| |
Sean
––––––––
Ever since I saw her five days ago, I’ve barely thought of anything else. Obviously. I’ve screwed up this entire mission because of my feelings for her, acting defensively in her honor instead of with a clear, cool head. And after all the trouble I’ve caused, I should have learned my lesson... but no. Here I am, melting into a pool of mindless emotion just because she said I belonged to her, because she said I’m in her heart.
As my hand slides under the oversized shirt she’s wearing, gliding over her smooth, soft skin and following the curve of her waist up to the generous swell of her breast, I wonder where all my self-discipline has gone.
She sucks her breath in at my touch, the sound sending a jolt of pure ecstasy through me. I’ve never felt this way about any woman, ever, and I don’t know if I can go through with this in good conscience. If I make love with Geri, then my promise to the EUC to erase her memory and keep a close eye on her takes on a deeper more complicated meaning. It means that I have to lie to her.
Her hands find their way under my shirt, her fingers running over my abs with a feather light teasing that has me gasping for breath. God, I want her, more than I’ve ever wanted anyone or anything. But it’s not fair to her. She doesn’t know the score.
I pull my mouth away from hers. “Geri, we shouldn’t do this.”
“No way. You’re not teasing me again, Eastman.” She pushes me onto my back, kneels over me, and tugs my shirt up over my head. Her eyes are transfixed on my abs and feverish with desire. And I’m lost. There’s no way I can say no to her.
I love the feel of her breath against my neck as we lie in each other’s arms, under the blanket with our naked bodies pressed together, in the soft, diffused glow of the recessed night-light. The euphoria of our lovemaking is still strong but fading enough to make way for guilt. There’s no going back, no way to hit rewind and find the self-control I lost. I need to find a way to somehow be honest with her, especially since we only whispered words about birth control before throwing caution to the wind.
I’m such a dick.
What if she ends up pregnant?
I can’t let her leave here with her memory intact because I won’t be there to protect her when Bale questions her. If he suspects that I didn’t do my job, the EUC will give him the green light to kill her. I have no choice. I have to go through with buffering her memories and erasing our night together. So a pregnancy would come as quite a shock to her.
There’s only one thing I can do—show up in her life as soon as I can after all of this is over and work my ass off to win her love.
She puts her hand on my chest. “Your heart is beating a mile a minute.” Her lips tickle my neck as she speaks. “Are you, um, suffering regrets?”
“That’s what I was wondering about you,” I say, staring at the ceiling. “We didn’t use any birth control, and I know how focused you are on your career. It was selfish and irresponsible of me—”
“Hey.” She cuts me off, and pushes herself up to look at me. “I thought we were both consenting adults, or are you pulling a big brother on me?”
My eyebrows shoot up as I gaze at her. “Brother? After what we just did?”
It’s too dim in the room to actually see her blush, but I know she is.
“I meant”—she draws the word out, emphasizing it—“that you’re acting like you should’ve known better, but not me.”
“I do know better, Geri. I know about all of this.” I wave my hand to encompass my bedroom and the spacelab in general.
“And now so do I, and it’s”—she pauses, looks around, then back at me—“mind-blowing.”
Bright excitement shines from her eyes, the giddy first flush of being one of the few select people on Earth to know about extraterrestrials. I hate to be a killjoy, but I want to set the record straight and let her know straight-up what kind of life this is, because I need to know her reaction to the possibility of living it before I erase all knowledge of it.
“Keeping secrets isn’t an easy way of life, Geri. You can’t share it with the people you love. In fact, there are times you have to lie to your family and friends, and I have enough experience with that to tell you it sucks.”
She runs a finger down the side of my face. “If I’m sharing it with you, then I am sharing it with someone I love.”
Okay, that kicked me right in the feels, and now I feel like an even bigger dick. “You need to understand—”
She puts the finger she was using to trace my face over my lips. “Do you remember my dad always used to tell us that as long our heads and hearts were in sync, we’d live a happy life?”
I kiss her finger and move her hand down onto my chest. “Yeah, I remember.”
“It’s taken me longer than Mark and Emma, but I’m starting to figure it out.” She lays her head onto my shoulder and cuddles in against me. “I took a wrong turn two years ago when I accepted the job on the fashion column. I was inexperienced and naive enough to think I could dazzle Global with my brilliance as a journalist and waltz into instant success, but all I accomplished was proving how inept I am at fashion. For two years, I’ve lived the life of a poser, letting on to everyone that my job is glamorous but, in reality, needing to grovel to my boss, Derek, every day just so he won’t fire me. I was in serious danger of losing all self-respect before I went rogue to follow this story, and guess what?”
