Pleasure

by Jacquelyn Frank

  But when he held her close, keeping her tight in his arms, she felt his need for her in the strength he used to keep her there. She would wake in the same embrace she had fallen asleep in.

  And she knew every day that it could be the last time.

  Finally, the inevitability of it became too much for her to bear.

  It happened at the most innocuous moment. She was standing over the sink washing dishes from the meal they’d just finished. Usually Sagan offered to do the chore, but he had left the meal halfway through, claiming to be tired. He’d teased her for being the source of his worn-out state, and she had laughed at his playful remark, but now as she stood with her hands in warm soapy water she realized he was more right than he knew. Sagan, she had comprehended early on, was used to extraordinary physical activity within his day. He was used to a great many things that he was now being kept apart from; a lifestyle full of habits that were 160 years inured into him. So sudden a change, so direct a flout in the face of all that he was…

  He was homesick and he was depressed, she realized. Whether he knew it or not, recognized it or not, or showed it or not, it was a fact. No being of his health, breeding, and power needed as much rest as he had come to need. She didn’t care how athletic they were in bed. She had seen a progression and had denied it attention because she didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want the end result of it.

  Valera didn’t want to send him home.

  She knew he would never come back if she did. It was selfish, she realized as tears clenched like a chokehold on her throat. He would never be happy here. She wished that he could, wished that she could somehow be everything he needed, but it was an unrealistic fantasy. She was human and she was mortal. She would grow old and die and he would be just as young and beautiful as ever. Outside of their physical chemistry, she had nothing to hold him with…and no reason to deserve having him at her side. Sagan could stay no more than Valera could follow if he went.

  When he went.

  Val dried off her hands and walked into the back bedroom. He wasn’t asleep, but sat on the end of the bed clearly heavy with his thoughts. So much so that he didn’t notice her there. She watched him in silence for a moment; saw the bow of his head as he studied his own hands. It was when she realized she knew what he was contemplating that she hurried forward to fill his empty hands with hers, squeezing them tightly and with all of her heart as she knelt between his feet and looked up into his troubled eyes. Since she had caught him off guard, she saw everything he had tried to keep concealed from her etched in his redwood gaze.

  “Here,” she said with a hitch of oncoming pain, “they can only be filled with me.” Valera looked at his hands, stroking her palm over his. “But there…there they can be filled with so much more. A sword. Work. Friends and family. All the responsibilities you treasured and all of the life you lived before something decided to snatch you out of it like plunging you into a surreal dream world. But Sagan,” she said, holding down her selfish emotions until she was shaking with the repression, “the dream has lasted much too long. It’s time for you to awaken back in your real world. You have to go. You don’t belong here.”

  Val had wanted to say it straight, with wisdom and selflessness, but her tears and the chasm of loneliness she was reopening overcame her. But she realized he was much too special and far too beautiful for just the human world. Her life was too simple and too unspectacular to hold any interest for him. How she had managed to catch his attention in the first place, she would never understand.

  Sagan’s fingers tightened around hers almost painfully as he stared into her swimming eyes. He brought her trembling fingers to the kiss of his lips.

  “I don’t want to leave you,” he said with such low intensity that it seized her by her heart. “I can’t imagine an eternity of never watching you cook again, or of never touching you.”

  He had her head in his hands instantly, drawing her mouth under his for a kiss of such poignant desperation it broke her heart even as it made her soar with pleasure to know he felt that way about her.

  “I don’t think I can live on only nine days of memories of you, Valera. I say that to myself each day and push for another and another, but I don’t even know when it would ever be enough.”

  “You can’t survive here,” she argued. “You need more than a woman in a cabin in the wilderness. Don’t you think I know that? Feel that? I could never be happy knowing that staying with me is hollowing out who you are and always have been. You can’t even tell me who you are and who you have been.”

  “What I need, what gnaws at me relentlessly, is to know…to know everyone I left behind me is safe and well.”

  “And what if they are? You’d come back? To do what? Hide inside when the white nights come to surround you? You can’t do that any more than I can live forever. There’s nothing to argue about here! We’ve always known this was wrong in so many ways—”

  “No! Not wrong!” he exploded, jerking her hard between his grasp. “Never again say such a thing, Valera. You are perfect. We are so spectacular together that it cannot be labeled wrong. It defiles the beauty of what we have had and I will not stand to hear you disparage it. Do you understand?”

  She nodded and then completely crumbled apart. She realized her stupid heart was breaking for someone she couldn’t have. She knew so little about him, but also knew everything that mattered. He was benevolent and gentle, intelligent and sweet with humor, and he was as dangerous and severe as he needed to be when occasion demanded it. He made love to her in so many ways both lewd and loving, but every time—every single time—he held her hard against his heart and spoke to her just as he was speaking to her now. Treasuring her. Treasuring them.

  “But you have to go,” she rasped softly, “and you know that as well as I do.”

  Sagan closed his eyes, his expression pained as he touched his forehead to hers.

