And so they walked together along the paths through the grounds of the Spires, past stands of trees and rows of hedges and beds of flowers, and together they talked.
“My counseling sessions have begun,” Rawn told her. “My counselor is a very
knowledgeable and understanding female. She has worked with other Knights who have come through very traumatic situations in battle, though of course none who have experienced what I have. She has done her best to put me at ease with expressing my feelings about my long time away. But it has not been easy.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ve said a lot of things that were very confidential,” said Joanna. “You don’t have to tell me any of the details; I understand what it must be like.”
“It isn’t easy to unburden myself of all these feelings,” he said. “Even talking with you, I haven’t expressed everything I’ve felt about what happened, and everything that I had to go through. We Knights are trained not to let feelings like that take us over, not to let them rule us. Remember what I told you before about fear. To reveal these feelings, even confidentially with a counselor, even when it is approved and sanctioned, is to resist the way we’ve been trained. It’s…very difficult.”
“I’m sure it would be,” Joanna said as empathetically as she knew how. “You know, I’m happy just to keep you company. You don’t have to tell me anything that you’re not comfortable saying.”
“I appreciate that,” Rawn said. “But my counselor says that expressing feelings—within limits—will do me good. Especially feelings that are truly important. She says that holding back the important feelings will hinder my recovery. In some ways…I must be open now, even if it is against my instincts.”
Joanna suddenly felt a bit nervous. She was not quite sure what to make of what he was telling her now. Where could this be going? Tentatively, she asked, “Open…about what?”
“There are…some things I need to say,” Rawn replied. “Can we sit for this?”
“Yes, of course,” Joanna answered, thinking that sitting down would likely be the best way to have whatever conversation they were about to have.
They found themselves a secluded spot where a marble bench stood nestled amid trees and shrubs. Rawn let Joanna sit down first, then he sat at a comfortable distance from her on the bench and thoughtfully began.
“Joanna,” he said, “on returning home, the first person that I saw was you. We met in a time of danger, and after I rescued you, you saw me at my weakest, most vulnerable moment--physically."
“That’s true, yes,” she said.
“Since then,” he continued, “we have spent much time together. Being with you,
speaking with you, has been part of my return to the life that I knew, just as the game was today. I've been taking back my life, one part, one piece at a time. I've been returning not only to my home, but to myself. You can understand that, can't you?"
“Of course,” she agreed. “You've been away from everything you knew. Your life for so long, I'm sure it wasn't anything you could even recognize. It must have felt like you weren't even really yourself sometimes."
"It almost did feel that way. At times, I feared I would lose myself in some other world not my own, in some space that was not my home. I had only my station as a Knight, my training, my purpose to hold on to, to remember who I was, what my life was and what it meant. For much of the time, it was all that I had."
“I understand that,” said Joanna. “But you came through it because that’s who you are. You’re a champion, Rawn. You’re a hero.”
He sighed at that, as if the thought, for some reason, sat heavily on his heart. "That is what everyone thinks of me, I know. And I've done everything to be that. I'm proud that I'm able to be that. But Joanna...being home again, being with my people, my fellow Knights...it has
reminded me that there are other things I need. Being with you has reminded me that, as proud as I am, and for everything I can do, I am not only a Knight."
“You're a good man, Rawn,” said Joanna. “Being as brave and strong and good as you are, that didn't come from being a Knight. You being a Knight came from who you are. I know that."
“I’m pleased that you know that,” he said. “I'm pleased that you think I'm a good man. But Joanna, at the end of it all...I am a man. A dragon...and a man." He paused meaningfully. "Joanna, in the short time we've known each other, I've grown fond of you. And I think you've grown as fond of me."
“I have, yes,” she replied.
“Then, I must ask you: Have you ever had any thought of me as something other than a story, or as a subject to interview?"
Joanna gulped a bit at the question. “Like I said, I think of you as a good, kind, brave man.” She had a very keen sense now that he was not going to leave it at that.
And then, he put the thought out there: "Have you thought of me as a man that perhaps you'd like to know in another way?"
There was another pause now, a shared pause, deeper and longer than the last.
Finally, she answered. "Rawn, everyone thinks the world of you. And I'm sure people everywhere think you're..." At this, she shut down for fear that anything she said next would take them further to a place where she did want them to go. Then, carefully, she continued, "Rawn, there are a million people out there who think you're beautiful. Handsome....beautiful...desirable. There are a million people who'd love to know you, be close to you...be with you. They've probably been sending you all kinds of messages, telling you all kinds of things, showing you all kinds of interest. And I don't blame them."
“Does that include you? Is that what you think of me?”
She started, “I think…” And again, she could not go on.
