Date Point: 8y 7m 3w AV
London, England, Earth.
Ava Rios.
“You know what’s funny?”
“What?”
“I was fucking terrified of losing my virginity.”
Sean gritted his teeth and curled his fingers into the pillowcase She had both of her hands on his wrists, gently trapping him. “How…things have changed.” he commented.
Ava giggled and paused to grind her hips deep down onto him, a motion which sent a delicious shiver of pleasure right through her, so that her eyelashes fluttered and she bit her lower lip so hard that it hurt. Apparently it worked for Sean too, because his expression of furious concentration became desperate.
“Oh Christ…”
“It’s okay, lover…” she leant right forward and whispered into his ear. “Come for me.”
She kissed his jaw and stroked his hair as he came down from whatever star she’d just sent him into orbit around, until he found his voice again and said something characteristically witty between great gulping breaths: “Fuuuuuck. Whoa-oh my…whew.”
She grinned down at him. “Good one?”
“Jesus.” He opened his eyes and swallowed, expression equal parts worshipful and concerned. “Did…are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” she promised, and carefully dismounted to roll down beside him. Neither of them moved very much for a few minutes until his breathing and pulse had returned to something resembling normal, at which point he cleared his throat and discreetly tied and disposed of the contraceptive he was still wearing.
“You’re sure?” He asked. “I mean, you didn’t-”
“I don’t have to, nibble.” she chided him, gently.
“Yeah, but this is supposed to be about-”
“Adam I’m fine, really!”
It took her a few seconds to interpret the change in his expression. “Sean. Shit.” She buried her face in the pillow, covered the back of her head with her hands and repeated herself, feeling a full-body cringe come on. “Shit.”
“Really?” He asked.
“God fucking dammit that’s…I’m so sorry.”
Sean sighed, stood up and went to the bathroom, which left her to sit up as well and blush violently by herself for a few minutes, hoping that the bed might maybe come alive and devour her before his return or something equally implausible to spare her a moment’s more shame.
When he came back in, he just sat next to her and rubbed her back. “You twit.” he said, lovingly.
“Sean, I am so sorry.”
“Well, better this than the other way around.” he joked, with a slightly awkward laugh.
”…You’re not mad?”
”…Well, I’m a bit jealous…” he confessed. “…but not mad. I get it, I’m the ‘other guy’ here. I suppose I should be glad this is the first time it’s happened.”
A laugh exploded out of her and brought embarrassed tears with it, which just made him laugh and kiss her below the ear. “It’s okay.” he promised.
“You’ve got to be the only guy in the world who’s okay with hearing somebody else’s name in bed!” She told him.
“Well, if you’re having sex with me and it makes you think of a big strong soldier, maybe I should take it as a compliment.”
“Don’t go too far.” Ava said, deflating again. “God, I really am sorry, you know that?”
“Don’t worry, I’ve done it too.” He reassured her. “Broke up with Gwen in the morning, spent the afternoon with Ayesha consoling me, and just as she was blowing me that evening I called her Gwen. That was awkward!”
“Jeez, how many girls have you—actually, I don’t want to know.”
“Okay.”
The wall clock uncomfortably counted out twenty seconds before she finally sighed. “Okay, okay. How many girls have you been with?”
“Including you?”
“Yes.”
”…Do blowjobs count?”
“Yes.”
“Handjobs?”
She gave him a light backhand in the upper arm. “Sean!”
“Okay, okay!” He laughed. “You’re my sixth.”
“Oh thank fuck. I was worried you’d say something crazy like twenty.”
“Twenty?” he asked. “Jesus.”
“It’s good to know you’re not that much of a slut.” she told him.
“No it’s not that.” Sean waved a hand. “It’s just…Twenty is your definition for a slut? I went to school with a guy who claimed a hundred when he was eighteen, and I’m quite sure it was the truth.”
“Bullshit!” Ava protested. “How do you even…?”
“A different girl every week for two years?” Sean suggested. “Apparently it’s not that hard if you know how.”
“What’s he up to now?”
“He volunteers with a HIV awareness program.”
