Dreamspinner Press Year Five Greatest Hits Read online

  They’d stayed there for an hour, quiet in the moment, until the sun started to fall behind the horizon. In front of them, the sky blazed red and orange, and the water flooded with fire. Above them, the night was darkest purple, and the stars were so clear and white they could draw blood. Two of the moons waxed fat and gold, one full and one at three quarters, both of them beautiful.

  Anderson had caught his breath and simply watched, and when the last fractals of sunlight had finally dispersed across the dark water, he’d collapsed in C.J.’s arms and breathed for what felt like the first time in years.

  C.J. nuzzled his ear and spoken. “Hungry?”

  “For sex or food?”

  “Food first. Then sex. Then sleep.”

  “I like a man with his priorities straight.”

  Their lovemaking that night had been exquisite and tender, a kiss that never ended. They had simply taken each other in hand and stroked as they kissed lips, cheeks, chins, and finally succumbed, mouth to mouth, bodies heaving and straining, foreskins sliding furiously over the crowns of their cocks as they came on each other, scalding and sticky in the dark.

  Two days later, C.J. had boarded the shuttle back to the space station and left.

  This time Anderson had cried, and dented one of C.J.’s cabinets with his foot, and broken a chair. He’d confessed to C.J. rather shamefacedly over the video that night, and C.J. had grimaced.

  “I’ll start leaving shit for you to throw at the wall or something, baby. Carpentry’s expensive!”

  “You’re not mad?”

  C.J.’s smile across the monitor had been partly forgiving, partly bitter. “It’s a hell of a lot better than the send-off you gave me last time,” he said quietly, and abruptly, Anderson hadn’t felt so bad for breaking things. C.J. was right. It was a hell of a lot better than helpless desperation.

  The next three months had flown by.

  Since C.J.’s stay had gone so well, Jensen let Anderson stay in C.J.’s bungalow. C.J. had given him the guest bedroom, and while it was true he put a desk in there and gradually found prints for the walls—including a shifting picture frame with pictures from C.J.’s first leave—and decorated it with stuff he liked, the truth was that Anderson slept in C.J.’s bed every night, dreaming about C.J.’s return.

  Anderson’s therapy sessions had become shorter and less frequent. While he still swam every day (because he had come to love it by now), he only saw Jensen or Molly every other day, and that was about the time he started wondering what to do with himself.

  That was the day C.J.’s dad came to him with a proposition.

  Anderson had been proud that he could greet Christopher James Poulson with fruit juice and fresh baked bread, a hobby he’d developed after ten years of synth food. They’d sat on chairs at a table in C.J.’s small backyard, which was mostly lawn with some flowering shrubs around for shade, and Chris, as he asked to be called, had talked of inconsequential things—the weather, what parts of the planet Anderson had seen, when he wanted a tour of the eastern quadrant of the northern hemisphere, and so on.

  Then Chris had gotten to the point.

  Anderson had sat for a few moments, a little stunned, and very interested, and very much afraid, after Chris had very sweetly offered to see himself out and give Anderson a chance to mull it over.

  Anderson had sat until the fruit juice had grown warm and the late fall sunshine had grown a little bit uncomfortable before cleaning off the table and going inside to C.J.’s bright, airy home away from the station. He’d washed up in a daze and then gone into “his” room and looked around. On the end table by the bed he never slept in, he’d set the school tablet that C.J. had so carefully preserved from the shuttle, the one with his family on it that he hardly recalled was his.

  The one that he had only looked at when the demands of therapy required it.

  That afternoon he sat down on the bed and looked at every picture and re-read every letter. Of course he cried through it—again. Of course it was painful, aching like the world was ending in his chest for every goddamned minute—again. When C.J. called that evening, he was still a mess—a weeping, slobbering, snotty mess—but when he told C.J. what he’d been doing and why, C.J. had smiled, that cocky, carefree C.J. smile that had let Anderson know it was all going to be okay in the first place, and Anderson wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.

  “Of course you’ve got to, baby. Of course. It’s perfect. You’ll do a wonderful job. I have no doubt.”