He watched her intently. "It is, isn't it? You find me desirable. You can tell me, Joanna. I've thought of you a great deal, and not only as a mediate interviewing me for her story. I've thought of you as an intelligent and very beautiful woman. A woman I'd like to know much
better--in a way that I think you'd like to know me as well."
Flatly, she answered, “That can’t happen, Rawn.”
“Why not?”
"You know why. You've said it yourself. I'm a mediate; you're my story. That's our
relationship. That's the only relationship we can have."
“Why?”
Joanna started to grow flustered. She brushed nervously at her hair with her fingers. "What do you mean, 'why?' It's what I just said. There are lines, Rawn--boundaries. Ethics. Journalistic ethics. If I'm covering you as a story, that's our relationship, and it can't go any
further. It's about my integrity. If I'm covering a story, it's my job to stay outside the story, to be impartial. To report, to show, to comment--from outside. Impartially.
No other involvement, no bias. That's what I do, and that's how I'm obligated to do it. It's how my profession and my audience trusts me to do it. If I compromise that, I throw away everything my work is supposed to be about. There's meant to be a line between me and the story. That's how it has to be."
“Is there also a line between you and your feelings?” Rawn asked.
“My job is to put my feelings aside when I report a story,” Joanna protested. “Rawn, if I cross the line for one story, if I compromise myself one time, everything else I do professionally will be judged by that. Everything I do will be suspect. There's a trust between me and my
Audience, and there's an understanding between me and my profession. If I make one personal compromise, I compromise everything from then on. Nothing happens in a vacuum, Rawn. Everything is tied to everything else."
“So your ethics are so important to you that you would sacrifice something that you
really want?”
Joanna asked back, “Aren’t your ethics that important to you? Rawn, they must be! Is your integrity something you can just put aside when it's convenient? I don't believe that."
Rawn looked down for a moment, sighing hard, before looking back at her. “Joanna,�
� he began, “there have been females that I've saved from danger, who have come to me when the danger was over and expressed their gratitude and their admiration. And I have lain with them and given them times that neither they nor I will ever forget. And I am no less a Knight because of it. I am still the same man, the same dragon, and the same Knight that I have always been, no matter whose bed I've shared or whom I've taken to my bed. I know who I am. My fellow Knights know who I am. Whom I lie with doesn't change that."
“It’s different for me, Rawn,” said Joanna. “It just is. And anyway, there's something else. The whole planet and everyone else in the quadrant knows you're going to your welcome ball with Evette Veles--the daughter of the leader of this planet. How will it look to your world and everyone who admires you and sees you as a hero if you're escorting the Alpha Dragon's daughter and sleeping with me?
Have you considered what people will think? And not only that, think of what it would do to me professionally, not just personally, but in my career. People are supposed to trust me—the
public, other mediates, the bureau that I work for. If this got out, it would go ahead of me
everywhere I went. People expect honesty from me. They trust me to tell them the truth. If I had a relationship with the subject of a story—who also happened to be seeing someone in
Evette’s position on this planet—what would they think of my honesty?"
“Why should anyone know?” Rawn asked. “I would not tell them. Would you?”
“Listen to how that sounds. See me in private and see Evette in public, and no one’s the wiser? We both deserve better than that.”
"Joanna, I've learned that life is too unpredictable to dwell always on what we deserve. Sometimes, we must take what's in front of us when it's there.”
"And what happens then? Rawn, I'm not going to be here on Lacerta much longer. After the ball, I'm scheduled to leave. Even if we do this now, we won't have much more than a few days. Then, I'll be gone, and it'll be you and Evette, or you and whoever else."
“Evette,” said Rawn, “is someone that I met when she was a little girl. In some ways, I still think of her as that little girl."
Joanna almost laughed at that. “Trust me when I tell you this, Rawn. Give her a chance, and you’ll see her very differently. She’ll make sure of it.”
“I will not see her the way that I see you.”
“But soon, I’ll be gone.”
“All the more reason to do what we wish, when we can.”
Joanna shook her head, frowning, feeling utterly unable to let this go on a minute longer. She stood up quickly from the bench and said firmly, “Rawn, it isn’t right.”
He stood up with her, as intent on his point as she was on hers. “And it's right to deny yourself what you really want? I don't believe life is meant to be lived that way, especially after the way I've lived the last fifteen years. If you have a desire, and fulfilling it will do no harm to others, you owe it to yourself to fulfill it--because the chance may never come again."
As decisively as he would strike a telling blow in some battle, Rawn stepped closer to her and closed the distance between them, and before Joanna could utter another word, his massive arms were around her. He brought his face to hers, and in a dizzying instant, their mouths were together. He kissed her as if to breathe fire right into her heart. She felt lifted from the ground as surely as if he was a dragon again and he was taking off with her. His kiss lit her up inside with dragon flames.