”…Oh.”
“Yeah.”
After a silent moment, she leaned into him and made a sighing sound. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Ayesha, I’m fine! OW!”
She’d smacked him in the upper arm again, with a laugh. He joined in and tried to tickle her, she fought back, and it wasn’t long before the tickle-wrestling had them both ready to go a second round.
This time, she got his name right.
Date Point: 8y 9m AV
HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Major Owen Powell
Being a minute later than he’d planned heading for today’s training session meant that Powell was just late enough to run into Technical Sergeant Kovač coming down the hall the other way, struggling under a cardboard box that she could have fit inside. “Uh…Delivery for you, Major.”
Powell stood and brought his hands together in a single eager clap. “Outstanding.” he declared. “I ordered those a month ago.”
“Yes, sir.” Kovač agreed, blandly neither assuming responsibility for the delay, nor assigning it.
Powell chuckled. “For cryin’ out loud, leave them there and grab a trolley. We’ll hand them out after today’s scenario.” he declared. “Assuming there’s enough for everyone?”
“Yes sir.” Kovač put the box down, gratefully. “I inventoried it all myself, everything’s as ordered.”
“Well done. We already planned how this was going to go, get them set up and ready for presentation once the scenario’s done. Don’t be late.”
“Yes sir.”
“Carry on.”
Scenario days were Powell’s favourite part of the SOR training regime. Gravball was fun, and the academic lessons were fascinating, but nothing quite matched the simple, mildly sadistic joy of seeing the lads tackle simulated missions in the warehouse.
The warehouse had been his personal request to HMS Sharman in the weeks before they’d come back here, and it had been the base’s willingness to accommodate his request that had finalized the decision. It was the size of an aircraft hangar and full of the very latest in gravity plating and holographic emitters, backed up by a dedicated staff of scenario planners and fresh-faced young specialists with the skills necessary to create, animate and deploy simulated hostiles via those emitters.
They had been given three simple instructions—the scenarios must be unpredictable, they must simulate the sorts of conditions and situations the SOR might find themselves in on actual missions, and they must be slightly beyond the lads’ abilities. Enough so that for them to actually complete the scenario and win would be unlikely, but not so much as to render the task actually impossible.
They had re-run one of the old scenarios last week, by way of a demonstration, along the lines of ‘look how far you’ve come’. Not only had the lads completed it, they’d done so without suffering so much as a simulated scratch, even in the sections that they hadn’t reached first time through.
It had been an education for Powell too, seeing just what they were capable of. Arés climbing a rope up the kind of falling hallway trap that Kaminsky had once described, with his legs wrapped around Vandenberg, who was no lightweight himself, both in their suits and with a full combat load. Akiyama overriding the electronic lock on a door panel in seconds, though that was doubtless down to the fact that he’d ordered a gross of the most common makes of door lock in the Dominion and spent his spare time for most of a month tinkering with them.
All of the lads were like that now, though. They’d become addicted to self-improvement, to the point where if a day went past where they weren’t challenged, weren’t learning something new or advancing an existing skill, they got listless and boisterous. Keeping them stocked with books, tools and material to further their lust for personal perfection wasn’t just a training expense, it was a morale and discipline one.
Not that Powell himself was any different, of course. His personal quarters had gone from containing only three books—’The Art of War’, ‘The Complete SAS Survival Manual’, and ‘Masters of Command – Hannibal, Caesar and the Genius of Leadership‘—to containing two overworked bookshelves that each held dozens, covering the military history of the last three hundred years, and including Machiavelli, Plato, the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Bhagavad Gita, some of the better introductory volumes in the fields of psychology, the history and design of games, physics and communications, plus several classic science fiction authors: Niven, Pournelle, Banks, Simmons, Clarke and Asimov. And, because he’d been left squinting at the literary references in the Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos and Ilium, that had led to him buying Homer, Proust, Shakespeare and Keats into the bargain.
His old man would have looked at a room full of that many books and promptly declared that it could only belong to a ‘poof’, and the reality of his son’s command, condition and intellect would have made not a jot of difference. Powell senior had been a deeply anti-intellectual man to cover for his own illiteracy, and quick to pin anything he didn’t like on ‘poofs’.
