by Smith, Glenn
Liz smiled. “Believe me, if I could take you with me I would. But this trip is classified, so I can’t. Hell, I’ve already told you more than I should have.”
At that, Karen smiled, too. “My dear, you always tell me a lot more than you should,” she humorously pointed out.
“Yes, I know. It’ll be my downfall one day.”
“Nonsense. I’ve never repeated anything to anyone.”
“I know, but that’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is, if I take you with me Admiral Hansen will assume I’ve compromised the secrecy of my mission. Rightfully so, too. He’ll pull me off that flight so fast it’ll make my head spin, which will make it easier for him to rip it off my shoulders afterwards. This mission, not to mention my career, is just too important for me to allow that to happen. I’m sorry.”
With a slight shrug of her shoulders and a smile to let Liz know that she wasn’t too badly disappointed—she hadn’t really expected her to let her go along anyway—Karen said, “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“Of course not,” Liz agreed, smiling back.
They gazed at each other for another moment. Then, as Karen started to cry again, Liz took her into her arms and hugged her close. “I’ll be back before you know it,” she whispered.
“Wanna bet?”
Liz grinned. “Try not to hound the admiral too much.”
Karen sniffed. “I won’t.”
They relaxed their embrace and gazed into one another’s eyes again, then kissed. A long and passionate kiss, it could easily have led to something more if Liz had had more time. But, unfortunately, she didn’t.
“I really do have to get ready,” she said.
Reluctantly, Karen let her go. “Behave yourself out there,” she said.
“Yes, mother.” Liz kissed her again as she grabbed a dry towel off the rack attached to the side of the counter, then left the bathroom.
Karen watched her go, then stepped into the shower.
Liz tried to wrap the towel around her as approached her dresser, only to discover that it barely reached around her chest and only hung halfway to her waist. She laughed. She’d grabbed a hand towel instead of her bath towel. No doubt Karen would have found that hysterical. She dropped it onto her stool instead and then sat down to apply her makeup. Because she spent so much of her time in uniform, she never really wore much makeup, but a little bit, when properly applied, could go a long way to bring out a woman’s natural beauty. That was what she’d always gone for.
She didn’t want to leave Karen behind any more than Karen wanted to be left behind. She loved her so much and loved to spend as much time with her as she could. Turning her down had been hard. If only she could take her along. Given the option, she would without hesitation, but that was an option the admiral would never give her.
They’d been lovers since high school, totally committed to one another, and had married in the summer after Karen finished college. In all they’d been together almost twenty-two years. Who would ever have thought, way back at the very beginning when they first met, that things would ever turn out to be so good between them?
It had all begun with a party early in Liz’s junior year of high school. Her overbearing parents, who’d raised her and her brother in a strict religious home, had finally caved in and given her their permission to start dating, and she’d wasted no time in making her classmates aware of her sudden availability. A senior boy named Chris, whom she’d known had had his eye on her ever since grade school, had eagerly asked her out to a Halloween party that one of his friends was throwing. That friend had rented the clubhouse at the condos where he lived, which he’d claimed had a heated indoor pool, a large hot tub, and if they could break into it, a very well stocked liquor bar. She’d happily accepted Chris’s invitation and had promptly told her parents that the party would be chaperoned, which was of course a lie. After all, if it really had been chaperoned, no one would have wanted to go.
Both the clubhouse and the party had turned out to be everything Chris’s friend had claimed they would be, and more. The pool was Olympic-sized, lit from several feet below the surface of the crystal water by a row of bright, built-in amber lights. Except for the recessed safety light in the ceiling above the front door, their host had turned all the other lights in the pool house off to enhance the Halloween mood. Costumes were discarded early in favor of swim trunks and bikinis, but it wasn’t long after someone finally managed to break into the liquor cabinet behind the bar that a few of the more uninhibited girls discarded their bikini tops as well.
As the evening wore on and what had started as a generous supply of liquor dwindled, more and more of the increasingly intoxicated partiers abandoned their inhibitions and stripped off their swimsuits. Now and then couples disappeared into the sauna or to some other secluded place for a time, and then return to the festivities with renewed enthusiasm. But for the naïve, sixteen year old Elizabeth Royer, it was the hot tub that marked her passage into that new stage of her life.
Like most everyone else, she and Chris had traded Halloween costumes for swimsuits fairly early. Hers was a navy blue two-piece with bright yellow highlights, but was of a more conservative cut than the skimpy string bikinis that a lot of the other girls were wearing. They’d been swimming and diving for most of the evening and were starting to get tired, so at a few minutes past 10:00, about an hour before Liz was going to have to ask Chris to take her home, they decided to go out and relax in the hot tub for a while.
The tub was actually located outside, but was enclosed within a semicircular extension of the building’s walls, tall enough so that no one not attending the party could see it. Several other guests were already enjoying it when Chris and Liz got there, but it was big enough to seat over a dozen people around its circumference, so the tired couple went ahead and joined them.