He held them in the kiss until every muscle in Joanna’s body felt molten, and she feared she could not stand up on her own; she needed him to hold her and stop her either collapsing onto the grass or flying away under her own power. She had never been kissed that way in her life. In spite of herself, she held him and gave herself into the kiss.
At the end of that long flight of passion, Rawn pulled back but kept his face close to hers and his warm breath on her. “There, Joanna,” he said, half whispering. “That is something we both wanted. It is the beginning of something we both wanted. There is so much more for us. You need only take it."
The woman who had made a career and a life working with words was speechless. She could do nothing but let him kiss her again and scorch her heart with his fire.
At the end of this kiss, he voiced the ultimate thought. “Let's go to your quarters,
Joanna. Let's go to your bed. I want to do everything and not stop. Let's go to bed now."
That was everything that Joanna should want to hear. That was everything she should want the most heart-stunning, breathtaking man she had ever met in her life to say to her. And she practically wanted to scream YES! She wanted to throw her arms around his neck, let him sweep her up in those incredible arms, and have him carry her off to bed to do everything he wanted and everything she wanted him to do to her.
But instead, with every ounce of her will and might, she wrenched herself from his
embrace, shocking him and her alike. To his dumbfounded reaction she breathlessly said, “Rawn…I can’t.”
Stricken, he said, “You want to.”
Struggling to regain her composure, Joanna told him, "I can't. I'm sorry. We don’t know that we won’t be hurting anyone else. I think it would hurt Evette. I think it would make her feel betrayed, and there’s no reason to expect her not to be public about it. She’s a public person, just like us.
And there’s your standing in the Knighthood. What would the Spires do when they found out? There’s so much admiration for you, Rawn; I’d hate to see anything happen to that as much as I’d hate to lose my own standing. Nothing that we want changes anything. I can't just throw away what I'm supposed to be about, and I can’t let this happen to you. I worked too hard for it, and you’ve been through too much. I'm sorry, Rawn."
"You would not be sorry if you let me do what we both want me to do. And there's still time. There's still a chance. You know how to reach me. I ask you, Joanna, to reconsider, to take the risk. That is another thing a Knight learns: the importance of risk. This risk is desirable, the most desirable thing there is. And risks have rewards. Think more about this, Joanna. And call on me when you do."
And that was it. He had stated his case, and she had made hers, and it had left them both feeling in the middle of nowhere—and both feeling the ache of knowing where they really
wanted to be. Respecting the space, however unwanted, that she had put between them, Rawn stepped back and added to it, making it feel that a chasm was opening up between them; a chasm that he could easily close just by taking flight. And Rawn did will his body back to dragon form, but only to lift his head, open his wings, leap from the ground, and fly away.
Joanna was alone now on the grounds of the Spires, alone with her thoughts and her integrity. And the memory of his arms and his lips that would stay with her instead of taking wing. She would carry that kiss with her forever.
CHAPTER NINE
The kiss stayed with Joanna that evening, which felt as if it must have been the most
difficult evening of her life.
She spent the next several hours at the guest house, trying to distract herself from how
distracted she was over her talk with Rawn. It did little good. Coiled all around her like a
dragon’s tail was the temptation of having Epaulette call up everything she had stored about him, in particular, the recordings of him in the restorative tank, naked except for the breathing
apparatus. At the time, she had wondered how it would feel to lie under him and be on the
receiving end of what she saw between his legs.
This very day, he had offered her that very experience, the pleasure of that very thing. And what an awesome pleasure it must be. How could she have turned him down? How could she have denied him—and herself? Was she mad?
Remembering everything she told him, Joanna thought no, she was not mad. She was principled. Annoyingly, frustratingly, maddeningly principled. In its own way, that was worse than b
eing mad.
Joanna’s principles right now were not making her happy. Her principles were standing between her and the rapture of lying down naked for a naked Rawn and having him present to her erect what she had seen flaccid, and having him lay himself down on her and put that
erection inside her and show her how it felt to fly in a different way than he’d flown with her
before.
Her principles were the only things stopping her flying with Rawn on a mattress, which would surely be oh, so much sweeter than flying with him through the air. Her principles, her ethics, her commitment to her career—only that was standing in her way, and she found she could not move them. So she sat at her desk in the guest quarters’ living room, and damned her principles.
In an only partly successful attempt to take her mind off Rawn, Joanna decided to play back another interview she had done between her encounters with him. She had spoken to Toran, the Mentor Knight who had taken on the job of supervising the disposal of the Scodax wreckage. The interview had been routine.
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