by Greg Curtis
“I’m David Hill. I live over by the next lake. This is Cyrea of Berel, my mate. And Ayer we know, but who might you be, if it’s not too rude?” Cyrea squeezed his hand again, partly bothered by the way he used her full name in casual conversation with strangers and so brutally stated their relationship, and partly pleased that he acknowledged it so readily in front of others. It was the first opportunity he’d had to introduce her as his mate, the Leinian equivalent of wife, and he enjoyed being able to, no matter how crudely he’d said it. He picked her hand up and kissed it gently, making sure she knew he had no fear of that. It was a gesture that was not lost on the other two, and in response Ayer picked up the girl’s hand and kissed it in exactly the same fashion.
“I am Ayertal of Hayle and this is Rebecca Roschelle, my mate.” At his words David noticed that Rebecca looked both happy and confused. She looked a little as though she was just waking from a pleasant dream, happy but somewhat disoriented. But he also noticed that the single word that had jarred was not being referred to as his mate, it was her own name. Actually her surname. Family problems? He filed it away for reference, wondering the significance, and meaning to find out.
“So now that the introductions are over, we’d very much like to hear how you met. After all my mate and I owe you a very big thank you. Until yesterday we were the only mixed couple. Today we seem to have started a trend. And please call me Cyrea by the way.” Cyrea when she smiled could light up a room, and the two kids were simply overpowered by her smile. So was David. He would have told her anything. But he hadn’t been asked to spill his guts. So instead he sat quietly by the fire as the two of them began babbling, listening carefully and holding Cyrea’s hand.
It was a wonderful story of love and wonder, but very soon on he realised things weren’t as rosy as they sounded. The investigator within listened with ever growing sadness as the kids took it in turns to speak, each filling in their own unique perspective, but somehow neither understanding the other’s essence. They were in love. Of that at least he had no doubt. But how they had gotten there, and whether it could endure was something else again.
Rebecca, or Becky as she asked to be called, and there was deception even in that, told them how she had been out tramping alone through the bush when she had decided to go swimming. But the current had been too strong for her, and the water too cold and too treacherous, and she had found herself swept away from her camp site. She had been carried for miles it seemed when she started to lose consciousness and started breathing water. From there it had been a downhill battle as the water buffeted her and the cold sapped her strength. She clung to a small piece of wood that was travelling with her and tried to make the shore, but she was too weak.
Then Ayer had come wading into the water from out of nowhere and rescued her. Her very own angel to the rescue.
In his own words she had been half drowned, her skin was turning blue and she wasn’t breathing very well, and he’d begun to wonder if he was too late. But a few deep breaths seemed to do the trick, and soon she had been spitting up water, and coughing weakly. He’d quickly grabbed a blanket from his kit, wrapped it round her when she began shivering, and lit a fire. When that wasn’t enough, he’d held her tight using his own body heat to warm her.
From that moment on the magic as they both agreed, had begun. Which made sense to David, as he remembered holding Cyrea only too well and the way it had affected them, even if they’d been too pig headed to understand it at first. That night the kids had slept in the same bag for the first time, though not as lovers, just two people sharing body heat. But in the morning when they had both awoken and remembered, that was when the passion had truly begun.
At first they had tried to deny it, which was futile. David and Cyrea could attest to that much. But they had both known the truth, and denial went out the window quite quickly. Then they had started to wonder about the wisdom of the act, being so very different. But Ayer had seen the recording of David and Cyrea, and he knew it was both possible and welcome, something that made David chuckle a little. He might be many things, but the boy was always a male. Ayer had made sure Becky knew all that he knew, removing one more impediment.
Their first full day together was a difficult day for them, both wanting, confused and both afraid. The tension became worse when they realized that Becky had only her bathing costume to wear for the day, a skimpy white bikini. Ayer’s clothes were too large for her in some places, too small in others, and she had lost her other clothes. Reading between the lines though David suspected she had played that card more than she needed to. She could have fitted in his clothes, she just enjoyed teasing him, making him stare at her with hungry eyes while she enjoyed his desire. Neither did Ayer object to looking, he was just frustrated. Typical teenagers in lust.
The final crack was the following night, when darkness fell and the air chilled. They had a fire but only one sleeping bag. They were both fit young people, with their hormones racing, and in a heaven sent position to sin. Ayer being a gentleman gave her the bag saying he could wear extra clothes, and Becky feeling both guilty and hungry said they could share. From the moment they were together in the bag again, everything that followed was entirely predictable. They gave in, probably immediately, and once they'd finally given in to their needs, there was no turning back.
