Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [51]
Of course, I don’t know what those feelings are, really. He liked Erisi enough as a friend and yet still found her very attractive. The degree of proximity forced by their roles had stopped short of physical intimacy, but had included living together throughout Jewel’s journey and the training before that. Erisi had made no secret, in the past, of her attraction to him. No one would have faulted them for sleeping together, given their circumstances, but Corran had held himself back from succumbing to her charms and the security of shared intimacy.
At first he told himself it was because he didn’t want to let his guard down. If they were to make love their guard would be down. One slip, one fatal admission, an inappropriate name whispered in an unguarded moment of passion, could have spelled their undoing. Only by being apart could they guarantee mission security.
Those concerns eroded as they spent more time together. For a very short time he allowed himself to imagine that he would be betraying Mirax in some way if he slept with Erisi. He did have feelings for Mirax, but there were no commitments or obligations between them. For all he knew she had a lover stashed away in every starport across the galaxy—he doubted it, and was surprised at the spark of jealousy ignited at the thought—and if she did, it was no business of his. They were both adults and if they did eventually enter into a relationship, what had gone before would have to be dealt with as something that happened before.
His ultimate resistance stemmed from two things that fed back and forth into each other. The first surprised him when he discovered it, but he couldn’t deny it—he thought of Erisi as being well and truly outside his social class—inescapably so. She came from a world where she was nobility. Money, opportunity, material advantages, and the best of everything were what she had been born to. While her joining the Rebellion spoke to true nobility in her heart, the fact was that she really enjoyed luxury and treated it as her due. He had seen that throughout the trip—she took to it like a Sarlacc to sand.
Despite being a telbun, the same luxury was available to Corran. He was surprised by his inability to get used to it. Whereas Erisi might think nothing of peeling a fruit and leaving the rind on the arm of a nerf-hide divan, Corran found himself worrying about spilling something or sweating on the divan, thereby ruining it. Erisi didn’t care if it was ruined, whereas he did because he did not have access to the sort of money that would allow him to laugh off a demand to replace the couch.
Erisi’s blithe disregard for money had all but given Corran fits. Erisi had ordered him to tip servants extravagantly, but he had a hard time rewarding indifferent or poor service as well as he did good service. And the servants on the ultra-deck were obsequious and sycophantic in the extreme. There were times he wanted to just lash out and bash them, but he knew they’d accept a beating, then thank him for administering it in such a skillful manner—doing whatever they thought would inflate the gratuities.
He knew he could never fit into her world, and he suspected she knew it, too. While the abuse she heaped upon him was exaggerated enough that he knew she didn’t mean it, there were times the tone of her voice or the venom in her eyes seemed a bit too convincing. A small part of her realized his unsuitability as a mate, and that bit went to war with the part of her that liked him, producing enough anxiety that she dealt with him more sharply than she might otherwise have done.
Her resentment about his lack of ability to cope with the common elements of her existence made him want to show her he could adapt. Deep in his heart he knew he would fail ultimately because just.as he and Erisi needed a touchstone phrase to remind them who they truly were, Corran himself needed a connection back to what he saw as real life. His family circumstances had never