Fighting Gravity (16 page)

He approached me, haughty, and full of righteous wrath. “You’ve wandered into a restricted section of the ship, Mr. Dawes. And whether you are here due to a poor sense of direction or because you’ve given yourself airs about your imagined friendship with His Excellence, let me be clear. You are not permitted here.”

I smirked at him. “No? I’m surprised, Duke Blaine. For someone who does nothing with his days but play social politics, you’re woefully behind in the gossip.” A plump young woman in a servant’s uniform came out of a nearby door carrying a breakfast tray. “Would you come here, please?” I said.

She approached, her eyes darting back and forth between us. “What is your name?” I asked.

She hesitated, looking back at the door as if for a way out. “Anna.”

“Anna, would you please tell Duke Blaine why I’m in this section?”

She colored but locked eyes with him, “Mr. Dawes was the emperor’s guest last night, Your Grace.”

Duke Blaine stared at me in obvious confusion. I leaned toward him and in a stage whisper I said, “She means I’m fucking the emperor.”

He blanched. Anna’s mouth wasn’t smiling but her eyes were. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, turned very red and then made as if to push past me, but checked himself at the last minute, stepped around me, and hurried away.

I winked at Anna, who giggled, and I continued to the lab.

-

My day passed as normal, but for a persistent peaceful feeling. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I’d only had the good and there was bad to come, but I made myself ignore that and enjoy my high while it lasted.

When I left to dress for dinner I automatically turned to the right outside the lab before I stopped and, with a smile, went the other way toward Pete’s—toward
our
—rooms.

Pete was already there and in the room-sized closet with Davin, his head servant. I asked Davin to leave. He looked at Pete, who nodded. The servant left and I closed the door behind him. I had Pete on the floor before another word was spoken. When, some time later, we lay side by side on our backs, panting, Pete laughed.

“It’s good to see you, too.”

I laughed with him. “The temptation was too much to resist.” I came up on my elbow and rested my head in my hand. “This could complicate things.” I grinned.

Pete stood and Davin re-entered the room at his summons, followed by Jonathan. I blinked in surprise.

“I thought you’d rather have Jonathan here than someone you don’t know,” Pete explained. “Then again, maybe you’re sick of him and we’ll just get rid of him.”

“Eh,” I shrugged, “let him stay. For now.” I grinned at Jonathan, who ignored me.

“By the way,” Pete said, after we’d been dressing for several minutes, “was it really necessary?”

I grimaced. I knew perfectly well what he was talking about. “No,” I admitted, “but it was fun.”

He gave me a stern look and I did my best to look shamefaced.

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t have loved to see that. But Jake, you’re only going to make things harder for both of us if you go around antagonizing one of the most powerful dukes.”

“I know,” I said, “and I did have good intentions before I walked out the door. If it had been anyone but Blaine…”

“It’s going to be Blaine often. He makes it his business to stay close to me. He’s very ambitious and I’m the means to what he wants.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry, Pete, really I am. He caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting a confrontation so soon. Looks and gossip, but not that. I didn’t think, I just reacted. He’s good at getting to me.”

“He tries to be.”

“When he’s
trying
, it’s so transparent it’s comical. It’s when he’s being himself that he gets under my skin. He’s a dense, pompous blowhard, that’s what he is.”

He chuckled. “Just try to avoid him if you can.”

“I would be very happy to.”

-

We dressed and went to dinner. Everyone assigned to the head table was assembled in a lounge just outside the emperor’s entrance to the dining room.

All conversation stopped when we entered the room. Pete acted as if it was nothing, but I knew this heavy silence wasn’t the norm. I met each and every hostile, judgmental stare like a personal challenge. Pete, on the other hand, did a beautiful job of not seeing them at all.

He introduced me to all twelve occupants of the room but the ones I already knew. Duke Blaine gave me a withering glare when Pete turned away and I let my eyes float right over him as if he wasn’t even there. I had the satisfaction of seeing his face go red. Pete “didn’t see” this either but I could see the smile he was trying to suppress.