Just one of the many reasons Major Powell so valued his own education. Not that he’d appreciated it when young, of course.
The physical effects of Crue-D were obvious, there for anyone to see. But now he cast his memory back a few years, and could see Jen Delaney, mastering marksmanship in a single lesson. Or Saunders, building a working starship out of scraps and salvage in a mere two weeks.
He was beginning to become seriously worried that the Corti might have badly miscalculated.
He set aside his worries about having created a monster when he realised that he’d easily loped the distance from the office complex to the training centre in hardly any time at all, at speeds that most people would consider a dead run, and without so much as a spare gasp of breath to show for it, even though that itself was pauseworthy. He was here to run a training operation: Cogitation could wait, for now.
For all its high-tech contents, the warehouse was controlled from what was basically a shed, fully half of which was computers, between which the team of four young men who organised and oversaw the exercises sat in a square, facing away from one another. There literally wasn’t room for more than one of them to stand up at a time, and Powell had given them special dispensation to not react to his entering except by straightening in their seats and looking toward him.
“All set up?” He asked.
“Yes sir.” Corporal Jenkins was the senior NCO in the shed, and the scenario team leader—he’d once been heard to describe himself as the “dungeon master”.
“Good, I look forward to it. Change of plan for the end of session today, though: report to the end zone once you’ve saved the footage and turned everything off.”
“Yes sir.”
“Right. As you were.”
He jogged the last hundred yards the Warehouse door. The lads were all suited up and ready to go, waiting for him in their EV-MASS systems and practically creaking under the weight of all the gear they carried for training.
“Arright lads, about that time again. Fall in.”
They did so, eager to get going.
“The scenario we’re gaming today is an assault on a Hierarchy space station, populated by traps and active defences under the direct control of a Hierarchy operator.” he explained. “Your mission is to reach the computer core, pull the data, then get that data off the station and into intel’s hands by whatever means are possible. We’re simulating that you’ve breached in from EVA. You’re going in blind, that means no hints about what threats you might face or what you might find. Any questions?”
They all shook their heads. “Right. Systems check on your suits, give us the thumbs up when you’re ready.”
He left them to it and climbed the ladder up into the observation gantry, a cabin that ran along the ceiling on rails from which the occupants were able to look down into the training area.
“Ready?” He asked, pulling the ladder up behind him.
“Ready sir.”
“Right. Wait for the thumbs up and let’s see how we do.”
He watched the men below go through a last round of confirming each others’ suits—a lesson that had been drilled into them by Drew Cavendish from day one—before they gathered round Legsy in a huddle to talk plan.
By agreement, the game controllers did not get to hear that plan. Powell did, because he wasn’t the one giving the orders—he was there to watch, observe, think about how he’d have approached things, and so far, he agreed with every decision Legsy was making, including the one about leaving the two Protectors behind, much to their dismay.
The huddle broke up, everyone headed for their respective loadout station to grab the equipment they’d decided they needed and Powell tuned in on Legsy again as he patted Arés’ upper arm.
“You okay?”
“Eh, you know me. I hate being left in the back.”
“Yeah pal. I would too, but trust me, right? We don’t put our best at risk until we have to.”
Arés’ silence spoke volumes on what he thought of that assessment. “Legs…”
“Nah mate. Said that for a reason. I’d rather have one of you bored and a jump away than fifty other medics right next to me in the fight, and you’d better bloody believe I mean that.”
The younger man didn’t say anything, just nodded, then grabbed Legsy’s gauntlet and drew him into the kind of body-slamming hug that would have pulverized bricks.
“You get through this without needing us, I’m buying the drinks.”
“Fuck aye. See you after.”
Powell didn’t need to be listening on the radio to hear Legsy calling for the safety officer, who performed a final round of checks to make sure that every last weapon, round and grenade they had on them were training versions—blank rounds, dummy grenades, and the laser-based MILES training equipment. The lads formed up, gave each other a round of slaps in the head, fist-bumps, and other suitably violent masculine gestures, and Legsy aimed a raised thumb at the control box.
