“No I won’t.” her temper hit nuclear heat.The insufferable jerk!”I am a dealer. Sometimes we lose. That is the way the game is played. If I bluff a hand and lose, then I lose. It’s the chance you take, and if you try docking my earnings, I’ll lose every game until I bankrupt your entire hall!”
Renall’s square white teeth clenched. “What did you just say to me?”
“You heard me. You keep finding new ways to take my earnings, and so far I haven’t said anything about it, but this is where I draw the line. I am already stuck with three indentures I didn’t ask for and the debt for my mother’s passage, on a body ship no less instead of a much cheaper passage, and now you want to…”
He got closer. He stared into her face. “You find me to be unfair?”
“I find you to be an asshole!”
Her heartbeat sped up. That lust she always felt every single time she got too close to him hit, weakening her knees and resolve. How he could manage to excite her so was anyone’s guess.
Renall hissed in a breath. He muttered, “Of all the impossible…”
He stepped closer. Their bodies collided. Her head jerked up. Their eyes met. Her lips parted and then his mouth was on hers. His lips, hard and warm and soft too, took over her senses, sending them reeling in a thousand different directions at once. Clara sagged against him, feeling the strength of his body and the sure and hard flesh below his suit.
Her breath caught in her throat as the kiss deepened, triggering lust so fiery she wanted to rip his clothes away, and hers as well, and make love to him then and there.
Clara shoved away from Renall’s tall body. Her senses were still in overdrive. Her lips puffed and plumped from his kisses. She stared at him, bemused by both the kiss and his expertise at it. She was equally confused by her willingness to kiss him.
He was an alien. He was a creature that held the keys to her future in his tight grip, and he also held the fate of her family in that same grasp.
She knew, better than anyone, that she could trust nobody. She managed to drag air into her aching lungs. “Don’t think that kissing me will get me to see things your way; it won’t.”
He nodded. “I was just about to tell you that you shouldn’t assume my kissing you meant you and I were in agreement.” His fingers plucked the chips from her hands. He counted them quickly, shifted a five hundred credit to her hand. Then he turned on his heel and walked away!
Frustrated and pissed at herself for kissing Renall, Clara took off down a long hallway. Her chambers were situated at the top of a staircase, but she didn’t take it. Instead, she went to the nearest exit door and stepped out of it. The sky, a dazzling orange-blue that came across the heavens at night, was filled with the cold prickling light of millions of stars. Clara stared up at them as she breathed in long gasps of fresh air. Her fingers clutched the credits. Her heart throbbed painfully. Her emotions tangled and ached. Air rushed into her lungs with so much force and oxygen, she felt dizzy.
Homesickness hit. A sharp cramp of missing everything she had ever known set in and stayed. Old Toronto, with its underground lakes and long blank corridors, its crowded below earth tenements and the illegal gambling and the tension, her family and everyone else she knew was so far from her reach now.
She straightened; her eyes watered but the tears didn’t fall. She’d had to take that chance on that last hand. She had a very expensive passage to pay for. Renall had first put her into a position of having to pay that passage and then he’d condemned her for doing what she had to do. He was impossible and an asshole, so why had she kissed him?
She didn’t have an answer to that. She entered the complex again, using her thumbprint to gain access to the higher levels where her chamber was. She passed a few Gurleys hurrying toward the stairs and their shifts, and a few carders as well. She nodded and kept walking. Despite their shared living and work arrangements, none of them were close. Life was too tenuous and the future too uncertain for friendships. People were always too busy watching their backs to trust anyone else to watch it for them.
It had been different back home. Alliances were often the only thing that kept someone safe, or out of the rasp of the Capos that prowled the districts, always on the lookout for captives and lawbreakers. Of course, there were people who would trade a person they were close to for their own benefit. It had happened to her, and so she understood, but still, she missed having someone to confide in and to just hang around with as well.
Her life had become a sterile thing made up of tables and sleep, and the occasional walk outside, and it chafed at her being, abraded her soul, and battered her heart. The only thing that kept her going was the hope she could get her family back, and to do that, she had to take risks and make credits—lots of them.
Her chamber door slid open. Clara stepped inside with a new set of worries. What happened after her debts to Renall were paid off and her family’s debts too? They could leave Orbitary and be free, but where would they go? They could never go back to Old Toronto, and she had no idea what else was out there either. She was not even sure she wanted to know.
Her eyes took in her chamber. It was sparse and utilitarian. The bed was a wide thing and raised on a short dais. The drawers of the small dresser held the clothes she had been given upon arrival. There was a narrow window that looked out over a loading dock and a small strip of green belt, and a chair and table. A wall held a panel that had been keyed for her voice and DNA. She opened it and stowed the credits inside the small safe; a smile tried to come up at the sight of those credits but wouldn’t. Not even that could make her feel better just then.
Nothing else.
She took a seat and hit a button on the table. A voice answered, and she ordered her solitary dinner, then clicked the off switch and sat there staring down at her hands.
Loneliness swamped her. She knew, on one level, that that loneliness was probably what had caused her to kiss Renall. She was starving for contact, something deeper than the daily interfaces she had become accustomed to. That had to be it.
She leaned back in the chair, trying to convince herself of that as the minutes clicked by. There was a light tap at her door, and she went to it, thinking it was her dinner.
It wasn’t. It was Renall.
Her body tensed. “Yes?”
His face wore an expression she hadn’t seen before, but he quickly smoothed that expression away. “Clara, I’m sorry that I condemned you.”
She studied his face. Was he sorry he had kissed her too? She wanted, so badly, to be sorry that she had kissed him, but she wasn’t. In fact, she was really considering kissing him again, which just served to puzzle her further. “I understand why you did.”
He asked, “May I come in?”
