Tanya traces the scar on my chest, running a finger over the mark between my pec and my shoulder.
“Can I ask you a question?” she says.
“It’s a knife scar,” I say.
Graduation day. My first real fight with Mike.
“I don’t care about the scar,” she says. “It’s a different question. I want to know what happened to you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“How is it possible for you to go against orders? I’m trained just like you. I know what you’ve been taught and how powerful that teaching is.”
“It didn’t happen all at once. A series of missions, a series of questions. Looking back, I can see that the questions were always there. I just ignored them for a long time. Eventually, I guess, they got too loud to ignore.”
I stroke the soft skin on the side of her cheek and down her neck. She shivers under my fingers.
“What about you, Tanya? You’ve deviated from your mission. At least I think you have.”
“You’re not my mission,” she says, and she pinches my arm playfully.
She lies back and stares at the ceiling.
“I saw you and Howard together, I saw the way you cared about him. I’ve never seen that before. Then the three of us spent a lot of time together and we started to have fun, and it got in my mind somehow.”
“So now we’re both in trouble.”
“In more ways than one,” she says, and she slides her leg between mine, so we’re twisted together like a pretzel.
“This is nice,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says with a sigh.
“Maybe too nice.”
I feel her tense in my arms.
“What’s that mean?” she says.
“I just mean it’s inconvenient.”
She pushes away from me, digging her knuckle into my bruised ribs as she goes. The pain flares.
“Inconvenient?” she says. “I’m sorry having sex with me doesn’t fit comfortably into your briefing folder.”
“Our lives are in danger, Tanya. And I have to find my father. It’s not a good time to get distracted.”
“To hell with you,” she says, and she jumps out of bed, throwing on clothes as she goes.
“Wait a second!” I say, but she’s not listening.
She rushes out the door and slams it behind her. I sit in bed for a minute, trying to figure out what went wrong.
Women.
There’s not a lot of information about them in the training manual.