The experience of entering that dining room turned out to be much more intimidating and uncomfortable than I’d anticipated. I’d expected it to be like entering the dining hall of the IIC at Pete’s side. It was much worse. These people had no reason to be interested in anything about me and every reason to be unhappy about seeing me with Pete. They made sure I knew it, too.

When dinner was over and we were leaving the dining room Pete turned to me. “There’s a performance by the resident string quartet tonight, Mr. Dawes. Will you be joining us?”

“No, thank you, Your Excellence. I have some things I need to finish up in the lab.”

The assembled regarded me with disbelief. Pete was hiding a smile. “Maybe next time, then.”

Much later, Pete found me in the lab. “I came to see if you were close to finishing up for the night.”

“If you’re asking me to come back to the room with you, then yes.”

He grinned. “You know, you shocked everyone tonight by not coming to the concert.”

“I got that impression. Doesn’t anyone ever say no to you?”

“Rarely,” he answered. “And among those who were there tonight, never.”

I shrugged. “It’s not my fault if other people don’t think for themselves.”

He laughed.

-

The following evening, as I was leaving the lab, I turned down a hallway to find Duke Blaine there, clearly waiting for me. I cast a quick look around. I could take Blaine in a one-on-one, but he might have friends nearby. He seemed to be alone.

I stopped a few feet away from him.

“Can I help you?”

“The proper form of address from one such as you is ‘Your Grace.’”

I trembled with a rush of adrenaline but I didn’t respond.

“I know what you’re doing,” he continued.

“Walking back to my room—well, the emperor’s room, but, you know…”

He went red. “Whatever you hope to get from or do to our emperor I will not permit it. Do you understand? Don’t ever make the mistake of believing you’re alone with him, or that no one will know. I have eyes on you you’ll never even see. And don’t get comfortable, either. You won’t be here for long.”

“Are you threatening me?”

He stepped closer but then wrinkled his nose and leaned back.

“It’s shameful that I should even have to speak to you, much less threaten you. But I will and I am. You’re a disgrace and an insult and I’ll make sure you’re dealt with. I promise you that.”

-

“What’s the matter?” Pete asked when I got back to our room.

I looked at him, his eyes bright with happiness.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

-

The rest of the week was so normal as to be unremarkable. The only real changes in my life were location. I went to dinner as I always had, but I sat in a different place. I went to bed every night, just in a different room. Of course, those changes meant everything, and they made my experience of normal things very different. And the encounter with Blaine made me twitchy about the way people looked at me now.

The third night, I joined Pete after dinner in a luxurious lounge.

The agenda for the evening was apparently socializing. I regretted my decision at once. The only thing that stopped me from bolting was the discovery of a chess tournament in progress. There had been one lord who had been left out of the competition because an odd number of players had signed up, so I was able to add myself to the roster.

He was a decent player, but I had spent my formative years at the IIC among those who took chess very seriously at an early age. We weren’t allowed to be decent.

I didn’t play my best, but I don’t think my partner realized I was going easy on him. I figured taking that tack was politic.

Pete was not in the tournament for obvious reasons, lack of interest not being one of them. He sat beside me for most of our game, watching.

We had an interesting public relationship. Everyone knew that I’d moved in with him, and had drawn the obvious and correct conclusion as to why. But we never alluded to our private relationship and no one else did either. Pete made no attempt to disguise his preference for my company, and yet we never touched in public. He called me Mr. Dawes and I called him Your Excellence. In my opinion, it was a ridiculous pretense, but it seemed to make it easier for the nobles to stomach our relationship.

Our private relationship was the opposite of our public one in many ways. When we were alone, we were Pete and Jake; all difference in power, all distance between us was gone.

Pete was affectionate and very loving in private. He’d never had any sort of real relationship, no one he could open up to or trust. It was daunting when I realized how completely he’d given himself to me. The need to protect him was overwhelming.