The simulated violence below unfolded. Knowing what they did about the Hierarchy, every simulated mission worked off the assumption that the mind in question knew they were coming, detected the intrusion within seconds, and that it would bring out its best and most potentially effective gambits first, but not unwisely.
What, exactly, those gambits would be was always an exercise in the games designers’ imaginations, informed by the sort of things they had learned from Delaney, Saunders, and Six, and their own sadistic machinations.
Cloaked assault robots with fusion blades for limbs. Several varieties of small flying drone, from the ones that stopped and deployed a plasma weapon, to a kind that the games techs had invented that were basically just a flying fusion blade, designed to flash at speed straight down a corridor and halve every man in it at the waist. Gravity traps, various kinds of turret, rooms full of hair-trigger explosives, rooms where the power cables had been wired like the grid on a bug zapper, even simulated human biodrone soldiers.
There had even once been a room full of sex slaves sporting the faces of a number of actresses and singers, an encounter so absurd that the simulation had been abandoned, and the two men responsible had been “motivated” to remember their responsibilities by means of having them train with Staff Sergeant Arés, under orders that he was not to be friendly about it.
Given how uncomfortable and time-consuming it was to both don and remove the suit, Arés had obliged with relish, though he had quite kindly carried the two broken perpetrators back to their rooms once he was done. There had been no such lapses of professionalism since.
Each simulation was designed to take a few hours. There was a lot of room in the warehouse, and the simulation techs worked all week to configure the next scenario ahead of training day. Beating the crap out of those two with WARHORSE had probably spared them the wrath of their fellows. Or at least, the worst of it.
Today, there were no such shenanigans. The Aggressors were a blur, emptying each room of anything that even resembled a threat almost before they’d finished entering it. That was doctrine—it had to be assumed that nobody and nothing encountered in a scenario where the Hierarchy were involved was a friendly unless it was clearly and obviously not a threat and could not possibly become so, and even then was to be treated as suspicious until proven otherwise.
The Defenders were no less deadly, but their deadliness was more methodical. Laying sensors and mines behind them, carrying spare ammo for the Aggressors, watching the Aggressors’ backs, disarming traps and overcoming engineering and technical challenges. When the team had to climb “up” a long hallway that had had its gravity rotated by ninety degrees, the Defenders were the ones who deployed the ropes.
There were firefights against an entrenched squad of simulated Chehnasho troops, easily brushed aside. There was a desperate battle against a pack of flying blades, one of which only narrowly failed to “kill” Firth. There was a holographic Vulza—Price dodged a snap of its jaws, wrapped his arms around its snout and held on while Blaczynski bayoneted it in the eye. It took nearly twenty minutes for Vandenberg and Akiyama to disarm a particularly nasty electrical discharge trap, while the rest of the men dug in and warded off probing attacks by an increasingly desperate Hierarchy force…
Which turned out to be a distraction. No sooner was the trap disarmed and the squad retreating into the room than a gunship—an illusion, projected on the huge “window” that ran the length of the room – decloaked and began to fire indiscriminately through the glass. A quick jerk of the gravity approximated the room decompressing. They all grabbed handholds and so none of them were “spaced” by the simulated blowout, but finally, three of the lads were forced to obey the rules of the simulation and lie down inactive as their MILES systems reported incapacitating hits.
Powell leaned forward to watch, eagerly. Their performance while things had been going well had been exemplary—now he was interested in seeing how they performed when the shit hit the fan. Those were the moments that a unit truly showed its quality.
They didn’t disappoint.
One of the functions of the midsuit’s active padding was to close any breaches in the pressure hull, but still a penetrating wounding shot while wearing EV-MASS in vacuum was a deadly matter, demanding immediate extraction to a pressurised environment, before all else.
That was the Protectors’ job. Everyone in that room knew it. They also knew that the Protectors weren’t there, and that the lives of their comrades (simulation be damned, they were all too motivated to care about the difference) depended on getting them into that room ASAP, and clearing the way for them to do their job.
