Star Wars_ X-Wing 09_ Starfighters of Adumar - Aaron Allston [55]
“Since I’m on the verge of losing everything I have left, I need, I really need, to find out how I lost something earlier. So I don’t do it again with anyone else. I need to know how I lost your regard.”
She stared at him as if stupefied for long moments. Finally she shook her head and said, “Wedge, you never lost my regard. You never lost my respect.”
“Then how did I lose your friendship? Where did it go, how did I chase it off?” He felt a hard knot forming in his throat, and it made his voice raspy.
“It’s not like that. It’s nothing you did. It’s something I did.” Her expression lost all self-assurance. “Wedge, let’s not do this now.”
“When? Iella, we can’t do it when I’m a civilian, being shipped back to Coruscant in disgrace for a mission I never wanted in the first place. Now’s the time.” He slid toward her, the knot in his throat threatening to cut off his speech altogether. “Please, because we were friends. Tell me how we stopped. Was it my relationship with Qwi?”
A flicker of pain crossed her face. “No. Yes. It’s related to that.”
“Well, that certainly clarifies matters.”
She lashed out, striking his shoulder with her open palm. The blow nearly shoved him off the sofa. “Don’t make light of it. This is very hard for me.”
“I’m sorry.” Wedge rubbed the stinging from his shoulder and resumed his seat. “I’ll just listen.”
Her words were a long time in coming. He saw her struggle with them, as if trying to find the perfect angle of approach on a target that had none. Then tears came, just two of them. She brushed them away and finally spoke. “When Diric died … the way he died, still struggling with his brainwashing, still a tool of the Empire, and I had not just his loss to deal with but all that shame, you and Corran were there for me. Making things better. Whenever I flailed out, looking for support, my hand would fall into one of yours. That made all the difference. And when I gradually got better, when I eventually figured out that the galaxy was just going to keep spinning and I could keep functioning within it, you didn’t wander away. It wasn’t a ‘You’re all better now, so it’s back to work for me.’ I can’t tell you what that meant to me.
“And gradually, I began to wonder …” She was silent for long moments. “To wonder if maybe there was a chance for you and me.”
He gave her a nod. “I had those same thoughts.”
“But I told myself, ‘It’s too soon to be thinking about that.’ I told myself that for a long time. I just accepted the time we had together, like after the whole Lusankya affair. I coasted.”
“I didn’t want to put pressure on you,” Wedge said. “Any pressure. That would have been …”
“Morbid?”
“Opportunistic? Crude? Janson-like?”
She managed a little smile. “Looking back on it, after a while, I don’t suppose you could have thought I was still interested in you. We became just pals, like Corran and I are, while I waited for, I don’t know, that final signal from somewhere deep in my mind that I was all ready to start my life up again. That signal never came, or I missed it, and we were apart so much of the time … and one day there she was, Qwi Xux, the neediest little thing in the galaxy, hanging off your arm …”
Wedge cleared his throat. “Um, I’m not sure—”
“And I realized I’d waited too long. It was my mistake. I hadn’t told you the truth about the way I felt, I’d waited for you to make a first move you were too ethical to make, and all these expectations I’d made in my mind blew apart like the Death Star. One second, solid and permanent, the next second, countless millions of little white specks of nothingness.”
“So, ultimately, I lost your friendship by getting involved with another woman.”
Iella shook her head. “Not exactly, Wedge. It wasn’t what you did. It was because, after you did it, I couldn’t stand seeing you. It hurt every time