Liquid Lies (27 page)

His thumb drew a line down her cheek and her eyes flipped open. “Good morning” didn’t seem appropriate. Maybe someday they could actually say that and mean it.

Whoa. Had his mind actually made that leap?

“You’re awake,” he said instead.

“Just been lying here. Liking it.” But trouble lingered behind her eyes.

“Me, too.” A blond hair got caught in her eyelashes and he pulled it free. “Thirsty?”

She nodded and he slipped into the bathroom to bring back two paper cups of mountain-cold tap water. They sat up in bed to drink, him finishing first. He watched her down hers. The second she lowered the cup, he was on her. Pushed her back into the pillow. Slid deftly between her legs and felt the hot place he’d been last night. He kissed her in the quiet light of a new day. Felt the soft, agonizing skate of her fingers on his back, making him compare it to the gentle tease of a whip before a lover snapped it.

Yeah,
whipped
was a good word for him.

She touched his mind. Commanded his blood. And every bit of it now headed straight for his cock, making it pulse. Beneath him, her hips rocked up, drawing him closer, telling him what she wanted. He rose to his knees and elbows, positioning himself, already feeling her heat. The tip of him caressed her inner thigh, and she held her breath in anticipation.

The watch, on his wrist positioned near Gwen’s head, buzzed and flashed a message. They froze. Stared at each other.

This was not trying to zip up before your parents traipsed up the stairs. This was not pumping as hard as you could so you’d come before your roommates got home from the late movie.

This was life or death. His and Gwen’s.

With a growl of frustration, he sat back on his heels and stared at Nora’s message.

Take her back to the cabin ASAP. Back here by one. Photo proof at all locations.

Back to the lake house by one. With an hour’s drive each way, they had to get a move on.

“What?” Gwen said, still stretched out gorgeously beneath him.

It was much easier to talk when he didn’t have to look at her. “You have to go back. To that cabin.”

“When?” Her hand gripped his thigh, saying,
We can make it fast. We can make it good.

He wrenched away. He had no choice. The blood left his dick in a great, cold whoosh. “Now.”

“Please don’t turn away like that.”

“I have to,” he sighed, “because if I touch you, I’ll never want to leave. And neither of us can afford that.”

Then she was behind him, all naked softness, breasts against his back, hands curling around his shoulders.

He groaned and stepped away. “Don’t.”

“So nothing’s changed between us. God, I’m so stupid for thinking—”

He whirled back around. “Are you kidding?
Everything’s
changed. Between
us
. But for Nora, everything has to be the same. It has to look as it always had. And I’ve lost my handle on the separation for what I have to do for her and what I’m feeling for you. It’s so fucked up. I’ve never, ever had an issue with being two different people because I’ve never had to be them at the same goddamn time. But now I do and I’m just barely hanging on. If she catches on, I’m a dead man. She’ll get rid of me and then I couldn’t look after you.”

Gwen went a little wide-eyed, a little indignant. “Do you still think I’m trying to turn you?”

He gouged the heels of his palms into his eyes and didn’t reply. Honestly, he had no idea what to think.

“Reed. Look at me. I’m not.”

“I know.” Did he? He peeled his hands away. “I’m just so…confused.” He skittered away from her outstretched hand. “Gwen, I said don’t touch me.”

Now she was starting to get the hint, to share a little bit of his coldness. They had to use that to get out of the house without raising suspicion. If they walked out of this room right now, they’d be all over each other. He’d kiss her, touch her, every chance he got. He’d be Reed, not the Retriever, and everything would end.

The wall had to go up
now
, and they had to separate, physically and emotionally, for him to do it and protect them both.

He stormed back to his room and returned with a new yellow pill. He wasn’t sure she’d be able to get it into her throat past the tight clench of her jaw, but she did it.

The door to the shack creaked open, throwing a shaft of harsh
sunlight inside. Genesai hunched over the table, which had been pushed into a shadowed corner. Both hands shoveling food into his mouth, he was completely unaware Gwen had entered. She was surprised by the gusto of his eating. By his appearance, it looked as though he’d been scraping by on the bare minimum of nutrients for over a century.