Legsy didn’t waste a second, and fired a grenade out of his gun’s M203 at the gunship, supported by a hail of rapid-fire from the others. The simulation decided that he scored a hit, which combined with the bullets did enough to badly damage the vehicle’s canopy and spoil its pilot’s view, causing the projected gunship to sway crazily and spray the exterior hull of the station with wasted shots.
Had the fight been real, the room would have been in vacuum which would have allowed Arés and Burgess to jump straight in to their buddy’s beacons. In reality, it was of course flooded with air. Fortunately, they’d planned for that, which was why the two Protectors had been walking along above their comrades a few rooms back, ready to drop in through hatches in the ceiling when summoned.
This they now did, arriving in the room just as alacritously as if they had displaced in, and Powell grunted in satisfaction as Burgess took immediate stock of the situation, grabbed the downed Vandenberg, hoisted him up onto his shoulders, and retreated toward the door into the next room that the Defenders were working on breaching, covered by the Aggressors as they continued to suppress the pursuing Hierarchy forces.
Arés got cocky. He tried to lift the remaining two fallen men simultaneously, rather than extracting the one who was in the more immediate danger.
There was no doubting that the young man was the strongest on the team, scoring over even Burgess by a fair margin, and that fact had been going to his head lately. Not in any overt, swaggering way, but just in his growing assurance that he was capable of anything. Powell tutted outwardly, but inwardly he was pleased, knowing that the kid was about to get the ego-check he needed.
There was some muttered astonishment in the control room at the fact that he actually managed it, getting Murray and Sikes off the ground and carried just fine, but Powell had done the maths. Arés may have been strong, but the simple physics of the situation—his mass relative to the combined weight of the two men he was lifting—simply didn’t work out in his favour. He was off-balance from the moment he teetered upright, and when he tried to haul them to the exit, he just couldn’t manage any real speed or momentum.
It cost him. The Gunship’s wild spraying hadn’t entirely ceased to be a threat, and its MILES laser strobed through the room for a second, scoring a hit on the kid’s left leg, and Powell smiled grimly as he heard a vigorous Spanish curse at the report that, although the suit’s impressive armour plating hadn’t been breached, the impact HAD broken a bone.
The honour system was important. They’d all been drilled from early on that “cheating” the wound results just meant doing themselves out of proper training and experience. Arés dutifully fell over and stopped using his left leg.
Sitting on the ground, he had far less leverage. With a groan of exertion he hauled Firth into cover that protected him from more stray firepower from the gunship, then began to drag Murray toward the exit door. He made good time despite having only one leg to work with, too.
Burgess deposited his patient with the Defenders as they got the door open, then dashed back across the room, grabbed Firth and returned him to the door with the same kind of ease that Powell might have hefted a box of printer paper.
Then he was back for Murray, and finally Arés.
The kid was smart enough to notice that, Powell knew. Doing one man at a time had allowed Burgess to clear four men out of the room faster than Arés had handled two. That wouldn’t be missed.
The simulation ended practically the moment the Aggressors retreated through the door. Legsy barked orders, and within seconds they had all activated their jump beacons—for training purposes, replaced with a red light—and the simulation shut down as the last one lit.
A siren hooted, the lights came up, and the lads all stood up, dusted themselves off, and made wobbly-handed, wobbly-headed gestures of mixed feeling at one another as they discussed the outcome, took off their helmets, bumped fists and commiserated with each other.
Powell took his time down the ladder and strolled thoughtfully across the concrete with his hands in the small of his back, giving the lads plenty of time to leave the course, sort their gear out and get lined up.
“Master sergeant.” he said quietly, greeting Legsy. “I’d like to hear your reasons for aborting the raid and pulling out, please.”
“Sir. The longer we took, the more likely the Hierarchy mind was to have just deleted the data. With all the lads up and running I was happy to take that chance, but after we got stuck on that trap and took casualties…”
“You deemed it prudent to preserve assets?”
“Yes sir.”
Powell nodded pensively and made a show of mulling over Legsy’s explanation.
