My Angel of the Dawn (WomanxBoy, ManxBoy, Sci-Fi + Romance)

***39***

You will loose him sooner or later. Nergan had warned you.

I can't. I don't want to.

You have no choice. You are not a proper company for him.

It has been just fine up until now.

He is too good for you. He is young and handsome. He has his whole life ahead of him.

I can't loose him. I need him on the Aurora.

Open your eyes. Back there, that was fraternizing, insubordination. You shouldn't work together anymore.

I need him.

You used to have managed without him all right.

With him it's... better. Warmer. Comfortable. I've never felt any of this with other people. Maybe with Jart sometimes, but not often.

You don't need this. It's attachment, responsibility, weakness. Better to be alone. Less chances of disappointment. Less trouble.

He has saved my baby. And my bloody life too! He has never let me down, not once. He is a godsend. My fair lad, my guardian angel. I can't see the Aurora without him. And I've promised Jart...

"Promise me you won't tell the boy to go to hell only because you are afraid to leave your shell," he had said that last time. As if he'd known all along this would happen, the rascal!

Good Heavens, what was the matter with her? She was no coward, always had a ready tongue. She had only to knock some sense into the lad, and everything would be back to normal. She could fix this. Some careful persuasion, some heart-to-heart talk, that's it would take.

I owe him now. I always pay my debts.

Nelsa raised her head from the dashboard. All this time she had been sitting in her pilot chair in the Aurora's cockpit, staring into the pitch dark of the hyperspace in the window. The angel figurine seemed to be hovering above the dashboard, not standing on it.

She checked the clock and was shocked to find out that only an hour had passed since their going hyper near Margotta. Too damn much had happened in that hour.

She turned round to face the door. Ariel was standing there, leaning on the doorframe, looking at her. She wondered for how long. He still moved as quietly as a cat, like the day they'd first met two years ago, even in his military boots.

"Sorry, Nell, I can't go. Let me stay," he said. Not pleaded like two years ago, just said. "We will pretend nothing has happened."

"Where did this 'Nell' come from?" Nice try to stall him and gather her thoughts.

His smile was sad. "I had let it slip that one time, et voilá, can't get rid of it. I've been always calling you that, in my mind. You know, as my private nickname for you, that nobody else knows. Nell, why are you sidetracking me? As I recall, you could hear the word 'sex' and not blush, right?"

"Do you see me blushing? Then again, I can discuss sex, just not ours! I mean, not your wanting to have sex with me! That's not, you know, a daily occurrence for me. I'm your captain, for God's sake!"

"As far as I know, the Brotherhood of the Wing has no rules about it. And when you hired me as a pilot and listed your rules, there was nothing about it either. Nothing like 'Thou Shalt Not Lust After Your Captain'."

"It had never crossed my mind! Nergan had said something, but I didn't believe him. Ariel, damn, try to find your brain and use it! You seem to have suddenly lost your mind along with your sight as well. Look at me! Do your think scars are like common acne, will vanish after having lots of sex? Or do you see me as an enchanted frog — kiss her, and she'll become a princess?"

"You are you." Ariel shrugged. "I've stopped noticing your scars after the first couple of weeks. Honestly, it had been way easier to get used to them than to your habit of cussing every five minutes."

"All right, all right, I get it, love is blind and all that rubbish. You obviously don't care for the age difference too. But I can't see you as, you know, a man. A lover."

"You don't even notice how you look at me. How you touch me."

"That's just Mother Nature, nothing else. Hormones-pheromones. You are attractive, there is no point denying it."

"Now say that you don't need sex, you have forgotten all about it, you are not interested in men. Come on, say it with a straight face."

Nelsa drew in a deep breath, made a face and said through clenched teeth, "Al right, let's say — hypothetically — that I look at you sometimes that way. But looking is one thing and doing is quite another."

"Not worthy?" He tilted his head, his smile unpleasant. "A whore, a former bedslave disgusts you?"

"I'm starting to think you are a masochist — calling yourself a whore so often, and with some degree of pleasure, it seems. Spare me the dramatics. Used to be a whore myself. Tough job, but there are ones tougher." Nelsa didn't quite understand what made her blurt out her confession so easily, matter-of-factly. She'd never told anyone about her past, ever. Not even Jart. But after what she'd learned now, after what'd happened on the skiff, she couldn't deny her connection to Ariel. They were too much alike.

Ariel didn't seem surprised, not even a little bit. He just shrugged. "Tell me something I don't know."

"How the hell could you know, Second Pilot, who I'd been before I became Nelsa Thorn?"

"How the hell could you, an honest smuggler, know words like 'eel,' 'blue grass,' 'Bizarrian contract,' 'endymion,' 'lolita,' 'shiraz,' 'golden arrow,' 'Athens League'? Why do you hate slavery and prostitution? Why do you know the literature of Bizarre and her colonies so well?"

Nelsa frowned, squinted her eyes at Ariel suspiciously, rapped her fingers on the chair arm. "I talk too much," she said at length.

"Hardly the case. I just know how to listen and deduct."

"And exactly how much did you manage to deduct about me?" she asked with undisguised mockery.

"Um... not that much, of course," he said hastily, taken a little aback. "But I still know you better than anyone else."

"You don't know shit about me. Baby, your so-called love is just a fantasy of me, with no foundation in reality.

"Nell, go to hell!" he snapped, offended. "You don't even understand that you've spent the last two years with me and no one else, talking only to me, looking only at me! And when I want to dot the i's and cross the t's, you brush me off, like I am daydreaming, like I am imagining things. If you don't acknowledge that we are close, you are just a hypocrite!"

"Be so kind as to go to hell yourself, pilot!" she yelled, jumping up. All her good intentions went out the window. "Call me a hypocrite a dozen times, I'm still not going to sleep with you! Neither for pity nor for sympathy! I'm not a charity! Come on, turn tail and run again, and don't forget to slam the door like a spoiled teenage whore!"

She realized what exactly she had just said and shut her mouth — a second too late.