loved. He knew how lucky he was. Because he was so lucky, he did not know firsthand how Pat felt, but he knew it was bad- worse now, he supposed, because she was letting what she had blocked away come out.

He bent down on one knee and put an awkward arm around her. She started to shake him off, then twisted in the chair until her head found the hollow of his shoulder. His other arm wrapped around her. Her tears were hot on the side of his neck. He held her while she cried herself out.

She looked ghastly when she finally raised her head-all the more so in the harsh blue-white glow of the fluorescent tube in the ceiling. Her blotched, wetstreaked face reminded Irv again of the toddler he had thought about a few minutes before. But the feel of her against him was like no toddler’s.

He shook his head at the distracting thought and reached out and snagged a paper towel off the tabletop. “Here,” he said. “Blow.”

Pat did, noisily, and dabbed at her eyes. “Thank you,” she said, and then again, in a different tone of voice, “Thank you.”

“It’s all right.”

He was still holding her with one arm. When he started to pull back, she clung to him. “Don’t let go, not yet, please,” she said. “I wasn’t, haven’t been able to feel anything since-“ Irv thought she was going to let that hang, but she made herself go on. “-since Frank got killed. It’s like most of me’s been stuck inside a glass specimen jar. I see things, hear things, but they don’t connect, they just bounce off the glass. This-I really know you’re here with me.”

“Okay.” That was one way of dealing with shock, Irv knew.

If nothing got through the glass, nothing could hurt.

“Give me that paper towel again, would you?” Pat wiped at her face, crumpled the towel, and threw it away. “I must look like hell.”

“Frankly, yes.”

She let out a strangled snort that might have been-Irv hoped it was-the first laugh from her since her husband died. “You always say the sweetest things, Irv.”

“I try.”

He kept his tone deliberately light, but Pat’s reply was serious. “I know. Thanks one more time.” She held on to him, too, as if afraid to stop. “So good to feel something, anything, again.”

“Good. That’s good, Pat.” Irv’s brain was handling mixed signals. Consciously, he was glad he was able to do as a friend should, able to help Pat begin to accept her loss. Through his hands, through his skin, he picked up another message. He was very much aware that for some time he had been holding a woman in his arms.

More than anything else, he was annoyed with his physical response to that. Not the time or place, he thought. For a crazy moment, he felt seventeen again, walking from class to class with his books held awkwardly in front of him to hide an incongruous erection.

The Pat leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. It was not meant to be a passionate kiss; thinking back later, Irv was sure of that. Nor was the one he intended to give back. But instead of her cheek, his mouth found hers. With a sound half sigh, half groan, she clutched him to her.

There must have been some time in the minutes that followed when their lips were separated long enough for Irv to say no or stop or something of the sort. Afterward, that seemed logically certain, but he never could figure out when it might have been. Even when they were helping each other pull off boots and trousers, their mouths stayed glued together, and his still covered hers and helped quiet her moan soon after. A moment later, he made noises of his own and was similarly muffled.

Coming back to himself was nothing like the afterglow he cherished. It felt more like breaking a fever: what had just ended seemed strange and unreal, as if it had happened to someone else. But Pat’s smooth thighs still gripped him; he still looked into her face from only a couple of inches away.

I’m sorry, was the first thing that occurred to him to say. That, he knew, was wrong. He levered himself with his arms and pushed off against the floor so he sat back on his knees. “I think we’ve been stupid,” he said slowly.

Pat sat up, too, and reached for her pants. “You’re probably right,” she said as she started to put them on. “This isn’t like the last time I-wanted you, though. I didn’t expect it to happen. I didn’t even particularly want it to happen. It just did.”

“Yeah,” Irv said. He started getting dressed, too. “t know.” And what the hell am I going to do about it, he wondered. At the moment, he had no idea. “I didn’t expect it to happen, either. I was just trying to comfort you, any way I could-“ He pulled on socks. One didn’t fit. It was Pat’s. He tossed it to her.

She was nodding. “mand God knows I was looking for comfort, any place I could find it. You want to call it shared battle fatigue or something, and let it go at that?”

“That might be the best thing to do.” That way, Irv thought, we can pretend-I can pretend-it never happened at all. He wished it never had happened at all. Wishing did just as much good as usual.

“Okay,” Pat said. “I know what you were trying to do. Maybe you even did it. I guess I have to make myself go on, figure out how to go on, without Frank.” She stood up. “Right now, I’m going off to the john for a minute.” Irv winced. Pat saw it. “All right,” she said, “I won’t talk about it anymore. But this once, happening like it did, wasn’t the same as it would have been a lot of other ways.”

“Yeah,” Irv said. He watched Pat walk out, then climbed into a chair. What she said was true. It even helped. Trouble was, it didn’t help enough.

He got up, looked at himself in the glass of the microwave’s door. It wasn’t much of a mirror, but he doubted he could look at himself in much of a mirror. “Stupid,” he told his reflection. It didn’t argue with him.

He heard the airlock doors open, first the outer, then the inner. “Anybody home?” Sarah called. Irv was not an adrenaline junkie. The sound of his wife’s voice almost made him jump out of his skin. “Anybody home?” Sarah said again.

“Back here,” he answered. His voice, he thought, came out as a hoarse croak. He discovered another reason why he hadn’t cheated on Sarah before: he didn’t seem to be very good at it.

Sarah came walking down the passageway. “What took you so long?” she asked, sticking her head into the galley.