She glanced back at Reed, who leaned against a pine tree at the top of the slope. He’d successfully reverted back to that detached kidnapper she knew so well, the one she hated. The Retriever’s presence carved an awful hole in her chest, because every time she looked at him, she saw the man who’d grinned at her over a Guinness, who’d talked to her across the DMZ, and who’d moved so powerfully and so well inside her while touching her so gently.

She closed the shack door against Reed’s image and blinked in the dimness. “Genesai?”

His head jerked up, his crazed eyes dancing over her. His mouth fell open, half-eaten crackers tumbling out. She took a few tentative steps closer. If he remembered her, he didn’t show it.

A clock ticked loudly in the back of her mind. Time with him was precious and short, and the window to figure out how to save the Tedrans and keep Ofarian society intact narrowed by the second. It was incredibly fortuitous that Nora had again been pulled away to the Plant and Gwen was here alone. She couldn’t screw this up.

Gwen unzipped her jacket and pulled out the pages she’d taken from the cabin wall. Genesai saw them, and his head swiveled toward the exact place where they used to hang. She let the long piece unfold. He blinked at his drawings and scribblings. Blinked at her. She moved closer and he brushed timid fingers to the words and images she held, much like a child might when encouraged to touch something wondrous and new and a tad frightening.

She’d gone through Translation twenty-one times, the only exceptions being for English and Ofarian. Many Translations were similar. People took pride in their languages and they liked to know foreigners wanted to learn it. If she got words or structure or grammar wrong, they liked to correct her. So many were eager to teach. She placed her hope for Genesai on this principle. After one hundred and fifty years of solitude, she hoped he was itching for a little conversation with someone who might actually be able to communicate.

She smiled and spoke the phrase, in his language, he’d repeated over the years.
Down, down, down we come. Into fire, into water. Up, up, up we go. All together, with blood.

Genesai’s face lit like the sun breaking over the eastern horizon. It opened a door in him and he started to babble the phrase again, pointing to the ceiling and then the floor. He started to rise to do his twitchy jumping thing, but she couldn’t let him get derailed and then wipe himself out again.

Since she already knew the writing on the long sheet of paper did not match what he said, she feigned ignorance, touched the first line of scribbles, and said, “Down?” in his language. He looked confused, so she repeated the phrase, touching a different symbol for each word. Questioning their meaning.

“Echa, echa, echa,”
he said, shaking his head with a goofy smile. One arm shot out in a jerky, snaky motion.

No, no, no
.

They were getting somewhere. She took a deep breath and held it, trying to contain her excitement.

His long, pale fingers trailed over the symbols, moving vertically, not horizontally as she’d done. At the bottom he moved over to the next column and came back up. As he pointed, he read.

The words came so fast she gripped the edge of the table to steady herself, the Translation unfurling so quickly it tangled in her mind and made her dizzy. At the same time, it felt glorious.

Usually she Translated verbally first then moved to the written word. With Genesai, she absorbed both at once and she had to concentrate hard to keep them straight. The language was harsh, guttural. As Genesai’s human tongue rolled around the sounds, the muscles in Gwen’s mouth strained to create their echo. Her head pounded with the beat of syllables and accents, the rhythms of punctuation and verbs.

Every word was a weapon against Nora.

Someone suddenly flipped off Genesai’s crazy switch, and his agitated fidgeting died.

“I first saw you when I was very young,” Genesai began. “The dream was lifelike, intense, as if I had lived it before. But when I woke up, I knew it was a vision of the future. Our future together. It told me what I was meant to do: to create. You were the most spectacular thing I had ever seen and I knew you were my destiny.”

The sound of his voice confused and intrigued her. The tone was high and childlike, but now that she understood his words, she detected the years, the wisdom, and the yearning inside him. The crazed young man was a shell for a lucid, heartbroken, lonely being. He was no more a boy than Gwen was a Tedran.