  “But….” Anderson grimaced. He had jobs—more than one offer—up at the station, with the assurance that all he had to do was choose his venue and take his time. He’d made friends there, and his work on the holodeck had impressed everybody. He’d told C.J. during his visit that what he wanted was to be with C.J.—to work the same schedule, to come home and play together during leave and live together on the station and… to just be together, because Anderson, of all people, knew that there might not ever be enough time in the world for that to happen.

  C.J. finished the sentence for him. “But you wouldn’t be able to come up with me after my next leave.”

  “No.” Anderson bit his lips and willed C.J. to understand—and because he was C.J., he did.

  “This’ll be good,” he said with a decided nod to his head. “I mean, it’ll suck, but it’ll be good.”

  “Good?” Anderson asked with a small smile.

  “You’ll get to work with people. Meet people.” C.J. blushed and looked haunted and frightened and sad. “People who aren’t me.”

  “Aw, hell, not that shit again!” Anderson smacked his desk in exasperation.

  “It’s a real consideration.”

  “Not for me!”

  Hell. Why couldn’t they ever hash these things out when C.J. was downplanet and Anderson could touch C.J. and reassure him that Anderson was totally and completely sincere? “C.J., you know I read my family’s letters, right?”

  “Right.”

  “My sister had a boyfriend, and I’m damned sure that if the universe hadn’t dropped a pile of rocks on that damned pile of rock, they would have been married and happy.”

  “Well, your sister had a mining colony to choose from!” C.J. snapped.

  “And I had a space station and… and… and a mental institution!”

  They both stopped there and met each other’s eyes and giggled.

  “Not to mention my own head!” Anderson finished with dignity, and that made C.J. out and out guffaw.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll believe you. I have no choice. But here’s the deal. You stay down there and you take that money you hate so much and build that amazing idea my father came up with. And if you meet any people, any… you know… interesting people, while I’m off-planet, no hard feelings, okay?”

  Anderson had scowled, and for a moment Alpha surfaced so forcefully that Anderson had no choice but to let him. “If you meet anybody interesting up there, you’d better tell them to keep their hands the hell off your body,” he growled. “That’s mine!”

  C.J.’s laughter turned shy and pleased. “That’s a deal,” he mumbled.

  “Good.”

  The conversation had ended, and Anderson had talked to Jensen and Molly and worked out a flexible therapy schedule the next morning.

  Then he’d called C.J.’s father, who seemed to love him already, and the work began.

  Anderson put things in motion, hired people, dealt with financiers and bankers (whom he didn’t understand at all), and basically was the boss for the memorial foundation that would commemorate his home, his family, the world he’d known as a child.

  He had some trouble with it at first.

  For starters—names. Anyone named Katherine, Catherine, Kate, Kit, or Katy, Robert, Lisa or Risa, Alex, Leonard, Peter, Henry, or Aaron was automatically suspect. It was the silliest, simplest goddamned idea, but he and Molly and Jensen had spent hours looking at work profiles and folders of job applicants to try to decide if the people in the folders
were qualified, or if Anderson just had an automatic bias because he missed the people on the holodeck now that he’d (mostly) chased them out of his head.

  The schedule was difficult. Anderson had started medication and still had therapy, and keeping to his routine was vital. He’d missed his time to swim after a prolonged phone call once and had spent the rest of the day locked in his old room at the center, arguing with Kate over whether or not the phone call had been necessary.

  That was a setback, and not the only one, but fortunately there was medication, and it was a godsend. Anderson was even more grateful when Jensen told him that when medication for mental health problems had been in its infancy, very often the cure had been almost as bad as the condition.

  “It used to stifle about everything,” Jensen said, taking Anderson’s vitals. “Creativity, brain function, libido—”

  “Libido!” Anderson—who had newly discovered the joys of his sex drive—had been horrified. “I’d rather die!”

  Jensen hadn’t laughed. In fact, his face had been grim and deadly serious. “For people on twentieth and twenty-first century Earth, it came down to that.”