  “And they will want me to repent my sin with you and demand I pay penance for it. What will happen, Valera, when I refuse to do it? You are no sin and I will not let them tell me to treat you as such. I will lose my position for it; the work you think I long for will be taken from me because they will deem me a hypocrite to my faith. As a priest committing what they see as a gross sin and refusing to repent? I will be ejected as an example, and they would be right to do so. To let it slide would invite chaos into an institution already riddled with difficulties. I will defy them on the issue of you, sweetness, but I will not destroy my faith because of it.”

  “And what of your family? Your friends? Your culture? Will you pretend they don’t matter? I feel you and hear you when you dream. The fear you have for the welfare of your people is choking you. You don’t have to tell me anything for me to know without a doubt that there are people you love in danger. And despite so much I don’t know about you, I do know you could not rest idle with me here when you would crave to be helping them there.”

  He lurched sharply to his feet and paced away from her, telling her she had struck his rawest nerve.

  “Look at you, Sagan,” she pleaded softly. “You are made to fight and defend for your culture. It is your special talent, just as mine is…”

  “Talking to your cats?” he lobbed back at her.

  “Trust me, it takes talent to converse with a cat,” she said wryly.

  “I’ve come to see that,” he agreed, his chuckle soft and a little distant. He remembered the first time he’d caught her talking to the fat gray cat named simply Fat Baby. At first he’d thought she was just a bit eccentric from being alone so long, but it hadn’t taken him long to recognize the telepathic connection she was using so offhandedly. Valera had told him the cats had magic because they were familiars, a special sort of cat that sought out magical and supernatural beings to make homes with. But he would argue that it was her magic that made the connection possible, otherwise why wouldn’t the cats have spoken to him? He was supernatural and a telepath. If that didn’t suit their need for conversation,
then what would?

  Her cats were very much like headstrong, and sometimes spoiled, little children. But she managed them with endless patience and practicality. He could see that even from just half of an interaction. She would make a very special sort of mother one day.

  Something he couldn’t, in good conscience, be a part of. Hybrid babies that were half Shadowdweller couldn’t survive in the human culture. There was too much light and technology that shed light. If a hybrid child was even born in a human hospital, how could it survive for even a minute after leaving the dark safety of its mother’s womb?

  There was only one surviving hybrid of human and Shadowdweller that he knew of, and even she was weak and fragile. Raised in a human world, she’d been treated as the child of a devil and had grown up delicate and brittle in an abusive world of light. Now she lived in the underground city with her second culture and it was hoped it would strengthen her.

  One hybrid.

  Only one.

  He could offer Valera nothing but what would be left of him after Sanctuary got through stripping him of his title and his work. She was right; he would be superfluous and out of his element here, whereas in the Shadow city, he could make a new purpose for himself without the priesthood. But how could he live so close and never reach out to her again? How could he find and fulfill any purpose without her to do it for? What would it mean and why would it matter? What he did as a priest he did to preserve their culture and to give people the freedom to find faith and security and love. Love of themselves, love of the gods…and the love of one special other. If he couldn’t rescue it for himself, how could he save it in others? How could he continue to love and feel passion for a culture that left no room for someone as special and precious as Valera was?

  He couldn’t. No more than he could survive and live in love within her culture, because they certainly had no room for him. One world meant almost certain death, the other meant survival only, but not passion.

  “I have no regrets,” he said softly, although he couldn’t look at her just then. “Always remember that. I would do this time over again in a heartbeat, even knowing the conflict I face because of it.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said in the barest whisper, making him jolt around to stare at her. She looked up at him from where she continued to kneel on the floor, tears dropping one after another over her cheeks. “I would rather let you live with peace and contentment just the way you were before you came here to me. I would rather you be happy!”

  “You mean ignorant!” he burst out sharply, storming back across to her and dropping to his knees before her. “You think I would be content living life without knowing what we have? Drenna, Valera, I love you like nothing else in my life! Not even my gods and my faith can touch what I feel for you! What else could have dissolved both our defenses so quickly if not the deepest and most powerful of emotions?”

  “Lust?” she offered with a nervous and watery little laugh.

  But he did smile crookedly at her for that.

  “I believe lust like that cannot exist all on its own. I have felt lust, seen it…I’ve even taught about the nature of it to many generations of my people. What we experienced was a lust that became a swift bridge to something more.” Sagan reached for her hands, nearly crushing them in his as he squeezed her in desperation. “I won’t leave here if I have come to this emotion one-sided. If I have, I have failed you. I thought…I thought you felt the way I do—”

  “I don’t want to feel the way you do!” she cried, gasping for breath all of a sudden, her hand jerking free to press against her laboring chest. “I don’t want to feel this, Sagan! You think it’s better to love and lose than never to have loved at all, and you’re wrong! God, you’re wrong! This hurts! It fucking hurts and I hate you for it! I hate you for it!”

  Val tried to rip free of him completely, but she never could do anything Sagan didn’t want her to do when it came to the physical, and this time was no different. He enveloped her in his arms and pressed her hard against his heart until she could do nothing but scream. She had never cried so hard in her life and it felt as if she were going to die of grief.