I hug her closer against my side, an irrational urge to smash whoever the hell Derek is right in the face. “What?”
“I know now that success isn’t measured by what the world thinks of me but by what I think of myself.”
I roll onto my side so I can face her. “You mean you enjoyed the last few days?” I ask, both confused and awed by her adventurous spirit. Most people would be feeling victimized, but not Geri. She really is a different kind of special.
“I’ve had the time of my life.”
I huff a nervous laugh. “So, say you and I—and I’m just thinking out loud—wanted to stay together. You know, live together, especially if it turns out something happened tonight and you might be, uh, with child. Would you be okay with what I am? With the kind of life I lead?”
Her eyes light up with merriment. “Oh. My. God. Did you just propose to me because you’re worried you knocked me up?”
“Not just because I’m worried.” I’m thinking I need to tell her how I really feel about her and come clean.
But she flops onto her back with an exaggerated sigh of pleasure. “Geri Eastman. Has a nice ring to it,” she says with a big smile.
I roll on top of her and smooth her hair away from her face. “Except Eastman isn’t a real last name. It’s a name Mary thought up. So if we get married, I’m taking your name.”
“Sean McKenna,” she says with a snort. “My old-fashioned dad would have a fit.”
I kiss her neck. “I think he’d have more of a fit if he knew what I am.”
“Will our children be super humans?” she asks.
I catch the serious edge to that question and tear my lips away from her neck to look at her. “The human side has consistently been more dominant in children born out of a human-hybrid relationship, but a few have shown remarkable skills.”
“How many hybrids are there?” she asks.
“Out of the fifty Pleiadian spacelabs hidden on Earth, four of them produce hybrids. Our population worldwide is one hundred and thirty-four, a mix of both males and females.”
“That many?” she asks incredulously. “How do they remain a secret? How is it that no one has discovered them by now?”
“Interesting that you should ask that question.” I think about the emissary’s suggestion that maybe Geri could be of some use. “I wonder how you would feel about helping prepare the world to know about all of this?”
Her mouth and eyes open wide, and she pushes me onto my back. Leaning over me, she chucks me in the shoulder with the heel of her hand. “Get out of here! Are you serious, Sean?”
“It’s not for sure. The emissary still has to talk with the council for approval, but I wanted to feel you out about it.”
“Then yes, I’d take that job.” Her eyes dart around the room. “Would I have to stay here, though? Would it mean giving up my freedom?”
I shake my head. “No, it won’t be that kind of job.” I’m not sure where to begin. “I need to explain something to you.”
She eyes me, some of the excitement fading. “Okay. I’m listening.”
I take a deep, ragged breath in and let it out. “I had to barter for your life with the EUC. I had a to make a deal I didn’t want to make.” I pause, not sure how to tell her, not sure how she’s going to react. She’ll hate me, that’s a given.
“Go on.” Her excitement has now been replaced with cautious concern.
“I’m trained in the Pleiadian method of altering memories, buffering them so to speak, and I promised the EUC that I would wipe your memory clean of any knowledge of the Pleiadians, the hybrid program, and the Saurian.”
Without a word, she rises up into a sitting position, clutching the blanket against her chest to keep herself covered. The shame of betrayal settles in my chest.
“You have to what?”
I sit up to be level with her gaze. “It’s the only way the EUC will let you walk out of here. If they so much as even suspect that I didn’t erase your memory, they’ll...” I can’t even bring myself to say it. “I don’t like it, Geri, but I’ll do it because it’s the only way to keep you alive.”
She stares at me wordlessly for a few seconds. “You’re actually serious? You’re not kidding?”
“I wish I were.”
She puts a hand to her forehead. “You’re going to mess with my head?”
Her eyes water, and the stricken look on her face rips through my heart. I couldn’t feel any lower if I tried. “I can ask someone else to do it, like the surgeon who put you back together.”
She breathes through her open mouth and puts a hand on her forehead, trying to digest what I’m telling her. “Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
Her face crumples, and the tears finally overflow and slide down her cheeks.
Why the hell did I tell her?
Because she’s not a lab rat or an experiment. She’s a human being—one of the most important human beings on this Earth—and I could never live with myself if I just went ahead and did it without telling her first. I should probably come clean about the possibility that her eggs were harvested too, but since I don’t know for sure, I’ll take it up with the council. If they have them, I’ll ask for them to be destroyed.
“I don’t want a stranger in my head,” she says. “You’re the only person I trust.”