  Anderson had subsided then and adhered to his medication regimen with gratitude and fervor after that, and the medication had helped him deal with the schedule disruptions and the constant barrage of people outside his usual social circle. In fact, the little project that he and C.J.’s dad had cooked up together seemed to be coming along just fine.

  Well enough that Chris Poulson helped Anderson shelve most of his work for the month of C.J.’s leave.

  “You mean I’m not going to meet any of your new friends?” C.J. complained when Anderson had come to get him at the shuttle port.

  Anderson shook his head. “Nope. I’m afraid everybody has a job to do, a month to do it, and they’re getting back to me the day after you leave.”

  C.J. slanted a look at him then. “You know, uhm, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you made them up.”

  Anderson laughed long and hard at that one, threatening to pull their personnel files and have C.J.’s father over for dinner just to prove that his new friends were not all in his head.

  They had invited C.J.’s parents over for dinner, but not before C.J. had laughingly, and thoroughly, demonstrated how very, very real everything Anderson believed in was true.

  They spent the entire month together, including three days on the beach and an overnight trip to some caves on the Topaz continent in the southern hemisphere that C.J. had never seen either. Anderson had loved that trip. C.J., who had such an adolescent, little-kid look at the world, had been doubly precious when he’d been awestruck by the glittering caverns, miles deep beneath the surface of the planet, sprouting precious gems like a tree would sprout leaves.

  “I see why they named the planet after a jewelry store now,” Anderson said fervently, and C.J. had turned to him and kissed him in the glittering darkness.

  “What was that for?”

  “Being as much of a dork as I am.”

  Anderson wondered how C.J. could possibly think that another person could appeal to him, could live in his heart the way C.J. did. There was no other lover who could vie for even the memory of C.J.—not even in the flesh.

  One man tried, though.

  Anderson had managed, against his better judgment, to hire a guy named Leonard as part of his marketing team to get the word out for the grand opening of the project’s culmination.

  Leonard was quiet, with a dry sense of humor and a rather cynical way of looking at the world—and a secret desire to be pushed around that Anderson had sensed from a mile away.

  Anderson worked him—and worked him hard—in his job as the head of PR for the memorial foundation, and they spent a couple of late nights together, sometimes coordinating with the graphic artist on the team and sometimes not.

  It was on one of those nights when they were alone that Len had kissed him.

  Anderson had been surprised, of course—and missing C.J., and human contact in general. In about two seconds, he’d had Len pushed against the wall, panting, begging, one leg wrapped around Anderson’s slim body, his erection grinding shamelessly into Anderson’s groin.

  “Wow,” Len moaned. “What else you got for me?”

  And for a moment, Anderson had a vision of Len, on his hands and knees, bound and begging, and he almost came from the thought.

  Then he closed his eyes and tasted, and took a deep breath, and stepped back.

  Len was real. He tasted real. His erection had felt real against Anderson’s stomach. But he wasn’t C.J., and it wasn’t fair to treat him like a holo-dummy, something to just work out his sexual needs on, when he wasn’t the man Anderson wanted in his arms.

  “I’m sorry, Len,” Anderson apologized—and it was sincere. “I think… I think you’re great. And I think we could probably have a really good time.”

  Len thunked his head back against the doorframe. “But…?”

  “But the love of my life is stationside, and he might not even have a problem with this, but I would. It’s not fair to you. I can’t use you like that.”

  Len gave a faint, dry laugh as he tried to right his pants and his clothes. “Use me! Use me!” he joked, and Anderson couldn’t even smile.

  “Never again,” he said soberly, and Len caught the idea that this wasn’t an option.

  “Okay,” he said. “Nothing personal. I get it. I… I knew you were attached, you know. You must mention C.J. twice an hour.”

  “So you made a move because?” Anderson was a little pissed, actually, but Len just shrugged.

  “Because, kid, you’d be so worth it.”

  Anderson shook his head and said, “That’s our cue for you to go home for the evening, okay?”

  And it was. Len didn’t make another move—and Anderson wasn’t really tempted again.