At first, the dark jet-churned water was a bit too hot for comfort and Liz had to sit there, body tense and eyes closed, willing herself not to jump right back out. But after a few minutes she began to find its heat and its gentle massaging action quite soothing and luxurious, not to mention a little stimulating, sexually.
About five minutes into it, Chris leaned in close and quietly suggested that she take off her top. At first she refused outright, but then he pointed out to her that all the other girls in the hot tub were already topless. As a matter of fact, the one straddled across her boyfriend’s lap kissing him was having sex with the guy at that very moment, or so he claimed. But a ripple of bright color below the water’s surface told Liz that the girl still had her bikini bottom on, so she didn’t believe him...until the girl clutched her boyfriend’s face to her breasts and started rocking back and forth.
Liz reconsidered Chris’s suggestion and finally decided that becoming known to her friends as the only girl at the party who wouldn’t go topless would be a lot worse than actually going topless, especially when some of them, guys and girls alike, were already running around stark naked without a care. After all, a tag like that might adversely affect her fledgling social life. So, much to the delight of everyone else in the hot tub who happened to be paying attention, her top came off, and they showed their appreciation of her generous attributes by breaking into a short round of applause.
She couldn’t help but feel self-conscious at first, but the next few minutes of conversation with Chris helped her to relax. She was really beginning to like him. Soon the talking turned into kissing. Petting and fondling followed as the booze she’d imbibed began to affect her judgment, and her ingrained inhibitions slowly fell away like so many layers of clothing on a hot summer day. Before too much longer she was as naked as the day she was born, perched on the edge of the underwater bench and lying back against the angled seat back with her legs wrapped tightly around Chris’s waist as he deflowered her for all he was worth.
As it turned out, all he was worth wasn’t as much as she’d hoped for, once she’d
decided to give herself to him, but that certainly wasn’t due to any shortcomings on his part. On the contrary, he knew exactly what to do and how to do it, and he had the equipment to do it very well. And she was thoroughly enjoying it, too—at least it was a lot more fun than all those years of masturbation had been—but it just wasn’t totlly...fulfilling.
She opened her eyes for a moment and happened to notice that the couple locked together in a deep, passionate kiss directly across from her were both very pretty girls with long dark hair. All but ignoring Chris’s efforts, she watched intently as they kissed and caressed one another, and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed them sooner.
The one on the right stood up. She wasn’t just topless, she was completely naked. She stepped up onto the bench, then turned around and sat on the hot tub’s narrow rim and opened her legs. An almost bestial lust filled Liz’s heart as she looked between them, surprising her as much as it would have anyone else, and when the second girl stood up—she was naked, too—and turned her back, then knelt before her friend and leaned in to taste her soft pink flesh, Liz’s entire body suddenly quivered and erupted with the first non-self-induced and most explosive orgasm she’d ever experienced.
Poor Chris would probably live out the remainder of his days thinking he was responsible for her awakening.
Finally, at that moment, it had all made sense. As far back as grade school, Liz had had the same superficial feelings of puppy love for boys that all of her friends had. But as she passed into her teens, that attraction had begun to diminish, replaced by what she’d always thought was nothing more than innocent curiosity and the simple platonic appreciation of a young woman’s beauty. She’d never even considered the possibility, until that very moment, that she might like girls in that way more than she did boys.
She didn’t want to be mean, so she let Chris finish what he’d started, but when those two girls climbed out of the hot tub a few minutes later and started to dry off, she excused herself to go talk to them while she had the chance.
Leaving her suit behind—they were naked, too, so why bother putting it back on?—she climbed out and joined them. She introduced herself, and the taller of the two responded in kind. Her name was Karen DiAngelo, and her lover’s name was Julie Covelli. Both were fourteen year old freshmen new to the school district.
After a brief conversation, during which Julie left to use the bathroom, Liz asked Karen out for the following weekend. But Karen turned her down, explaining that she and Julie had been friends since early elementary school and had secretly been lovers for the past two years, since long before their parents’ recent marriage had made them stepsisters. Since that marriage had resulted in their living together, they had a great thing going that neither one of them wanted to complicate.
Over the ensuing weeks, Liz tried a few more times to get one or the other of them, or even both of them if they were interested in trying that sort of thing, to go out with her, but they turned her down every time. Finally, she accepted their kindly offered platonic friendship and started dating the few other girls in school she occasionally found who were willing to go out with her and participate in her sexual experimentation. It was during that period in her life that she realized she preferred girls exclusively, but opportunities for that sort of relationship came few and far between in such a small town, and no matter how hard she tried to ignore it, her unwavering desire for the stepsisters lingered.
Then, during spring break of that same year, Julie met a boy from the neighboring school district. Liaisons with her stepsister grew more and more infrequent as she grew closer to him, and before long she was spending nearly all of her free time with the guy, leaving Karen alone to fend for herself. That rejection, unintentional though it might have been, hurt Karen deeply and plunged her into a pit of depression.
