by Robin Banks
“Not really. I mean, I don’t know. You like them?”
I put my hand in the box to touch them. “They’re really soft.”
He looks sideways at me. “Aren’t they s’posed to be?”
“I think so.” I take them out of the box. One is all golds, blues, and browns, one is rust and gray, and one is silver and green. “They’re beautiful.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I take the blue one out and put it against my cheek. “Isn’t it a bit much?”
“What?”
“A bit too fancy for me.”
“No.”
He says that so definitely I can’t help smiling.
“Thank you.”
“Yeah. Alright. I have to go now.”
“Where?”
He shrugs. “Out.” And he’s up and away in a single motion.
I am entirely at a loss as to what just happened. I don’t feel like walking anymore, though, and I have a sudden need to be near Asher, so I head back to our room. I try not to wake him up, but I fail. He doesn’t seem to mind, though.
“Hey, gorgeous. Where did you get to?”
“Nowhere much. I thought I’d go for a walk, but Luke was up.”
He pats the bed next to him. I sit down and he curls up around me.
“I’m confused. What does Luke being up have to do with you walking?”
“He wanted to talk to me. It was weird. He got me a present, sort of.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Look.”
I take the scarves out of the box and show them to him. He rubs his fingers against one of them.
“Huh. Isn’t that something. Did he explain why the urge took him?”
“Yes. Sort of. It’s to do with the part I’m playing for the mission. So I can look more in character.”
“And that needed three of the things?”
“This way the girls won’t feel left out when I get home.”
“Huh.”
I don’t like Asher’s tone much. His expression is not much better.
“Do you think it was ok for me to take them? It was all ever so awkward. I didn’t know how to say no. I didn’t know what to say at all.”
He sighs. “Gorgeous, that’s the thing: if I wanted to give you a gift and make sure you’d take it, that’s precisely how I’d do it. Make it about the mission and the girls.”
“But it is about the mission and the girls.”
“Quinny, wearing that stuff you’re going to look like a well-kept tart, that’s a fact.”
“Oi!”
He smiles the half-grin he saves for softening blows. “Operational need, gorgeous. But, despite your inveterate vanity, giving you something pretty wouldn’t have sat well with you, not if Gwenny couldn’t borrow it.”
“Well, it wouldn't be fair, would it? It’s bad enough that she’s at home working while we’re out here having fun.”
He cackles. “That’s grade A bullshit. You’d give your left nut to be home right now. But Luke cunningly bypassed that issue altogether. I keep underestimating the guy. I really ought to know better by now.”
“Are you saying he tricked me into taking this?”
“No. I’m saying he knows us better than I give him credit for. This isn’t the first present he gives you, either.”
“What? Yes, it is. Well, he took me out to lunch a couple of times, but I think that was on Raj’s tab.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. He got me that gig last week.”
“He didn’t! You got that for yourself, fair and square. You’re a good floater.”
“I’m a brilliant floater, but I wouldn’t have found the gig had he not mentioned it to me. He noticed it even though it was completely irrelevant to him and took the time to tell me about it.”
“That was hardly a mighty struggle.”
“No, but it was a kindness. You might not notice them because you’re naturally kind, but they’re not all that common.”
“Maybe so, but how was that a present to me?”
“You’re happy when I’m happy, and working makes me happy. Gorgeous, the boy likes you. You must know that.”
“I know no such thing! You’re getting this all wrong. If you heard him when he was giving me the scarves, you’d understand.”
Asher grins. “I’ve never been too smooth talking to girls I liked, either.”
“I’m not a girl! And you’re being ridiculous!”
“That’s a distinct possibility. You can forget about the green one, by the way: Gwenny will claim it on the spot, because it’ll bring out the green in her eyes.”
“And the silver in her hair?”
“You may choose to tell her that, in which case it was nice knowing you. Which one is your favorite?”
“This one.” I hold the blue-and-gold against my cheek.
He half-grins again. “I should have figured. You haven’t spotted it yet, have you?”
“Spotted what?”
“He got you a scarf for each of us. Green and silver for Gwenny, grey and red for me, and blue and gold for himself. I don’t know if he meant to or he did it by accident, but he did it. Either way, I think it’s sweet.”
“I think it’s nonsense.”
“Quinny, wouldn’t it make you happy if he liked you?”
“Whyever would that be the case?”
His grin disappears. “Come down here, will you?”
I put the scarves back in the box and start to snuggle up against him, but he pulls away from me.
“Aren’t you a bit overdressed for bed?”
I shake my head at him, but I take my clothes off anyway.
We wrap our arms around each other. I like talking to Asher like this. It might make my thinking a bit hazier than it would be otherwise, but it’s worth it.
“Gorgeous, in the last few weeks we’ve been spending a lot of time together, the five of us, and we haven’t seen a great deal of anyone else. This kind of proximity can bring about a degree of intimacy, as it were.”
“As it were, how?”
“People can get close on long trips. You know, snuggly close.”
“I find your choice of terminology as disturbing as the concept, given the people in question, but ok. What are you trying to get to?”