  But the work—the frantic work, since Anderson had given an almost impossible deadline—was worth it.

  By the time C.J. came home for his leave, everything was in place.

  THE DAY after C.J. arrived home from leave was spectacular. It was early summer, and the sky was so blue it seemed to fracture the heart. The air was fragrant—Anderson had learned that the Emerald Continent was known for its flowers, and he’d even planted some in C.J.’s backyard—and there was a slight breeze to keep things from being too uncomfortable.

  Big, puffy clouds scudded across the sky, and the clearing of land that Anderson had purchased and developed was lovely and peaceful and sweet.

  Or it would have been peaceful if it hadn’t been for the two hundred or so people gathered on a plas-crete circle at the foot of a makeshift stage.

  Anderson stood on the stage, a microphone clipped to the lapel of his rather fashionable suit—one piece, with large collars, and a tie, which he’d never seen before in his life until Jensen had taken him shopping. Behind him was a most unusual sculpture.

  It was simple—it was a family.

  Anderson had given the artist the picture, the one from his tablet, of his family gathered together at a time of celebration, and asked her to recreate it in bronze, and she had.

  He’d thought a lot about the sculpture, and he’d gone back and forth with C.J. about it. An exploding planetoid? A shuttle? What did he want to stand in front of the Cancer Nebula Memorial Library and represent all of the things that he personally and the universe in general had lost that day?

  In the end, he told C.J. that he was too self-centered at the moment to think about what the world had lost. He wanted what he had lost to be what people saw.

  C.J. told him that it was a good idea. Once they saw what one person had lost, the loss became personal. It was perfect.

  So Anderson stood in front of the family he’d lost and the boy he hadn’t been in nearly twelve years and waited to address a crowd of people who were most definitely real. In the background, one of the mining colony’s singers was breaking his heart with a voice so plaintive and yearning th
at it seemed to shadow the sun.

  The song ended, and Anderson began speaking.

  “Hello,” he began, and was surprised as hell when everyone stopped talking and listened to him. He looked out at the crowd and saw C.J. smiling at him, wearing a suit of his own as he stood by his family. He looked… God. He looked handsome and proud and joyful and everything Anderson might have dreamed about when he was a boy and had first dreamed about kissing a boy who brought him tablet stylus covers just because.

  Anderson smiled back and then began speaking again. “I’m so glad you all could come,” he said, smiling at them with what C.J. called his sunlight smile. “My name is Anderson Rawn—and no, nobody calls me Andy. My parents were James and Caitlin Rawn, and my family lived on the Cancer Nebula mining colony, which had 2,128 residents at the last census.

  “Two thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven of those residents were killed nearly thirteen years ago, including my parents and my sisters, the oldest of whom threw me aboard a ship and ensured my survival.” Anderson had since seen the recording that C.J. and Cassie had seen, and he’d spent a good week cursing Melody’s name. He’d spent the next month tearing up if he even heard it. Oh, God, Mel—but she’d known he loved her. Just like he knew that she loved him, unequivocally, with the same fierce protectiveness that Cassie loved C.J. That was the way of things. Even the best of love had to hurt sometimes.

  “I spent the next eleven years on a shuttle, talking to myself,” he said now at the memorial that Melody would probably have yawned through. He waited for a moment and was gratified when the crowd gave an appreciative little laugh. “And one of the most pressing matters aboard the shuttle was the preservation of the things you will find in this library.”

  He paused then and looked at C.J. one more time. “My soon-to-be husband, C.J., says that if I saved one song that makes it across the quadrant, I’ve successfully saved the memory of my entire people. I saved more than that, and it’s beautiful. The Cancer Nebula mining colony had been in place for over two hundred years. It was one of the first places populated in this galaxy, and between farming on the smaller asteroids and developing its own atmosphere, it was one of the prototypes that every other mining colony in Trading Federation space uses for its other colonies, and as a people, we had developed a small but singular culture, and music….” He smiled and remembered his family singing after dinner, singing during their chores, the music that had permeated his dreams in the shuttle.