Spin State - Chris Moriarty [179]
“Was I really so awful?” she asked.
“Just a little thorny.”
“Very funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. As I recall, you pricked my ego not a little.” He grinned. “A certain speech about not having the patience to work with dilettantes comes to mind.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“My dear, it was well worth it for the sheer entertainment value of watching a twenty-five-year-old who never finished high school look down her nose at me.”
“It’s not like I was the first.”
“Oh. Well, that’s simple bigotry, often as not. You despised me personally. I respected that.”
Something in his smile made her drop her eyes and turn away. She brushed her finger over the white velvet skin of a petal, then bent her head and put the blossom to her nose again.
Another memory. Her again, leaning back against the door of an officers’ flop on Alba with a knowing smirk on her face. It was the evening of the first and only night they’d spent together. She remembered standing there. She remembered looking across the room into Roland’s golden eyes, trying to play it cool, wondering what the hell Cohen even saw in her, still half-convinced it was all an elaborate joke at her expense.
But now she was seeing it through Cohen’s eyes. She felt Roland’s knees tremble and his breath quicken. And she felt something else behind the organic interface, something cleaner, sharper, truer. As if an infinitely complex mechanism had come into alignment, bolts sliding, tumblers clicking and turning over, locking in on her looking back at him, wanting him, making him real. On the dizzying, exhilarating, precisely calculated certainty that nothing, once she touched him, would ever be the same again.
Christ, she thought. What did I do to him? Why didn’t he tell me how he felt?
But she had known how he felt, hadn’t she? Why else had she been so unbearably, unforgivably cruel to him?
She jerked back into the present and saw Cohen sitting on the bench looking up at her, holding his breath like a child who still believed you could make dreams come true just by wanting them hard enough. It was the same look she remembered from that night—and God help her if some awful part of her didn’t still want to slap it off his face.
He blinked, and her stomach clenched with shame as she realized he’d caught the edge of that thought.
“You’re a very confused person,” he said.
“It took you six years and a fortune in wetware to figure that out?”
“No. It took me five minutes.” He smiled. “It just didn’t seem polite to mention it before now.”
Something tickled at the back of her mind like the soft trailing ends of fingers. She realized she’d been feeling those fingers for a while. All the time she’d been exploring the sun-drenched garden of Hyacinthe’s memory palace, there had been a little cat-footed thief prowling through the dark passages of her own subconscious, probing her memories, weighing her responses, taking the measure of her own feelings. A little sock-footed soccer-shorts-wearing thief is more like it, she thought.
“I won’t have you sneaking around inside my head,” she told him. “I won’t have your prying.”
“Prying? And what do you think you’re doing here?”
“That’s different. I have to be here. It’s not personal.”
“Isn’t it?” He bit his lip and looked up at her through Hyacinthe’s dark lashes. “This is as personal as it gets, Catherine. And it doesn’t go one way. The link won’t work until you accept that.”
“Then I guess it won’t work,” she said.
She turned away, meaning to leave—and found herself tangled in one of the long suckers that arched out from the rose thicket. “God dammit!” she muttered, trying to pull it off her and only managing to gouge the razor-sharp thorns into her arm through the thin fabric of her shirtsleeve.
That was when she smelled Gilead.
What had Cohen said about finding