Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [142]
“Don’t make me laugh or I’ll bleed on you.”
“You’re going to bleed anyway.” She poked gently at his back.
“How the hell did they get it in me?”
“Don’t know. When you hurt your nose did you go to a hospital?”
“Yes. I was there for a few hours.”
“Maybe that was when. Okay, here it is. Hold steady.”
Then a quick cut. Frank held himself immobile. Now she was wiping off his back with her fingers, and kissing his spine at the base of his neck. She ripped open a little square Band-Aid and applied it to the spot.
“You thought of everything,” he said.
“I hope so.”
“What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
He picked up the wand.
“Oh that. I think I’m okay.”
But he ran it over her anyway, and it beeped over her back.
Her mouth tightened to a hard line. “Shit.”
“It wasn’t there before?”
“No.” She ripped off her jacket, took the wand and ran it over it. No beep. She pulled her shirt off over her head; shocking lovely curve of freckled white skin, spine deep in a furrow of muscles, ribs, shoulder blades, the curve of her right breast in its bra cup as she faced away from him. He ran the wand over her back, listened for the beep, watched for the green lights on its black face. Like finding the stud in a wall; but nothing. He ran it over her crumpled shirt and it beeped. “Ah ha.”
“Okay,” she said, spreading the shirt out and inspecting it. “That’s good. Here. It’ll just be a few millimeters long.” She ran the wand closely over the shirt, inspected the part under the beeping. “In a seam . . . yep. Here it is.” She cut with a pair of keychain scissors, held up a tiny black cylinder, like a tiny bike pump valve stopper.
“Maybe there’s another one in your bra,” Frank suggested, and she laughed and leaned forward to kiss him; and then they were hugging hard, kissing lightly, she only brushing her lips against his, murmuring, “Oh, oh, it must hurt—watch out, I’m going to hurt you,” and him replying, “It’s all right, it’s all right, kiss me.”
They got off the rest of their clothes and onto his groundpad, under his unzipped sleeping bags. All warm and cozy and yet still bobbing on the wind. Finally completing the dive that they had launched in their stuck elevator, so many months before; they finally fell in and were both seized up in it together. This was Frank’s overriding impression, to the extent he had any thoughts at all; the togetherness of it. She kissed him gingerly, squeezed him hard, as sure with her caresses as she had been with her little surgery. Frank began to bleed again down the back of his throat, he tasted blood and was afraid she could too.
“I’m going to bleed on you I’m afraid.”
“Here—let’s turn over.”
She straightened her left leg under his right, and they rolled to that side together as if they had done it a thousand times before; then crabbed back onto the mattress pad. Frank swallowed blood, held her as she moved on him. Off they went again.
Afterward she lay beside him, her head on his chest. He could feel that she could hear his heartbeat. He ran his fingers through the tight curls of her hair. “Wow.”
“I know.”
“I needed that.”
“Me too.” She shifted her head to look at him. “How long has it been for you?”
Frank calculated. Marta, the last time . . . quite some time before she moved out. Some of those last times had been very strange: sex as hatred, sex as despair. Usually he managed not to know that a nearly eidetic memory of those encounters had been seared into him, but now he glimpsed them, quickly shoved them away again in his mind. “About a year and a half?”
“It’s been four years for me.”
“What?”
“That’s right.” She made a face. “I told you. We don’t get along.”
“But . . .”
“I know. That’s just the way it is. He has other interests.”
“Someone else, you mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“But that chip in your shirt?”
“That was him.”
“So—he keeps tabs on you?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
She shrugged. “Just to do it. I don’t know really. He started working with another agency, and it seems to have gotten worse since then. He’s always been kind of obsessive. It’s a control thing.”
“So this