Maybe if I had been older, I would have known how to do that.

fg
18

We landed on Earth in the late afternoon.

He went straight from the ship to his office and I went to our rooms. I was hoping to get my bearings in the huge palace. Jonathan led me through the grand hallways with a great deal of narration. By the time we entered the Imperial wing in the West Quarter I knew it would take me a few days to be able to find my way around. Jonathan assured me that it was well laid out and logical and not as bad as I thought.

I’d assumed that Pete’s rooms on the ship would prepare me for his rooms in the palace, but I was wrong. I would realize later that the basic layout and features were the same, but it was so much grander in appearance and scale I didn’t even notice. It just didn’t fit to try to compare those rooms to these.

The details of the décor at that time escape me now so many years later, but I remember an overall impression of grandeur and power. The rooms looked long lived in. Not worn or tattered, of course, but older materials, gold and platinum and other things long ago mined away on Earth, and real woods, sat beside verium accents and the crystallized plasma sculptures of Vir. It exuded a sense of permanence.

There were two chairs in the reading room and I wondered if both had been there a couple weeks before.

The windows that made up most of the west wall looked out over the ocean, somewhat diminished when set against the grandeur inside. The rooms were their own continent. I was completely intimidated. What had I gotten myself into?

I settled into a chair in the reading room and attempted to lose myself in a book, but I couldn’t get over the uneasy feeling that I was trespassing, or that the room itself didn’t find me worthy. It was a relief when Pete arrived later. He came up from behind and slid his arms around me, his chin on my shoulder. “Hungry?”

I was, but that wasn’t what I wanted at the moment. I pulled him through the rooms and we made love in the huge bed. Besides a desire for him, there was some need to “conquer” the room. It sounds ridiculous now, but I know I was thinking at the time of proving that I wasn’t cowed, that I had every right to call these rooms my own because Pete wanted me there.

After a delicious lovemaking session he led me to a garden within the Imperial wing. On a flat pebbled area in the center of the garden there was dinner spread out for us. The breeze carried the tang of the ocean.

The meal, the quiet conversation, the soothing silences were the perfect antidote to my jangled nerves. Pete examined me from time to time, considering.

“Better?” he asked as we lingered over wine.

“Yes.” I sighed.

“I was worried there for a while. You looked like a rabbit about to bolt.”

“I admit, I considered it.”

We stayed in the garden until the sunlight filtering in from above gave way to the approach of night. And we remained a bit longer, as the stars became visible through the trees. It was peaceful and perfect and I forgot everything else but that I was with Pete.

-

The next morning he walked with me to the transport. Pete wanted me to put off my visit to the IIC until after the return celebrations, but the whole thing sounded like an extravagant form of torture to me so I begged off. He didn’t try to persuade me.

He led me to a private courtyard, and parked there was an enormous transport. The Imperial arms were on the side. Anyone who saw this would assume the emperor himself was on board.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I groaned. He was grinning. “This isn’t for me, is it?”

“Of course it is.”

“Pete, this is one of yours.”

He shrugged. “It’s one of the smallest ones, if that makes you feel better.” He was chuckling.

“Don’t do this to me. Please?”

He leaned over, wearing his mischievous grin, and kissed me. “You’ll survive.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. He laughed and then pulled me close in a real goodbye kiss.

I knew it didn’t really matter if I rode in that thing. I was going to make a spectacle of myself at the IIC with or without it. The embarrassing transport seemed somehow appropriate; just another thing conspiring to make my life as uncomfortable as possible. Life was exacting a steep price for my relationship with Pete.

I followed Jonathan aboard the transport. He led me first to the very back and the main bedroom there; I followed, grumbling about needing a whole bedroom on a trip that would take less than a day. And, of course, I was the only passenger. He showed me a private sitting room attached to the bedroom and I opted for that over the large, empty lounge. I picked up a book and sank into a chair facing the window but I never even opened the book. Instead I brooded.