  “You have to leave,” she sobbed in anguish. “I can’t bear your guilt, your helplessness and your pain any more than I can bear this love. You’re killing me. God, please…please…”

  Sagan shuddered as her agony washed through him and he swallowed his emotions until he all but choked on them. It had been selfish of him to demand her feelings, but he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t deserve them when he could offer her no solace and no future, but how could he face the recriminating future that awaited him without knowing if she loved him? He had never thought himself a coward or weak until he thought of facing the future alone again. He also knew she felt just as weak and afraid of that future as he did, except she had tried to do the right thing. She had tried to free him with a measure of dignity.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered painfully soft against her ear. He took a deep breath, saturating himself in her lilies and sunflowers scent. “Please don’t forget what I said. I have never loved anything so much as I love you.”

  Sagan stood up, prying himself free of their embrace, and left her on her knees on the floor as he left the room. Val sobbed silent, airless sobs, bending over her knees…until she heard the front door close behind him.

  Penchant, Fat Baby, and Ulysses found her curled up in her bed several hours later, numb and spent, for the moment, and simply staring at the darkened window.

  “What will he do when daylight comes?” she asked them on a whisper, her voice lost to her grief.

  What he has always done, I imagine. He did live over a century and a half before finding you, after all.

  Nice, Penchant. Way to be sensitive, Fat Baby scolded sarcastically.

  I only meant she shouldn’t worry. He is capable of caring for himself.

  Just what she wants to hear, Ulysses chimed in. How well he can get along without her.

  It’s what she needs to hear. And she needs to remember the same goes for her, Penchant sniffed.

  Fine, Fat Baby sighed, but at least give her some time before you get practical on her.

  “Yes. I need time,” she murmured, closing her eyes.

  Penchant’s tail twitched as his feline heart went out to the human Witch who had taken such good care of him for so long now.

  Time, he thought. She needs time.

  Gee, why didn’t I think of that? Fat Baby thought dryly.

  Chapter Six

  Without supplies or proper clothing, and because he had to be so cautious of finding places to keep him securely out of sunlight for Alaska’s short winter days, it took a long time for Sagan to return to Elk’s Lake. Getting caught in a storm didn’t help matters. One day there was no shelter anywhere for him and he had to cross into Shadowscape to keep safe from the sun. The landscape of pure darkness, except for the light of the moon, was the safest place a ’Dweller could be. For two days. After that they started to sink into a euphoria that made them a bit crazy. Shadowscape had to be used with caution because time moved very differently there than it did in Realscape. There was never any telling whether he would end up hours or days off schedule when he shifted from one to the other.

  By the time he reached the research station guarding the entrance to the exhausted mines that had been transformed into the Shadowdwellers’ winter city, Sagan looked and felt like he had been through Lightscape naked. But his priest’s uniform was a universal identifier to the guards at the gate and he was ushered in as they tried to take him into the nearest building to tend to his state of exposure and exhaustion. He shrugged them off and walked himself directly into the city, not stopping until he was about to step into Sanctuary.

  Sagan struggled to catch his breath and to control the shivers of his body as the significantly warmer environs of the city thawed him from his near-frozen state. The harshness and numbness of survival in the wilderness had kept him focused every i
nstant on what he needed to do to keep alive and keep going.

  But now pain rushed into his warming extremities even as it rushed across his heart and soul. He stared down at the line of decorative tile that demarcated the holy ground of the temple and the vaster Sanctuary that housed it. He realized it had never occurred to him to simply keep silent about what he had done. Probably because it would be a dishonorable deception of omission and it simply wasn’t in him to do that. He might have broken a vow, but he was no hypocrite. He had spent ages speaking religious law and its consequences to those who broke them, preaching how only repentance could allow forgiveness. To hide a wrongdoing was in itself a sin.

  He had done wrong to break that vow. He admitted that. But it was the vow alone he regretted and not any of what followed. Sanctuary and temple law, however, would not be so selective.

  “Sagan!”

  The loud call of his name brought up his attention as Magnus rushed across that shiny tiled flooring to him, his golden eyes alight with relief and disbelief all at once. As he drew closer, however, Magnus’s delight in seeing his friend alive altered dramatically into an aghast shock and worry for his state of health.

  Magnus reached Sagan and immediately dropped his shoulder under the other priest’s arm to help keep him steady on his feet. Sagan remained utterly silent, but Magnus could feel how he stared at him as if searching for an answer from him.

  “Come, Sagan,” Magnus bid him gently. “Let’s take you in to the healers.”

  Sagan heard lighter steps reach them and he saw K’yan Daenaira hurrying up to them.

  “Sagan! Oh thank the gods!”

  She was less gentle with him, throwing her arms around him to throttle him with a hug. It confused him, that familiarity. He didn’t know her that well. And what he did know of her told him that she was a prickly thing who did not lower her defenses easily; something he could respect as a swordfighter.