Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [111]
“I don’t agree. I mean, sure, that’s good enough for some people. But not for me. I’ve been trying to do this for as long as I can remember. Getting into Starfleet, moving up the ranks, becoming a senior officer-those have been my goals since I was a kid. Now they’re within range-I can almost close my hands around those gold pips. I can’t afford to lose my momentum. I can’t let anything get in the way of that goal. Not now.”
“And by ‘anything,’ you mean…?”
“You know,” he said, still unwilling to say out loud what had really brought him to Felicia’s room. “Dennis and his crazy schemes. Helping him cheat. That’s a sure way to get kicked out, to guarantee that I’ll never have a Starfleet career at all.”
“But tutoring isn’t against the rules.”
“We’ve been over that,” Will reminded her. “The degree of tutoring he needs is more than I can handle and still keep my own grades up. I can’t really spare any time for him, much less the amount he’s looking for.”
“So what you’re saying is that your career takes precedence over your friends,” she translated.
He paused, understanding that he was about to go over a waterfall without so much as a barrel to ride in. “That’s right. It has to.”
“All your friends?”
Will swallowed but answered quickly. “That’s right.”
“I had a feeling,” she said. “At lunch, when you just let me walk away.”
“I really am not sure how I’m supposed to stop everyone from walking away,” Will said. “Flying tackles? Is that better?”
“Usually a simple word or two will do it,” Felicia told him. “But you have to want to say them.”
“What words? You know I’m not good at this, Felicia. You want me to tell you that I love you? I do. Or I think I do, and if there’s a difference I don’t know what it is. But that’s not really what this is about, is it?”
“Not really,” she said, keeping her steady gaze fixed on him. “Not whether you can say it, anyway. More whether you can mean it.”
“I do mean it,” he tried to assure her. “As much as I have ever loved anyone, I love you.”
“Are you sure about that, Will?”
“But obviously,” he went on, ignoring her question, “that’s not enough. For either of us. You want more than I can give. And I feel like I’m already too committed-like just being in a relationship with you is costing me too much. I can’t concentrate on my work, I can’t separate my personal life, my emotional life, from the things that I need to do to reach my goals.”
Now he realized that her eyes had gone liquid. She sniffed once. “I had hoped that you were different, Will,” she said. “I saw-I still see-a great person inside you, a wonderful, loving man who is driven and ambitious but also kind and generous and giving. It’s those qualities, in combination, that make you the man I want to be with-the man I’ve wanted to be with since I met you, even though I had to wait so damn long for you to figure it out. And these past few months, when you’ve actually been that man, have been amazing. I’ve felt things, being with you, that I could barely have imagined in my wildest fantasies.”
A tear escaped her eye and trailed down her left cheek. She ignored it and kept talking. “Your problem, Will, is that you haven’t yet figured out how to be the whole person you really are. You think you can only be one part of you at a time, and that’s not true. So even though you really are the man I love, you can’t seem to give yourself permission to be that man.” She turned her head away, finally releasing him from the withering assault of her nearly unbearable scrutiny. “Funny how I’ve always known you better than you know yourself. That’s backwards, William. You don’t have to let it be that way.”
“But maybe I do,” he countered. “If that’s the way I am. You may be right, but I can only be the person I am now, at this time, in this moment. If I can change that in time, fine. But that still doesn’t help us right now.”
“Apparently there is no help for us now.”
“It doesn’t look that way,” he agreed.
“Well,” she said, sniffling and trying on a smile. “Fun while it lasted, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I am sorry. Really, really