“I promise I won’t hurt you or interfere with any of your other memories.” I’m not sure she’s listening. “When you wake up, you simply won’t remember the past few days. You won’t even miss them.”
“I think I’ll miss this, Sean.” Her hand waves between us, tears flowing unabashedly. “I’ve been in love with you all of my life. We finally make out, and you’re going to erase it from my memory?” Her eyes grow wide. “And what if I am pregnant?”
“As soon as this is over, I’m going to come for you. I swear, Geri.” I’ve never cried before, but when her breath hitches on a sob, I can’t stop the tears from spilling down my face. God, I hate the EUC. I hate what they’re making me do.
Then Geri is kissing me, making love to me again with a passion and fervor that makes me think she’s trying to burn it into her memory forever, hiding it away in a place where I’ll never find it.
But I do find it, hours later after she has fallen into a deep sleep. I carefully take my time, using my telepathy with surgical precision to isolate the memories and send a mild charge to disrupt the synaptic connection. Standard procedure would have me rewire her neural networks, but I’m going to cheat this one time. Instead of erasing her memories, I’m going to bury them.
Every mind has a storage closet, a place where someone automatically archives information she doesn’t want taking up prime hard drive space. It’s a hoarder’s paradise of useless information, a place to be avoided unless a person is pressed to recall something, such as those four words she learned in German twenty years ago because she’s in Munich at a bar and wants to order a beer and a schnitzel. If there are enough prompts, like people speaking German around the person, she is more likely to locate what she’s looking for in that cluttered mess.
So I attach a password to each file I archive, using the mild electrical current to solder the word Pleiadian onto the back of every memory. It’s not a word people use, and subsequently, not something she’s likely to hear in everyday conversation. I need her well away from the EUC before I help her restore those memories.
I barely have time to finish before Mlindr warns me of her arrival. Seconds later, the door opens, and she glides into the room. The last time I saw her, she was wearing her surgical tunic and was covered in Kasnid’s blood, giving me the news that my friend was going to make it. Now she’s in her casual clothes, and her silvery-blond hair is neatly pulled into a plait.
Peace to Sean, she says.
Peace to you, Mlindr. Are you here to ensure I’ve done my job? I try to omit the malice, but it’s difficult to do with a telepath.
Mlindr’s rosebud lips curve into a jubilant smile that lights up her crystal-blue eyes. Of course not, Sean, you are well trusted. We are unanimous in our agreement that you did the right thing burying her memories instead of erasing them. She has a kind spirit, and Emissary is hopeful that she can work with us. She sets her medical bag on the desk and opens it. I’m here to give my patient a final examination before she leaves.
I get out of bed to give her clear access to Geri. My apologies for my angry thoughts.
Mlindr places two fingers over her heart. I am sorry for your heavy burden. Your connection to her is strong. The entire lab can feel your heartache.
I breathe in a few deep breaths, letting go of my anger. She has suffered a lot because of me. And I need to know, Mlindr, if you harvested her eggs during her surgery?
Mlindr bows her head. No, Sean, I did not. Out of respect for the sadness it caused you.
A lump suddenly presses against my throat and I swallow it down. Thank you, my friend.
While Mlindr conducts her examination, sweeping a handheld device over the post-surgical areas, I step into the bathroom to splash water on my face and get dressed.
After I’m dressed, I grab Geri’s folded clothes and wait patiently for Mlindr to finish.
Mlindr clicks off her device. Her bones are completely fused. The only injury left behind is the one I was asked to leave. She gently touches the bruised cut on Geri’s forehead. I’ve given her a sedative. She’ll remain asleep for the next eight hours. Mlindr stands and holds her hands out toward the stack of clothes I’m holding. I’ll dress her.
I can do it, I snap, and then give her a look of apology. I mean I should be the one to do it.
She steps forward and takes Geri’s clothes from me. I think you’ve punished yourself enough, Sean. They need you in the docking area to finalize the plan with the EUC. Go. I’ll take care of her. I stand my ground, preparing to fight Mlindr on this, but she turns her back on me and begins dressing Geri. Please don’t make it harder on yourself by upsetting the EUC. They’re not completely convinced your plan will work.
Of course she’s right. Keeping the EUC happy is the same as keeping Geri alive.
Thank you for looking after her, Mlindr. I want to ask but hesitate, not wanting to appear ungrateful for the respect she has already shown me by asking for more, but I have to know.
It’s far too early to tell, she says with a twinkle in her eye. Even for me.
Thank you, Mlindr. Peace to you.
Peace to you, Sean.
I take one last look at Geri then leave to prepare for the next part of this plan.