“I know for a fact that you have no inclinations to get cozy with Raj, which further proves your poor taste in men. The guy is upstanding and outstanding, but he doesn’t tickle your fancy in the least.”
“That could be because he’s duller than dishwater.”
He cringes. “Say it like you see it, why don’t you? And you still find him more attractive than Alya, with whom you’d never, ever tangle.”
I shudder. “Gods, no. Rolling around in the sack with her would be like falling down the stairs in high g clutching a sack full of spanners.”
Asher stares at me for a couple of seconds, then starts laughing so hard he can’t breathe.
“I’m sorry, but it’s true! The woman is practically made of elbows!”
“I’ve never…” he wheezes, “…never thought I’d hear you being such a bitch about anyone, ever. Man, that is cold.”
“But true.”
“She’s not so bad, come on. She’s a bit more streamlined than Gwen…”
I snort. “I’m not talking about her curves, or lack thereof. The woman’s made entirely of sharp angles, inside and out. You could double her size, but that wouldn’t change her angularity. It’d just put more mass behind her countless elbows. It’d be terrifying.”
That makes him laugh again. “You’re probably right there. I was going to call you a hypocrite and now I can’t. Our Gwenny wasn’t much plumper when you first met her, and you were all over her. I was mildly concerned at the time.”
“What? Did you think I was going to cut in on you?
“Nah.” He brushes my hair off my face. “Well, maybe a little. Or a lot. We’d not been together all that long, and she’s all brilliant and shit, and I was
a scarred-up, mentally crippled has-been who’d gone about as far in his career and his life as he was ever going to go, and that wasn’t very far. I was still waiting for her to wise up and kick me to the curb.”
“Asher, you’d been married for over three years by then.”
“Yeah. Just long enough for her to work out how much trouble I was and how little I was worth it.”
He says that as if it was no more than a passing fancy on his part, as if it didn’t matter. Maybe now it really doesn’t, but I know full well that it did matter back then, that the only reason the fear of losing her didn’t drown him is that he valued her happiness more than his own. He still does. He does the same with me, and with everyone he loves. That’s one of the perks of being loved by a hero: they always put you first. That’s also one of the dangers of being loved by a hero: you always have to check that they’re not taking unnecessary damage. They take a lot of looking after because they don’t look after themselves.
He smiles his half-grin again, but there is no joy behind it.
“You were young, handsome, and healthy, and you were brought there to protect her person because I’d had to admit that I couldn’t do that on my own. I’m enough of an asshole for that to matter. I ought to be able to protect my lady love without assistance from third parties.”
“Have you watched your lady love play with knives lately? She does the bulk of her own protecting.”
“I know, and I know it’s all awfully Terran of me. But it’s in my head, and until I get rid of it all I can do is admit to it, keep an eye on it, and not let it turn me into a total ass. I wanted you there. I wanted her as safe as she could be, and I couldn’t be with her every hour of every day. But needing you to be there… I felt unmanned, and I wasn’t feeling that great about myself at the best of times back then. It didn’t matter, anyway. Gwen needed you, and if it turned out that she wanted you, too, or instead…” His gaze flickers. “If Gwen wanted to go on to better things, and you turned out to be part of those better things, I would have tried to be glad about that. I would have probably managed, eventually. In a couple of centuries or so. That wasn’t it, though, or rather it wasn’t the main thing.”
He puts a finger on my chest, right over my heart, and slides his eyes to it. “You were there. We needed you there and we wanted you there. You were becoming a bigger presence in our lives every day. As soon as things started to veer off in that direction, Gwen made a point to tell me that I came first, that we came first, that whatever was going to happen wasn’t going to make a dent in what we had, because she wouldn’t let it. She said it so many times and so forcefully that I started to worry. I wondered whether she wanted to make sure that it’d really sunk in, because sometimes I can’t hear that kind of thing very well, or because she needed to remind herself. But I trust her, you know? She plays it straight.”
His eyes slide back up to lock with mine and I know the difficult part is coming. Asher plays it straight too. “I was worried about you. I thought you liked Gwen enough that you could get hurt, and I liked you well enough already not to want that to happen. I knew I’d only like you more the more I knew you, and I wanted to know more of you…” he trails off. “There’s a ton of ways this could have gone wrong, and all of them would have sucked. All of them could have hurt someone I care about. But it felt real, and important. Too important to run away from.”
Every now and then Asher comes out with something that reminds me of how brave he is, how lucky I am, and how a good proportion of my luck hinges on his bravery. Every single time this happens, it takes my words away. It doesn’t take away my gift, though. I flash him how I feel about him. Just a little bit, just so he really knows.
His eyes flutter. He rests his hand on my heart and sighs. “Yeah. Right back atcha. I never dreamt it could be so good. I didn’t know there was this much good to be had.”
I move his hand off my chest and slide up closer to him. I need to feel his skin against mine for a while. He nuzzles up to me and speaks into my neck. “And there was this, too. Quinny, love, you confused the fuck out of me. Not literally. Quite the opposite, in fact, which was rather the source of the confusion.”