“I agree.” he declared after some few seconds, and he knew Legsy well enough to spot the invisibly subtle cues of relief in his friend’s face.
He tucked his thumbs into his belt and looked up and down the line. “What we know of the Hierarchy says that they’re rigid thinkers, as suggested by the name.” He said. “They come up with good plans, but they rely on those plans too much. They don’t adapt well if their plan fails. They like to go away, think about it, seek the advice of a senior mind, and form a new plan.”
“With that in mind,” he continued “The way to fight them is through unrelenting aggression. Break their first gambit and keep the pressure on. Don’t give them time to think, don’t allow them a moment’s breathing room. So long as the situation is unfolding quickly, they’ll be panicking and caught on the back foot, and anything they put in your way is going to be only half-thought-out.”
“This is something that EVERY man on the team must take part in. You must appear to be unstoppable, so you must never stop. Never stop moving, never stop doing, even if it’s just handing out the ammo or swapping out your juice cartridge, and above all keep the pressure on. You cannot afford to be bogged down dealing with a trap that’s going to take twenty minutes to disarm. Find an alternate route, cut a hole in the wall, fookin’ go EVA if you have to. But do not ever stop moving. You understand?”
“Yes sir.” They nodded, seeing and understanding what he was saying.
“Right. This isn’t the result we were hoping for today.” he said, and saw them all nodding and thinking. “…But it was good enough. Kovač!”
The sergeant and a handful of other NCOs entered with parade precision, having been waiting as ordered, and the operators all straightened up as they saw the berets being carried on trays towards them, knowing what it meant.
Powell started with BASEBALL. “Burgess. You did good work today.” he said. “Efficient, fast, bold. Don’t stress about not carrying as much as the Incredible Hulk there. Don’t doubt for a second that your speed is the unique skill you bring to this team—don’t lose sight of that.”
Burgess accepted the beret. It was black, with two pins on it—the Vitruvian Man emblem of the SOR, and a small circular pin adorned with a pair of green feet that Powell could tell he wanted to burst into a wide grin upon seeing. “Yes, we kept your bloody green feet.” he smiled, and stepped back, waiting. Burgess saluted eagerly, a gesture which Powell returned with rather more composure than he felt.
“Arés. You’re clearly strong enough to carry two men in EV-MASS, but you’ve got no control over the momentum. Just remember that one man saved is better than three dead. You’d have got them all without even tiring yourself if you’d taken it steady.” He handed over the second beret with the green-feet pin, and returned the younger man’s salute, keeping his immense pride in the lad to himself. It wouldn’t do to seem to have a favourite.
“For our Defenders…I know it’s not an emblem of your original training, but for you we’ve selected the castle. You’ve wonderfully fallen into your roles as the finest combat engineers ever, and something tells me you won’t mind, am I right?”
“Essayons, sir.” Sikes commented.
“Well said.” Powell handed him the beret. “Just don’t become so focussed on working on the challenge directly in front of you, that you forget the bigger challenge of the whole mission.”
He shared similar words of wisdom and gestures of respect with the remaining Defenders, then turned to the last and largest group. “And for my fellow Aggressors—the dagger, the symbolism of which should hopefully need no explaining. You are the swift, the deadly, and the skilful. Attack from all angles, show no quarter or hesitation, and there is nothing you cannot slay.”
He stepped back. “This is a moment to take pride in yourselves, but it’s also a moment for humility. We’ve chosen the black beret for a good reason. Yes, the black of space obviously, but more important is that the black beret is the colour worn by many an ordinary infantryman and marine the world over. It is critical that we all remain grounded, and conscious of the fact that we are all just servicemen, fighting for the same reasons as any other.”
“You have done what many hundreds of thousands in our home nations’ armed services could not…” he continued, but then gestured to Kovač and the men beside her. “…but you would not be SOR without our technicians and support staff. Which is why I want you to help me hand out berets and insignia to everyone else in this regiment. We are the tip of the spear—but without the wood behind it, a speartip alone is a poor weapon.”
“Yes sir.” they seemed eager to do as he had said, and he allowed himself to smile at the fierce pride shining in their faces.