“Most of my people created their partners to stay on-world, but you and I were meant to travel into the dark above-world. We were meant to draw shimmering lines between the stars and planets. To discover, together. Ten cycles around the sun I spent designing and constructing you, correcting my mistakes, reinventing the science of my people. Then you finally worked. I will never forget the first time we connected and you drew power from me, coming fully to life. My partner, my life’s companion. My love. No day or experience I have had since has matched it.”

Rarely did Gwen question her Translations. Sometimes she was unsure, and that was where the teacher corrections came in handy. With Genesai, however, she was absolutely sure of what he’d said; she just couldn’t wrap her brain around it.

He did not speak of a woman or a living, breathing partner. He was talking about—and to—his ship.

“We left my world,” he went on, not pausing for her fascination, “and arced into the black. Time became inconsequential, a thing that flitted by outside your beautiful skin. I could not say how long we moved among the stars and hovered over planets both gorgeous and grotesque. I never wanted it to end. I did not miss my world or my people, for I did not belong to them anymore. I belonged to the universe. And you and I, we saw it all. You and I, we were never going to stop exploring. We were going to drift until our substance dissolved.

“But on the planet Tedra, riddled with war and slavery and death, we were stolen. Taken. Our curiosity became our bane. We drew too close and were pulled into its chaos. The warmongers, the Ofarians, commandeered us. They stole Tedrans from their home world and forced us to fly where they wanted. You became my moving prison. The planet to which the Ofarians made us go was one we had long avoided for fear of discovery. We crashed here and our captors ripped me from your embrace. Tore apart our blood connection. Divided me in half.”

Gwen felt like she’d been flung into the stars herself. Only there was no joy in her suspension. She felt ill. Betrayed. Everything Nora had told her was true.

“I looked different from the Ofarians, and they wanted to avoid detection by the native race of humans. An Ofarian used his magic to transform me into water. They forced a simple boy to swallow me. They poured me into a new body and I do not know which hurt more: being separated from you or the constraints of my new body that fought so viciously against my true self.”

The ugly truth clawed violently at Gwen’s heart.

Is that how the Ofarian race on Earth began? Did they arrive, looking different from humans, and force themselves to be drunk by innocents?

What the hell was Gwen?

Though Genesai closed his eyes, his finger still trailed up and down his characters, and he recited from memory.

“It has been too long away from you. I do not know how long exactly. I do not know where you are. I do not know if you are well, or even if I survive without you. I still see you when I close my eyes. I am not the same. I fear I never will be again. I miss you.”

This was no story. It was a love letter.

Gwen took a chance and reached out to cover Genesai’s hands with her own. He jerked back. He started to squirm again. In her mind’s eye, she saw a strange being beneath his skin, punching to get out.

“It’s all right,” she said in his language, because she finally could. She tested the sounds on her tongue, the movements of the muscle strange against her teeth and palate. “I’m here to help you.”

The moment she said it, she knew it was absolutely true. He stared at her, eyes wide with unfettered hope and legs all jittery. Ignorantly, up until then, she’d only been concerned with maintaining the viability of the Ofarian race and giving the Tedrans their freedom. Genesai had only been a means to an end, a solution to her dual problems. Now she wanted to save him, too. She
needed
to give him back what her people had stolen.

“You will speak to me?” he rasped.

She smiled. “Yes, Genesai. I will speak to you. I am very, very happy to be able to speak to you.”

A twitch of the head. “You said you are here to help me?”

As she nodded, she felt the lump in her throat. “I know where your ship is. I have come to help you get back to the stars.”

She thought for sure he’d propel himself from the chair, bounce around the room like a racquetball, then pass out again. Yet he fell absolutely still. The only movement came in his bulbous eyes, which brimmed with tears. He lifted a finger, wiped away the salty drops, and looked at them in confusion.

“Where is she? Take me to her. Let us leave this horrible place.”

This time when she stretched forward, he let her take his bony hands. She looked deep into his eyes and told him everything she knew about the war on Tedra and the settlement of the Ofarian and Tedran Secondaries on Earth. She told him about the slaves and how some rogue Tedrans wanted him and his ship to help them escape.