ARC10

Chapter 17.2

I stare at the closed door for a few seconds in my own stunned silence before leaping off the table and running after him. By the time I catch up, he's already out of the ward with his enormous strides propelling him out more quickly than bullets from a barrel.

"Dean, wait." I wrap my hand around his wrist. "Where are you going? What's wrong? We should be celebrating."

"You are so selfish." He rips his arm from my touch.

His words are louder than my big guns. Each one punches a hole that goes straight through my chest. You. Are. So. Selfish.

"Selfish? Seriously?"

"Yeah, Janika. Selfish. You are incredibly selfish."

"So it's selfish for me to . . ." Before I open my mouth to say something incredibly dumb, my militia brain kicks in, sounding all the alarms in my head. I see that people of the URE, the average every-day civilian, is milling around, some staring at our spectacle. My jaw clicks shut.

Dean waits for my response.

"So, it's selfish for me to want to work at the Sink," I emphasize heavily, hopefully indicating that when I say "the Sink," he gets that I really mean the mission where the survival of two thousand souls rests in our hands. "To do all of my work at the Sink uninhibited by a child? And what about that child once it's born? Is it selfish for me to think that the kid would be better off not being born during . . . my shift? Or at least waiting until . . . after my shift?" My fervor drifts off as I start to lose the potency of the metaphor.

Dean stares at me, fuming. I can tell that he gets my message, but I don't think I've adequately expressed my point of view. My mind drifts to other possible metaphors. I barely catch his words. "You only have thought about how this entire contract would be affecting you. Did you ever, for even a second, think about what I'm going through during all this?"

I sift through the last five years of memories and find a resounding no. I didn't think about Dean's feelings because I didn't want to. They'd make me feel like a monster.

"For all of your complaining, you've never really given us a chance as partners in this. It's all about what you want." His voice is low and steady. "I didn't want to be reassigned, Nika. I don't want to have to go through all of this again. Not with a stranger."

My body freezes, and I feel my extremities numb.

Dean is being reassigned. Dean is no longer available. Dean is not contracted to me anymore. I am not contracted to Dean.

I am not contracted.

My mind clears. "We have a week."

"For what?"

"For this." I rise up and wrap my fingers around the gray material of his collar and pull him down.

With my fists crushing the fabric and my lips slammed against his, I have a sudden and drenching revelation—I don't want to let him go.

The kiss is hard but unsure. He gently takes my arms in his hands and pushes back.

I don't know what to say to him. I want him to share my weightlessness.

"You have a week before the next cohort meets. That means we can still be together. I know that's what you want." I release his shirt one finger at a time.

He looks at me with an unrecognizable expression, thus shocking me into oblivion. In all the years I've known Dean, I thought I'd seen everything. Ranging from joy, anger, sadness, shock, inspiration, determination, blood-lust, and fear, I figured I'd seen every single way his face could maneuver to show emotion.

This one is entirely new.

It looks like resignation, but I'm not entirely sure. It also looks like frustration or hopelessness. It looks like a cross between stubbing a toe and losing his faith in his precious god.

"It was never about that."

"Then what was it about? If all these years weren't about getting me in your cot with you, what was this whole thing about?"

"Is that all you thought it was?"

"Mostly," I lie.

He grabs my hand and pulls me down the Rotunda.

We rush through the crowds until we get to the produce markets on Level 4. It's congested like the hurried current of a flooded river.

Dean, more than a head taller than them all, pushes us through the crowd in erratic zig-zag patterns. We pop out somewhere in the middle in a hidden crevice that's just spacious enough to fit the two people squeezed in together.

We've been here before. This is a space of our childhood—a secret corner where we'd go to hide from the gravity of imminent responsibility. It's a place where no one would find us.

He pushes me up against the pipes on the wall.

"Tell me now, Janika. You didn't feel anything between us these last few months?" He's bent so that he's hovering over me, meeting me eye to eye. His hands press flat against the concrete wall as if he's attempting to push the URE away.

"Nothing at all." I feel the words, meaningless and dry on my tongue, slip out into the alley.

"Then I guess you won't mind if we take one last time together. For the good-old days? Since it meant nothing anyway." His hands move deftly to my waist as he unbuttons my pants with eerie finesse.

My stomach churns, not out of fear of Dean, but of want. I lied to him, sure, but he doesn't have to know that. This reassignment is the best thing that could have ever happened to him.

Now I'm going to be selfish, for real. I want him, one last time because I don't think I'm ever going to get a chance like this again. Dean will be gone, and I'll be contractless, left to drift about my own devices until I die. Let me have this. Let me have him just one more time like this.

My hands rush to join his, moving quickly to get my leg out of the pants so that I'm free and exposed.

Once done with me, I work on his clothes. He pins me between himself and the wall, lifting me until our hips are leveled. My ankles cross behind him.

"Say it, Janika."

"Say what?"

"Say that this meant nothing more than just sex. That when I was with you, there wasn't anything more."

I lift my chin. "It was just sex. All physical. Nothing more."

He drives into me as if he were trying to go through the wall and break us both. I pull him in and close all the little gaps between our chests.

"You're a liar." He slams into me. Our lips, tongues, and limbs become tangled in our messy, angry knot in the shadowed alley of the markets. He grunts quietly as I moan over his lips. His release lasts for eons in that moment when I, for a flicker of a second, hope that this one sticks.

Just as that hope appears, it gets sucked back into my vacuum of ambition.

Silence stuffs the space between us as we right ourselves. We disperse, moving through the crowd as if nothing had ever occurred between us in that dank corner of the URE.