We’ve never really spoken about this. Way back when, by the time our thing went from being a theoretical possibility we may or may not want to entertain to a real, flesh-and-blood issue, we were past being able to speak. We felt our way through it. Afterwards we were too busy trying not to get killed, and then we got too involved living our lives and our loves. I kiss him before pulling away from him. I want him near me, but I need to look at him right now.
“Was it the gender thing?”
“No. That was the least of my worries. I mean, I know that I don’t really get it, because I don’t always brain so good and we’re wired differently anyway, but I know it’s not really for me to get. You are who you are, and I’m damn glad of it. I’m glad of all of it.”
One of the cool things about Asher’s complexion is that when he blushes you can see it from a couple of miles away. The skin dye is hiding the bulk of it now, but I can feel the heat radiating from his face. Whatever is coming is a big deal for him, and I have no idea what it is.
“What then?”
“It’s just… I felt like I ought to go down on my knees and thank the gods for you, for you being who you are, for having found you, but every time I was on my knees near you I’d get distracted.” His hand sliding between my legs clarifies his meaning, as if it needed clarifying, and makes my breath shudder. “And, you know…” He trails off again.
I bite my lip to stop myself from biting his.
“Asher, love, I really want to talk this out, because it feels important. But if you carry on what you’re doing, in about thirty seconds you’re gonna have to nail my hands to the wall to keep them off you, and if you don’t I’m gonna… I know I’ll forget all about it for a while. Out with it.”
His hand stops moving on me and I momentarily wish I’d kept my mouth shut, but we can save that for later. I want to know what the hell this is about.
“It’s just… You’re my first dude. You must have known that, right? I mean, with me not knowing what goes where and stuff. It must have all been awfully fumbly.”
“That’s not how I remember it. And first times with anyone are always fumbly, if they’re any good. You don’t want be with somebody who bangs from a script.”
“Yeah, but you were my first-first.”
He looks so damn vulnerable right now and I can feel that this is the important bit for him, but I don’t understand what he’s trying to say and that worries me.
“Love, I need more words. Come on. Better out than in.”
That half grin flashes again. “Ever since I’ve been with Gwen, I don’t look around. I don’t have to stop myself looking: it just doesn’t happen. Maybe it’s because the woman is so much godsdamn trouble that she takes my full attention. Maybe I’m just naturally, what’s the word again? Monochromatic? Monotheistic?”
That makes me giggle. “Monogamous. Though some people may balk at us using the term to describe a member of a triad, and for you and Gwen ‘monotheistic’ is probably more accurate anyway.”
He cracks a grin. “I guess. But before Gwen, I’d notice girls. I mean, it’s hard not to. They’re all around, and most of them are pretty in some way. Even if you aren’t looking for anything and neither are they, it’s hard not to notice them. But I never noticed a… A male-shaped person before.”
“You what?”
“I didn’t know I liked guys. I still don’t. I mean, I know: I don’t like guys. Not like that. Never have, and maybe I never will. I just like you. And you’ve, like, got manly parts, and I like that about you. I like that a lot. And that was confusing as fuck, and still is when I think about it. Luckily the two of you keep me too busy to have a chance to think at all.”
“Oh. I didn’t know. I mean, I knew that you hadn’t… But I didn’t know that you hadn’t wanted… Asher, you should have ta
lked to me about this. Way back when, I mean. Before.”
He snorts. “Yeah. That would have made for a comfortable chat.”
“Not comfortable, no, but important.”
“What would you have done? Honestly.”
“Honestly? I would have probably backed the fuck up until you got it all straightened out in your head.”
“Maybe I didn’t want you to do that. I mean, that was the whole issue: I wanted things to move forward. I talked it out with Gwen, anyway, because that’s what I do.”
“You told your wife, whom you adore, that out of the blue and for the first time ever you fancied a, what did you call me? Male-shaped person?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I? If anyone had a right to know, it was her. She’s my wife.”
“A lot of guys would have kept quiet about that. No, that’s not right: a lot of guys would have buried that thought so deep they could never find it again, and ideally with a stake through its heart.”
“A lot of guys aren’t married to Gwen. I wasn’t about to start keeping stuff from her. Aside from the fact that she would have found out eventually and eviscerated me, what’s the point in being with somebody if you aren’t straight with them? That cuts any chances of a true relationship right out.”
“It increases the chances of one lasting, though.”
“Maybe. But who wants a long-lasting, bogus relationship? Anyway, Gwen does most of the thinking for me at the best of times, and she was talking about it to me, too. It was a bit different for her, but she was starting to fall for her best friend. I mean, sorry and all that, but you’re the nearest thing to a best girlfriend she ever had, even though you’re not a girl. And you’ve got manly parts, and she was starting to think she wanted to interlock genitals with you, and that was confusing to her, too.”
“Yeah, but that’s nothing special. She’s liked guys before.”
“Yeah, but you’re not a guy. Or a girl. You’re just you. That’s the whole thing about it: you’re you, and both of us liked you and, well, wanted to get down with you. Monotheistic or not.”
“But you weren’t sure about my manly parts.”
“Not at all, no. I was somewhat freaked out, really. Gwen put me right. I’m so glad I married above my intelligence quotient.”
