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“Quinn, I-” What did she wish to say to him? What could she say? He’d been avoiding her, then he’d rescued her once again. It was turning into a bad habit that she needed him to do so. Sitting cross-legged, she had her hands turned down on her knees and she clenched the fabric. “Thank you,” she ended up on. “For saving me.”
“You’re welcome,” Quinn mumbled. His voice lost the Irish brogue, but wasn’t quite the monotonous robot tone he’d used before. He just sounded tired and defeated.
“If you want me to leave you alone, I will.” She made the offer, but her voice landed far from even like a serrated knife, it rose and fell the edge uneven. She cared for him. A thickness unhidden and full of the tears she’d not quite shed all the way last night. “I should have respected your wishes to start, but I just didn’t want to see you leave on such bad terms. I don’t know what I was thinking- or maybe I wasn’t thinking. I’m so sorry to have put you in this position. It was unfair of me to push my presence on you to begin with. Max has just been trying to get me to be more sensitive towards others, and I guess I was the exact opposite of that.” It was clear she was flustered. Twisting about, the cold of the floor traveled up through her feet. She left the tray. She didn’t even ask for Gabby to come with her. “I’ll still send along meals if you want them. I’ll stay on the ship and off of Eikos, but I’ll be where you aren’t.”
Quinn listened without interrupting, his head leaning on the side of the wall, his eyes downward. Gabby rushed, flinging herself off the side like a flying squirrel, arms outstretched, landing with the clicking sound of metal tapping metal before rushing toward Kira’s leg to shimmy upward.
“It’s a bit late for that.” His voice carried his usual gruffness, but it still sounded more weary than anything else.
Pausing her back to him, she stiffened. “I can make it less painful.” She wished she didn’t have to, and she was glad that she wasn’t facing him anymore.
“By what? Acting like a bitch, so I don’t like you anymore?” Quinn snorted. Then he laughed. Really laughed. He fell over and clutched his stomach as the offended lizard, Gary, dove for cover.
“Why in the world is that funny?” Rounding on him, he’d sparked the anger that she’d felt when he’d been avoiding her all those days. The rage she’d felt when she’d searched for him to talk about how Gabby was doing or just to see him because she’d enjoyed his company.
“Because this all started because you were too stubborn to leave me alone. Then we got to know each other and you want to loop back to being a bitch,” Quinn said, wheezing with amusement before falling into another fit of laughter.
“I don’t want to loop back to being anything. I wasn’t the one who decided that just avoiding me was the best way to handle the fact that, for once in your life, someone was trying to be a friend to you when you’d not had one before.” She shoved her hands in her pockets to keep from slapping him as he continued to laugh at her expense. Lashing out because he had called her names.
Quinn’s laughter slowly died down and he stared up at the ceiling.
“Yeah, well, mission bloody accomplished Kira,” the man said with a sigh.
“Stars, you’re infuriating Quinn.” Tossing her hands up in the air at his words, she went to stomp off, but before she left the room she called back, “Dinner’s at six.”
“Says the woman who badgered the future hermit until she was, apparently, his friend.” He laughed again, something manic to it. He wasn’t any better. He wasn’t mentally in a place ready for healing. But apparently, for the moment, he wasn’t a totally useless curled-up blob not doing anything at all. Kira could deal with this.
“Well, now you can either show up or deal with the Eikos. I won’t send it with the drone.” That was the ultimatum now. He didn’t want things to go back to the way they were, so she’d make it worse.
Leaving him alone there, she needed a shower and a moment to think clearly.
Watson thought the opposite, and he was promptly told where he could go stick his computer chip.
Chapter Eleven
KIRA
Kira
It lacked punctuation the way he said it. No question, but not quite finished, as if he’d started to say something, then decided against it. With the way his programming worked, she knew he could do that mid sentence and no one would know.
“Watson.”
His name dropped from her lips with curiosity, but not the same fervent pushing she’d been doing towards Quinn.
I hope you know what you’re doing.
“I will not mess things up for you… again.”
That’s not my focus.
“It is your focus, don’t lie to me.” Jolting upright, fingernails bit into her palms. He couldn’t see her, she thought. He couldn’t tell anything about her movements other than the sound they made, the way she spoke to him, irritated.
Maybe it is, but maybe it is for reasons that I cannot explain properly like this.
“Watson…” Her mounting anger faded as quickly as it had come on. “You can tell me anything. There’s nothing you could say that would-”
Commander West is requesting an audience. It’s urgent.
