chill and light and then a doorway, a confusion of bizarre wallpaper and a desk
and a clerk—a sleepover, a carpeted hall in either direction from here… He
leaned on the counter with his head propped on his hand while Allison
straightened out the details and the finances. Then she took his arm again and
led him down a corridor.
“Keep them out of here,” she yelled back at someone, who said all right and
left; she carded a door open and put him through, into a sleepover room with a
wide white bed.
He turned around then and tried to put his arms around her. She shoved him in
the middle of his chest and he nearly fell down. “Idiot,” she said to him, which
was not the welcome he had hoped for, but what he reckoned now he deserved. He
stood there paralyzed in his misery and his mental state until she pulled him
over to the bed and pushed him down onto it. She started working at his clothes
with rough, abrupt movements as if she were still furious. “Roll over,” she
hissed at him, and pulled at his shoulder and threw the covers over him.
And he fell asleep.
Chapter V
He woke, aware of bare smooth skin next to his own, of a warm arm about him, and
turned, blinked in confusion. She was still here, in the room’s artificial
twilight. “Allison,” he said hoarsely, hoarse because his voice like the rest of
him was not in the best of form. He stroked her hair and woke her without really
meaning to ruin her sleep.
“Huh,” she said, looking up at him. “About time.” But when he tried with her,
there was nothing he could do. He lay there in wretched embarrassment and
thinking that at this point she would probably get up and get dressed and walk
out of his life forever, about the time he had just spent most of it.
“What could you expect?” she said, and patted his face and took his hand and
carried it against her mouth, all of which so bewildered him that he simply lay
there staring into her eyes and expecting her to follow that statement with
something direly cutting.
She did not. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. I’m really sorry.”
“There’s tomorrow. A few more days. What are you going to do, Stevens? Is it
worth the handful of days you bought with this stunt?”
He thought about it. For a moment he found it even hard to breathe. It really
deserved laughing about, the whole situation, because there was something funny
in it. He managed at least to shrug. “So, well, maybe. But I think I’m done
after this, Reilly. I don’t think I can do it again.”
“You’re absolutely out of your mind.”
He found a grin possible, which at least kept up his image. “I don’t make a
habit of it.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“Why not?”
She frowned. Scowled. She shook her head after a moment, got up on her elbow,
looking down at him, traced the old scar on his side, a gentle touch. “What are
you going to tell your company?”
He lay there, stared at the ceiling with his head on his arms, considered the
question and truth and lies, grinned finally and shrugged with what he hoped was
monumental unconcern. “I don’t know. I’ll think of something good.”
A fist landed on his ribs. ‘I’ll bet you will. No cargo. No clearance. You
jumped out of Viking on the wrong heading. What are they going to do to you,
Stevens?”
“Actually,” he said, “it’s a minor problem.” He shut his eyes, still with a
smile painted on his face and a weariness sitting on his chest that seemed the
accumulation of years. “I’ll talk my way out of it, never fear.” And after a
moment: “Why don’t we try it again, Reilly? I think it might work.”
It did, oddly enough—and that, he thought, lying there with Allison Reilly
tangled with him and content, was because he had started thinking again how to
con his way through, and about saving his skin and Lucy’s, which got his blood