Of course they were teenagers, young fit and healthy, and with substantial needs. They were also new to each other, and discovering the joys of their flesh. Once they had opened the flood gates nature did the rest, and they had spent close to a week travelling slowly up the river supposedly looking for her belongings, and not getting very far at all. It had taken them a whole week to travel three measly miles and they still hadn’t found them.
Their tale made sense to David, in the way that a story should, but it was wrong. He knew it from the moment Becky opened her mouth. He even knew what smelled so badly about it. But he also guessed Ayer didn’t understand, and probably wouldn’t for a long time to come. He might be twenty, but he was a young twenty, even for his people. His people probably wouldn’t understand either. He knew Cyrea well enough by then to know that the Leinians were remarkably short sighted in some areas. But it wasn’t a flaw with them. It was the result of being too decent. They thought everyone else was too. They couldn’t even imagine the truth.
Carefully he started questioning Becky about her background, already knowing it before he asked. He could see it in her eyes and hear it in the answers she wouldn’t give him. The same answers she hadn’t given Ayer. The less she told him the more he knew.
Becky was a runaway, though from a very much more privileged life than most. She had been raised in a cold house, the only child of a distant father and a drunk mother, though she hadn’t described either of them as that. Instead they were busy and poorly, respectively. There was violence too in her background; it was in the way she described them in such polite, unemotional words. Words that allowed her to deny the pain. He didn’t pry further. He didn’t need to.
She had been raised by a string of servants, and when she became too difficult she had been sent away to boarding schools. But by the time they got her she was already a lost child. The die had been cast early on and she couldn’t fit in. She didn’t want to. She managed to get herself expelled from one school after the other, always he guessed, secretly hoping she would be welcomed back into her loving parent’s arms. It hadn’t worked out of course. It never did. And each time she had been thrown back into another school. That was why she could honestly say she had been educated all over the country and all over the world.
Her father had died early, David suspected suicide or violence from the evasion she gave, and her mother had walked away, leaving her at fifteen with an allowance which would leave most people staggering, and a life that was already in tatters. For the next five years she had managed to waste her life, her inheritance, and her hope on world trips, frivolities, failed relationships and new age hocus pocus. It was written in the t
attooed pentacle around her navel, the missing tan lines and the expensive nose job. By the time she turned twenty she was close to bankrupt, ill educated, unemployable, morally shattered, lucky not to be pregnant, and had a drinking problem.
It was a tragedy but the greatest horror was that she wasn’t the only one. Too many people like her ended up on the CIA's watch list because of drugs and international travel. He had seen many others in her shoes and watched them go from bad to worse. All of them he knew would ultimately have to reach rock bottom before they could pull themselves back from the edge, and not all of them would make it back. Especially those who discovered drugs. For them the way back was a hundred times harder. But her eyes were clear and he could see no needle tracks in her arms, which gave him some hope.
At some point she had taken the only course left open to her, and gone to see her mother. A mother who was so drunk she didn’t recognize her, but apparently alert enough to try and steal the last of her inheritance from her. In her words though, her mother had been so poorly that she needed the money for her medical expenses.
That had been Rebecca’s point of no return. Her world had finally collapsed and she had nowhere to go. She’d taken the last of her money, driven probably until the fuel ran out and then gone hiking. But it was no spontaneous holiday as she claimed. She was not a tramper. By the looks of her feet she had never worn a pair of boots in her life, nor had her shoulders ever supported a pack. Never having been in the woods in her life before was the only thing she had said which he knew she was telling the truth about. She’d had no survival gear, no tent, no adequate clothing and no hope of surviving more than a day or two. But then she had never intended to survive.
Somewhere upstream, and he was pretty sure he knew where, she had stripped down to her togs and leapt off a tall bank into a cold and deadly river as the sun was setting. That she had survived the fall from Dead Man’s Leap which he had no doubt was the place - the name would have drawn her like a magnet - was a miracle. The ten meter drop into rapids had killed too many over the years. But there had been heavy rain in the past weeks and the water level was probably high enough to keep her from killing herself by hitting the rocks underneath.
There was a down side to the river being so full though. When it was in flood the water simply flew through the narrow gorges and twisted canyons. The swollen river had carried her like a cork for upwards of ten miles, probably in less than half an hour, while she no doubt panicked and started the slow and painful process of drowning.
Along the way, as her situation had become more and more desperate and the imminence of her death had made itself known, she had experienced a revelation. She wanted to live. David was certain that that much of the tale was true. But wanting to live when you’re going under in a twisting, tossing, flood engorged river, is not enough. You have to have the physical strength and the will, and the cold and choking water had been swiftly robbing her of both. He wondered how many others had made that same life affirming decision in her shoes and never achieved it.
She had ultimately been unbelievably lucky. When Ayer had stepped in and literally pulled her to safety, David had no doubt she had been going under for the last time. It was a miracle she had made it that far down the river at all. She meant it when she said he had been like an angel to her, carrying her to heaven. But for her perhaps, that heaven would hopefully be on Earth.
