The Cold Between. Elizabeth Bonesteel
“There was no reason not to be.”
She wondered, as she had when she had first spotted him, if he was an impostor. Real PSI soldiers were rarely seen on colonies, living primarily in nomadic tribes, many of them spending their entire lives—birth to death—on massive generation ships that isolated themselves from Central Gov. Central maintained authority over colony worlds, supporting local government while regulating interstellar trade and rule of law, but PSI as a people kept mostly to themselves, appearing only to deliver supplies to colonies in need … or, as was rumored, at least, to steal necessities from a passing freighter.
On a wealthy colony like Volhynia, PSI would be seen as anachronistic, even threatening; a PSI soldier at a local bar would be an attraction. Or, more likely, a wasp to be provoked. But if he was an impostor, she would have expected him to be making the most of it: courting attention, and drinking a good deal more than what the bartender had poured into that tiny glass.
She waited, wondering if he would say something else, then finished paying for the drinks. When he spoke again, she almost jumped.
“May I offer you some advice?” he asked.
His pronunciation was clipped and exotic, his speech mannered and slightly slow, as if he was translating in his head before he spoke. Most PSI were reputed to be multilingual, and some joined as children, or even young adults. She would have no way of guessing on which colony this one may have started his life.
“All right,” she said.
“You should not keep company with children.”
He was staring straight ahead, not looking at her. He had an angular profile punctuated by a substantial, aquiline nose and a neatly trimmed mustache. A masculine face, and yet his lips were full, almost feminine. His eyes were wide and deep set, and in the dim light of the bar looked jet-black; but they caught light from all around, giving him an expression of intelligence and good humor. She could not, if asked, have honestly called him handsome; but there was something in his bearing, something immediate and physical that she suspected made people watch him even when he did not move.
“Are you offering me an alternative?”
At that he smiled, although he still did not look at her. “I take my own advice.”
The amusement in his eyes was not cruel, but she still found herself annoyed. “Do I seem so young, then?” she asked him.
“My dear lady, you are young.”
He had a nice voice, almost impossibly deep, with a hint of music. She wondered if he sang. “I’m not that young.”
He took pity on her at that, and turned to meet her eyes. His direct gaze was sharper, and she realized that whatever he was drinking had not intoxicated him at all. “What age are you?” he asked her curiously.
“Thirty-two.”
He gave a brief, dismissive snort. “When you were born,” he said, “I was well into my twenties, and I had seen more horrors than you will all of your life.” He turned away again.
By her estimation, she had seen enough horror for anyone, but he would have no way of knowing. “So if I am so young,” she deduced, “then surely I’m in the right crowd. Me and all these boys.”
“Possibly,” he allowed. “But these boys can do nothing for you.”
“That’s not what they think.”
He scoffed again, still good-humored. “These boys believe that because they know the mechanics, they know how to make love to a woman. They are wrong.”
She thought for a moment, an old memory surfacing. “My cousin Peter used to say something about young men,” she remembered. “‘Too busy loving themselves to effectively fuck anybody else.’”
At that he put down his glass and let out a loud bark of laughter. She could not help but smile herself. “He tends to be crass,” she said, half-apologetic.
“Observant, though,” he said, favoring her with a genuine smile. She saw him focus, as if he had not really looked at her before. “Tell me, dear lady,” he asked her, curious. “Why are you here?”
Those dark eyes of his, in addition to sharpness, held a genuine warmth that pleased her more than she would have expected. “I thought we’d established that,” she tried, but he shook his head.
“You told that boy you were planning to leave,” he reminded her. “I believe you meant it.”
This time she was the one who looked away. “I came here because I promised 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