“Congratulations, gentlemen. This unit is now active.”
Date Point: 8y 10m AV
London, England, Earth
Charlotte Gilroy
Being tall and slim meant that Charlotte had always suffered in the cold, and there was just no substitute on dark frozen evenings for pajamas, loungewear, two blankets, a hot chocolate…and a nice warm boyfriend on the couch.
For once, they were actually hanging out at home, rather than Sean’s house. Their place was a student flat that she, Ben and Ava could just afford on their combined housing allowance. Two bedrooms, a tiny bathroom, and a small shared space that did the work of kitchen, dining room and living room all in one.
At least…She and Ben were hanging out. Ava was busy getting ready, and Sean was busy Ava-watching. If Charlotte had been forced to pick a word to describe his expression, it might have been “guarded”. Sean usually had the light of intellectual good humour in his eyes and a slight smile around his mouth, as if he’d got the joke on life and was just waiting for everybody else to get it so they could laugh together.
Seeing him look tense, stressed and serious was a new one on her, even though only somebody who knew him well would have noticed.
Something similar went for Ava, who was usually the very picture of composure and confidence, but today was a bundle of jittery happiness, flitting restlessly from minor adjustment to insignificant chore, allegedly to make sure everything was perfect, more likely to try and retain what little equilibrium she had left.
“He’s just got off the tube!” She announced, waving her p hone at them.
Sean stood up and headed for the door.
“Sean?”
Sean cleared his throat. “We’re…out of milk.” he grunted.
To her credit, Ava’s happy buzzing ceased, and she rushed up to him and gave him a reassuring kiss. “Okay.” she said. “You go get milk.”
“I may be some time.” Sean replied, some of that humour returning, weakly, to his face.
“It’s okay.” She promised. “I’d like for you to meet him, though.”
”…I’ll try.” Sean promised unconvincingly, and let himself out.
Ava’s shoulders dropped as the door closed, but she picked herself up again after a second and turned around. “How do I look?”
“You know damn well you look amazing.” Ben told her, causing Charlotte to roll her eyes a little but nod vigorously alongside him. Ava smiled a little at the compliment, and went back to her restless bumbling around the flat.
“Have you ever seen her so nervous?” Charlotte whispered, once she judged Ava to be safely out of earshot.
“Nope.”
They let her bustle some more until she suddenly laughed aloud. “Hah! Message from Sean: ‘just passed a side of beef getting out of a taxi. Take it that’s your fella?’” She waved her phone again and giggled.
“Good to know he’s able to laugh about this.” Ben commented.
”…I know it’s hard on him.” Ava replied. “But…well, we talked about this before we started. What more can I do?”
The creaking of the stairs up to their door stopped Charlotte from answering. She just shrugged and smiled weakly.
Ever since Sean and Ava had opened up to her about their affair, she’d had serious doubts about it. Being in a committed relationship herself, it was hard to see how anything good could come out of cheating.
The instant change in Ava’s attitude dispelled most of those doubts. She practically flew to the door, glanced through the peephole, and then flung it open with a delighted noise.
It was like watching the dawn break on the first clear day of the new year after a long and dismal winter. Everything about Ava’s behaviour calmed and perked up, to a startling degree—in half a second she changed so utterly that it made Charlotte wonder if she’d every actually seen her friend relaxed before.
Adam was surprising. He was actually a little shorter than Ava and well-dressed in charcoal utility trousers and a light jacket over an NFL jersey, clothing calculated to make him look a little smaller than he really was.
This was largely futile, considering that after he’d finally been able to weaken Ava’s stranglehold hug on him, he had to turn slightly to fit through the door. He gave Charlotte and Ben a shy smile as he did so.
Ava made the introductions. “Adam: Ben, Charlotte.”
There was a round of “nice to meet you”s and “Hi”s with matching handshakes and it dawned on Charlotte that Adam was actually…rather dorky. He geeked out hugely over Ben’s tattoos when the Koi carp Ben was sporting today decided to swim up his sleeve and down the other arm just as they were shaking hands.
