Monsieur LaRoux is taking the stage.
He looks the same as he always has—piercing blue eyes and close-cropped white hair, a face that’s recognizable all over the galaxy. He’s flanked by a pair of bodyguards, and just behind him come a couple who’ve spent the past year on nearly as many HV screens as he has. Even in black tie, Merendsen still looks military—it’s in the way he stands. He only softens when he rests a hand at the small of Lilac LaRoux’s back, ushering her up the stairs after her father, so that he can stand between her and the photographers at the bottom of the stairs.
I’ve talked with them on text chat dozens of times, and via the feeds I hijacked when I locked down their personal security arrangements, I can get a look at their faces any time I like. But this is the first time we’ve all been in the same physical space, and I’m transfixed. They look exactly like their publicity pictures, from the way she turns her head to gaze up at him, to the way he keeps an arm around her, smiling faintly as their eyes meet. Everybody knows the way those two look at each other. Like there’s nobody else in the room. I swallow down a moment of the bitterness that always surges when I watch them together on the screen. They make it look so easy, being together.
Sofia’s staring alongside me, but we’re hardly at risk of blowing our cover. The whole room’s transfixed. Then she shifts her weight, starting to step forward toward the trio onstage, like she’s forgotten I’m even there. I grab her arm, and she tries to shake me off. “What are you doing?” I whisper, stepping up beside her.
She ignores me, turning her head to conduct a slow sweep of the room. She takes in the security goons one more time, lets her gaze pause on the stage, every muscle in her body tense—like a hound on a scent, pointing her quarry.
I squeeze her arm. “Time to go,” I whisper in her ear, tugging her back toward the pillar—nervousness surging up all over again, the fear that she’ll forget her promise to me.
And abruptly, as though some decision is made, or conclusion reached, she lets me draw her away. She turns to take hold of my lapels and pull me back against the pillar, then stretches up on her toes to kiss me. Her hand curls around the nape of my neck, sending another shot of electricity down my spine as her skin touches mine, and her lips brush my ear. “Time to go,” she agrees. “We need to look like we’re sneaking out to…Well, try and look like you want me.”
No problem, Dimples. No problem at all.
We keep our hands linked as we slip through the door, the space between my shoulder blades twitching with the discomfort of turning my back on all that security. She uses her grip to drag me to a halt when I’m about to stride away down the corridor, instead pulling me a few steps in, and then leaving me to skip back and press her ear to the door, listening for pursuit. After a few seconds, she nods. “Hold still,” she says, stepping in close to reach up and start pulling my tie undone with one hand, unfastening the top buttons of my shirt with the other.
“Is now really the time?” I hesitate as soon as the joke is out of my mouth—I might have her agreement, but I know I don’t have her forgiveness yet.
But she flashes me a small smile and pulls out a tube of lipstick from her purse, reapplying it carefully, then pulling me down so she can press her lips to my collar, leaving a crimson smudge there. She steps back to give me another once-over, then tugs at one side of my shirt until it’s untucked from my waistband.
Next it’s on to her own preparations. She musses her hair, running her fingers through her curls until they’re sitting askew, then leans down to unfasten her towering heels, stepping out of them and hooking her fingers through the straps to carry them. If anyone finds us, they won’t be that confused about what we were doing, looking like this.
When she looks back up at me, she’s steel once more, nothing but determination in her gaze. “Let’s go. The clock’s running.”
The blue-eyed man comes to the thin spots only rarely now, and never again does he bring the little girl with the delighted laugh that so transformed his face. But the same pieces of sound and color that flooded the stillness flood the thin spot, and through them we can see more of this universe. We struggle to learn much from their words and letters and messages, but the images speak, carry ghosts of the hearts behind them.