David looked at Ayer and knew he didn’t understand. No more did Cyrea, for which he knew he should be truly thankful. He didn’t want them to understand. But he also knew that sooner or later, they would have to. And while for Cyrea that would be hard to accept, for Ayer it might well be impossible. Yet he had to.
From that point on, whenever Becky saw Ayer she saw her angel, which was both a good and bad thing. It was good because seeing him that way gave her a reason to live, to be happy, and to escape her past into a fantasy world. The past week was probably the first in her life when she had truly felt loved. It was also bad because no matter how decent Ayer was, he still wasn’t an angel. He was a young man with all the strengths and weaknesses that that entailed. And he was a Leinian, a person from a totally different culture to hers. Sooner or later her bubble would burst and she would have to discover him for who he was. What would happen then, no one could predict.
But there were things that could be done to swing the odds towards a better outcome. Towards keeping them together, and he knew that that was the key for both of them to have a good life.
It was as though a corner had been turned in his mind, as he suddenly understood he needed to do everything he could for these kids, and that for both of them, the best thing he could do was to keep them together. At some point he'd stopped thinking of the Leinians as anything other than regular people. Now, sitting here in front of him were two people, two children, who needed all the help they could get, and he wanted to give it to them. Their problem had become his.
Rebecca had suffered a life changing experience, for which he was glad, but he was also old enough and cynical enough to know that such changes don’t always endure. Sooner or later he knew, her old life would reassert itself. She would miss her servants or her wealth, maybe even her friends if she had any left. That could spell disaster for them both.
For now though, she was at least clean and alcohol free, being looked after by someone who actually cared for her, and for the first time actually enjoying her life. David knew that the longer that happy circumstance could continue, the better would be her chance of leaving her old life behind. Also the better would be the chance for the two of them to grow close emotionally as well as sexually, and that was even more critical for Ayer. As Cyrea had told him, Leinians had only one chance to find a mate, and this for the youngster was clearly it. Becky could move on though it would probably be a stupid mistake for her as well as him. Ayer couldn’t.
They had been asked, well Cyrea had said asked but he suspected the truth was closer to their being ordered, to bring the two kids back ASAP. David vetoed that on the spot. He had no reason to return them to the ship, and every reason to let them continue their honeymoon. Ayer was no fool, and he knew he was overdue from his holiday if only by a day, but when he asked if they were there to bring them back, David told him he’d been given another fortnight off for having been so brave. Cyrea started squeezing his hand again about then, wondering what he was doing, but she didn’t openly disagree with him. He promised her quietly that he’d explain later.
Thinking quickly David made a short speech about Ayer’s courage, knowing that Becky listened intently as he spoke about how much danger Ayer had faced in going in after her into the raging waters. They could have easily ended up with two dead swimmers. It sounded quite corny to him and Cyrea and probably Ayer, but they weren’t the intended audience, Becky was.
The young man clearly wasn’t quite sure he believed him and he was also modest, trying to down play the water’s speed, and his own risk. But then he also knew enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Two more weeks of sun and sex. Rebecca on the other hand was simply ecstatic. She began a new phase of hero worship on the spot as she rediscovered the risks Ayer had taken for her, and in any case she didn’t want her new found heaven to end so soon.
So far so good David thought, but there was also a catch. The pair had to get past their initial lust and fantasy somehow. Not so rapidly or cruelly that it burst their bubble of joy and left them sad and angry, but gradually so that the fantasy and reality merged as gently as possible for them.
He asked Ayer to bring Rebecca back to the Leinian base at the end of their two weeks so she could have a proper medical and so they could explain their mission to her. To Ayer that at least made perfect sense, and Becky was simply too happy at the thought of another two weeks with her angel to even think about the future. But in time David hoped, it would start triggering her curiosity. With each day as they came closer to the base, her questions would grow together with her uncertainty. Ayer would automatically
reassure her, and in learning about the Leinians, he hoped she would learn about Ayer.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but the best he could do at such short notice. He hoped to be able to improve the chances later by involving the Leinians themselves, and making sure they watched the couple closely. The latter at least he was sure they’d do. Perverts as Cyrea and he thought of them, could still have their uses.
Cyrea finally started to look as though she was going to object to all the changes he was making. David quickly kissed her and then stood up, complaining his backside was sore from sitting on the ground. When she looked as though she might want to stay where she was, he picked her up and carried her back to the flier to hoots of laughter from the youngsters. Cyrea was caught once again off guard, but didn’t protest too much he noticed. Maybe it was a technique he’d use again. Besides she was a wonderful warm weight in his arms.