“Oh my God where do I get those?!” He demanded. “Can you turn them off so they don’t show?”
“Yep.” Ben replied, answering the second question first. “Mind you, these cost me a couple of thousand quid, and…” he extended a forearm alongside Adam’s own: The contrast was like comparing a shot glass to a pint mug. “You’re a bit of a bigger canvas, mate.”
“Yeah, but think about what I could have on there!” Adam chuckled. “I could watch movies!”
He was…likeable. Nice! And when Charlotte made eye contact with Ava as Ben slapped his forehead and bemoaned never thinking of that, the look she got back had an undeniable “told-you-so” element to it.
“Come on, meatstack.” Ava leaned forward and got Adam’s attention again. “We’re going into the city, remember?”
“Oh, yeah!” Adam stood up, then looked around. “I was kinda hoping to meet Sean, too, he sounds like a great guy. Isn’t he here?”
“He had to go home.” Ben lied for the three of them. “He wasn’t feeling well.”
“Aww, that sucks. Tell him I said hi, would you?”
“We will.” Charlotte promised.
And that was that. Ava gave them a grateful sort of shrug as she left, and they listened to him enthusing as she followed him down the stairs, about seeing Tower Bridge and the Eye and HMS Belfast and Buckingham Palace and…
“So.” Ben cleared his throat after the creaking stairs and litany of tourist traps had faded. “He’s…a really nice guy? How the fuck did that happen?”
Charlotte had to nod, watching the door a little warily, not quite sure what to make of this new information. “I don’t understand.” she agreed, and turned to frown her confusion at Ben. “He’s adorkable!”
“So why is she-? I mean, she’s gone from miserable to really happy these last few weeks!”
Charlotte thought about it. “Has she?” She asked eventually. “I mean, you saw how she lit up there, didn’t you you?”
”…Yeah.” Ben. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so animated.”
“Maybe she hasn’t been happy recently. Maybe she’s just been…”
Ben nodded. “…coping.”
Charlotte scratched at her bra strap, frowning at something only she could see in deep thought, until Ben slipped an arm around her waist. “Are we…okay with that?” he asked.
“I think…Yeah. Or at least, I am.” She replied. “I think if she’s doing it to cope, so she can get through and have more of that then, then…then I can understand.”
“Yeah but…What about Sean?”
“That’s where it falls apart, yeah…” she agreed.
Neither of them said anything for a little while, and after a bit, Ben turned on the TV.
They were in the middle of a report about the Iranian nuclear weapons program when Sean finally returned with a shopping bag and the expression of a condemned man.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Sean dropped his bag on the coffee table and himself into the chair next to it, rubbing at his forehead as if he was trying to iron out the frown, and watched the news with them.
Clearly, he had other things on his mind though. “…So what’s he like?”
“He’s…actually really nice.” Charlotte told him, keeping her tone of voice delicate and sympathetic.
“I already knew that.” Sean told her, dropping his hand into his lap and managing a weak smile.
“You did?”
”‘Course I bloody do. Ava’s told us that enough times, hasn’t she?”
Ben and Charlotte exchanged a glance. “I…didn’t really believe it before now.” Ben confessed.
“Why not?” Sean asked him.
“Well, he keeps hurting her!”
“Right. Because he’s a fucking idiot. A really nice fucking idiot that she loves so much that I’m fucking lucky just to be the fucking crutch for their relationship!”
Sean surged upright, stood there for a second with his face turned away from them, and then heaved a huge sigh and headed for the door. “I’ll see you Monday.”
Charlotte scrambled out of Ben’s lap to try and talk to him, putting a hand on his upper arm. “Sean…”
He turned and made fleeting, unconvincing eye contact. “I’m fine, fairy.” he lied, using the group’s pet nickname for Charlotte.
“You’re not, mate.” Ben pointed out.
“Well…better me than her then, isn’t it? She’s suffered enough.”
Charlotte’s hand dropped to her side, and he shrugged his jacket on. “I’ll see you Monday.” he repeated.
Charlotte didn’t stop him this time.