Liz was there for her friend, and made sure she knew it. She spent nearly every evening after school by her side, helping her to cope with the pain that she didn’t dare share with her parents. She made no advances toward her—that would have seemed wrong somehow—but somewhere along the line something happened. Karen chose to give herself over one night and asked Liz to make love to her, and that was that. Karen fell in love with her that very night, and they’d been together ever since.
Focusing on her reflection as her mind returned to the present, Liz suddenly realized as she lifted her mascara applicator to her eyelash that she’d already finished putting her makeup on. Funny. She could barely remember starting.
The mini comm-panel in the wall beside the bed chirped to life. “Commander Royer?” it called in the admiral’s voice.
She set the applicator aside and got up, went over to the comm-panel, and tapped the respond pad. “Go ahead, sir.”
“Good. I’m glad I caught you. Go silent and secure.”
“Stand by.” The mini panel was an older model that didn’t have the S&S feature, so she had to go into the living room, to the main terminal. She activated the unit, double-checked to be sure it was set on audio only—she still hadn’t put any clothes on—then flipped it to S&S and put on the headset. “All right, Admiral. Go ahead.”
“We’ve got a major problem, Commander,” he began. “I received an Intel report a short time ago that confirms the Sulaini have brought the Veshtonn back into the Caldanra system as an ally. No doubt they’re hoping to enlist their help to overrun Cirra and finally claim the whole system for themselves, once and for all. What prompted them to trust the Veshtonn all of the sudden is still anyone’s guess at this point, but I think we can both guess what the Veshtonn plans for that system are.”
“Yes, sir,” she agreed. “Has fighting broken out yet?”
“Not yet, but I don’t think it’ll be quiet for much longer. As a matter of fact, it looks like the Sulaini have already struck right at the heart of the Cirran government. The Crown Prince of the Cirran Republics and his first bound concubine have been abducted.”
“The Sulaini admit responsibility for that?” she asked doubtfully.
“Of course they don’t. They’re blaming the Caldanran Unity Front and are offering to assist the Cirran government in any rescue attempt they might want to mount. Naturally, the Cirran government has declined their kind offer.”
“I should hope so.”
“Listen, Liz. I called you because I wanted to let you know what you were getting into on this trip, and to tell you that I’ve already discussed a plan of action with the president and issued the appropriate orders to initiate it. We’re sending in our Rangers.”
No doubt that meant... “Sergeant Graves’ unit?”
“Exactly.”
“Is that wise, sir? I mean...shouldn’t we keep him out of harm’s way at this point?”
“Believe me, Commander, I’d like to. But we can’t. Not now. Not without drawing a lot of unwanted attention to ourselves.”
“I can think of any number of ways to...”
“Negative, Commander. We can’t risk delaying this operation. That system’s a powder keg, and it’s about ready to blow. With that in mind, you might want to put your travel plans on hold for now, until we know for sure that Graves will still be there for you to talk to.”
“I’d love to, sir, believe me.” She glanced back into the bedroom to make sure Karen was still out of earshot, then lowered her voice. “But like you just said, we can’t risk any delays. Assuming he lives through this, we’re going to want to get him back here and into the academy as soon as possible. I think I should still go.”
“I agree completely, Commander,” Hansen said, relief clearly evident in his voice. “But since you volunteered for this, I felt obligated to give you the option.”
“I appreciate that, sir, but I really think it’s best that I go.”
“Thank you for not disappointing me, Commander. Have a safe trip, and good luck. Hansen out.”
Liz closed the channel and set the headset down, then went back into the bedroom to get dressed. She went to the bureau
and pulled on clean underclothes, then chose a new pair of jeans and a pullover top from the closet and put them on.
Karen came out of the bathroom wrapped in a thick white towel—one that actually reached around her and covered everything—and followed Liz back into the living room. She waited while Liz pulled on her soft, well worn deck shoes, then stepped into her welcoming arms.
Liz kissed her tenderly and said, “I love you,” then grabbed up the suitcases she’d packed yesterday afternoon and left for the aerospace terminal.
“I love you, too,” Karen quietly responded as the door slid closed in front of her.
Chapter 25
The Next Morning
Earth Standard Date: Sunday, 29 August 2190
Except for last night, and whenever necessary in order to complete those mundane tasks they’d long ago coined as the ‘official business’ of being a married couple—cleaning the house, buying the groceries, preparing the meals, paying the bills, and whatever else happened to come up—Dylan and Carolyn had hardly spoken to each other for most of the day yesterday, which had left Dylan feeling more than just a little bitter. Sadly, he was growing used to feeling that way toward her. God only knew where her heart truly lay amidst all the trouble between them, but Dylan had long since resigned himself to the fact that he was probably going to be miserable for most of the rest of his life unless he divorced her or got himself assigned to a starcruiser again to escape his domestic life for a while.
But last night something very unusual had happened—something so rare that he couldn’t even remember the last time it had happened. They’d enjoyed a nice dinner together and had actually engaged in a few hours of intelligent conversation afterwards without getting into an argument. They’d even gone to bed together and made love before they went to sleep, which was something else they hadn’t done in quite a long while.
