Heart of Briar. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ as though women did this to him all the time, no big deal. He’d tell her to cut it out in a minute, or maybe two. Or if her foot went any higher.

      Her foot lingered just below his knee, a warm, pleasant weight, and his thoughts drifted off, spiraled around, the faint memory of the song he had been humming earlier tangling with the hiss-and-chunk noise of the espresso machine behind him, the low conversations of the people around them. What had they been talking about?

      She was talking again, her voice a pleasant murmur, but he found it difficult to focus on the words. He put his coffee down, tried to shake off the disorientation, but his eyes were filling with the steam, his mind equally clouded, and when she touched his hand again, pulling him toward her across the table, he did not resist.

      Her lips tasted like spice, cool and firm.

      This was wrong. This was further than he’d planned to go—wasn’t it?

      What else did you come here for? What did you think—hope—would happen?

      He stared at her, unable to answer the voice in his own head, the mocking, cool tone.

      “Come,” she said, and they rose from the little table, her hand still on his, leading him to the door. He followed, obedient, his coffee and coat, his wallet and phone, left behind at the table, forgotten.

      Outside, the air was clearer, the smell of the coffee fading, and he blinked, shaking his head slightly to clear his thoughts. The song came back to him, the notes more clear. He had been singing it in the shower this morning, thinking about...what? About the day, the job, the night before. Her? No. Someone else. He tried to grab hold of the music, the memory, as though it would lead him out of the fog. “Where...?”

      “Come,” she said again, her fingers curling around his, tugging him gently forward. The sound of her voice was honey and spice, her skin soft and cool, filled with promise and suggestion, and the song—and the memories—faded under its intrusion.

      They walked through the night, heading away from downtown and the university campus, onto streets he should have recognized but did not. His skin prickled, uneasy. “I don’t...”

      “Shhhhh...” Her voice had less honey and more spice now. “You came to me, joined your hand with mine. Of your own will do you come, Tyler Wash?”

      He shouldn’t. He couldn’t. There was something he had left behind.... But the hint of promise and suggestion lured him on; the male ego impulse—stupid, but irresistible—pushed him over.

      “I do,” he said, and she smiled, teeth too white, eyes too sharp.

      Around them, the air crackled, a faint familiar smell overlaying the normal odors of the city at night. Something twisted inside him, hard enough to hurt. He managed to lift his eyes from her face, force them to clear enough to see something ahead, dim lights swirling like a corona, the static fizz of noise on the wire, and then it cleared, creating a massive oval of cold white, filling the entrance to an alley, and obscuring what was beyond.

      He stared, fascinated. “What?”

      “Yours. Yours and mine, together. We will make it stronger.” That too-white smile disappeared, and her face went still. “Come,” she said again, her fingers hard against his own, and together, they stepped through.

      * * *

      Jan was dreaming. She knew it was a dream: it wasn’t a nice dream, it was the same dream she always had when she was stressed, about not being able to breathe and nobody hearing her call for help, but she let it carry her along, anyway, unable to stop it until the alarm went off, and she woke up.

      Over the years, she had perfected a basic morning routine, Monday through Friday. Roll out of bed two minutes before the alarm went off, take the litany of pills waiting on her nightstand—birth control, asthma meds, iron supplements—then stagger into the kitchen and pour herself a glass of grapefruit juice while the coffeemaker—set to go off exactly at six in the morning—started its spluttering little song. Pour that first cup of coffee, feel her neurons start to fire, and head back across the apartment to her office. Flip open the laptop, start the email download to see what fresh hell her office had sent her overnight. Sometimes she missed having a commute, an office, coworkers to gossip with. The rest of the time she thanked god for telecommuting. She could start work at seven and get a head start on whatever was going on.

      And for the past three—almost four—months if she had woken up alone, she had added another early morning routine. The first words of the day, typed into the small text box in the upper left hand of the screen: Hello, lover.

      Normally, her screen would show a reply almost immediately. But today, the text box on her screen remained blank, save for her words.

      She waited a minute, then another. Nothing.

      Well. Maybe he was in the bathroom. Or dealing with a work thing. Tyler did contract work for the university, which meant there was almost always a crisis happening—academics were worse than corporations for wanting something changed and then not understanding why it couldn’t be done. But it also meant he wasn’t away from his monitor, when he was on the clock. Not for long, anyway.

      They’d met in one of those dating-site chat rooms, ironically self-conscious and, she admitted, a little desperate. She hadn’t expected anything; so many of the guys would chat, email, they might even call once or twice, and then disappear. But Tyler had suggested they meet for coffee, almost immediately. They’d both been awkward, almost shy, for about ten minutes. Then...magic.

      It wasn’t because they were so alike—they weren’t. And it wasn’t because they were total opposites, either. There was just enough overlap that they didn’t run out of things to talk about that night, or after, for that matter.

      Jan frowned at the screen. Maybe he had gone onto campus today, rather than working from home? He hadn’t mentioned anything about it yesterday, but something might have come up after he left.

      He’d gone home the night before around eight o’clock; they both were busiest in the morning, so Monday through Thursday they tended to sleep in their own beds, work until around two in the afternoon, and then hook up again. She might have liked waking up with someone snuggled against her more often, but Jan admitted that she liked her space, too.

      So, yeah. That was probably it: he was on the bus heading toward campus, and he’d check in later. Reassured, she opened her work in-box and got hit with an urgent email from a client in Ireland whose site had apparently gone FUBAR, “and she swears she didn’t touch it, didn’t do anything,” according to the email from the project manager.

      “Yeah. Sure you didn’t.” Jan shook her head and got to work, digging through the code.

      By the time she’d restored the site, finished her first pot of coffee and refilled it, there was still no message from Tyler in her text box. She frowned, chewing on her thumbnail, then—after glancing to make sure no new mail had come in red-flagged for an emergency—typed again.

      You there?

      No response. She looked at the time display: 10:40. More than enough time for him to have gotten into the office—maybe it was a really massive crisis?

      She opened another browser and brought up the university’s site. It seemed to be running fine, although god knew what was going on with the intranet, which was Ty’s baby.

      “Okay, СКАЧАТЬ