Read Online Blue Light of Home by Robin Smith - Free Book Online

voicing concerns which demand redress, and as demands go,” he went on, beginning to sound just the faintest bit on edge, “these are ridiculously simple.  You have suspended my assistant’s finances without cause, which in addition to being a gross infringement of her rights, also places the burden of keeping her entertained fully on me.  I am not here to entertain her.”
    Skye stepped back from the wall and stared at it.  Of all the numbing, unpleasant, and frightening things she’d heard tonight, that was somehow the worst, the most wounding.  Even hearing him say he’d blown up an island wasn’t that bad, because she’d known even as he’d said it that he wouldn’t actually do it, not just because someone cut him off mid-sentence.  But this…this sounded like something he meant.
    Skye backed up to the bed and sat.  She could still hear him, no longer clearly enough to make out more than a word here or an answer there, and no longer caring what conclusion he reached.  She sat and stared at her hands where they rested on her knees and just let time pass, until she heard his footsteps out in the hall.
    He never knocked and he didn’t knock now.  He just paced, being loud and obvious, wanting her to come out the way she usually did because going in to talk to her was so far beneath him, but everything he did was supposed to be the center of her whole world.
    It had almost felt like that this morning, when she’d thought he’d cleared a console for her so that she had a place of her own, and not just so she’d stop bugging him with conversation.
    Skye stayed where she was.
    Pacing, pacing.  Finally, he went to the exercise room and worked out for a few hours, pausing every so often to peek out into the hall.  Then he showered, recycled the water, sterilized the shower-stall…came out to stand in front of her door again.
    She lay down on her bed and didn’t speak.
    He went back to the main room, and maybe he started to work, but in just a few minutes, he was up again and stalking down the hall, this time to his own room.
    Skye glanced at the light above her bed just in time to watch it come on.
    He never played fair.  Never.
    She got up, because she had to.  She didn’t dress in her slinky nightgown for him.  He didn’t really want her ‘services’.  She walked the dozen or so paces to his door and opened it.
    He was right on the other side—waiting, glaring, fully dressed.  “I am never going to understand you,” he snapped.
    “I’m sorry,” she said tonelessly, her face carefully composed.  “What can I explain?”
    “Stop that!”  He stalked away from her as far as the bed, then spun around and said, “What the hell is the matter with you?  Weren’t you listening?”
    “Yes, I was.”  She raised her chin slightly, but kept her calm.  She was a mask, she told herself.  A porcelain mask.  “I heard you call me duplicitous and dishonest.”
    His alien face smoothed out in shock, then furrowed in exasperation.  “That wasn’t about you, that was about him!  That wasn’t even about him, that was just gaining leverage.  I was trying to help you.”
    “Were you?  Or were you just making sure I amuse myself from now on?”
    His mouth dropped open, then snapped shut.  He raised one hand and smacked it down over the point of his pointed head and stayed that way for a while, his eyes squeezed shut and sharp teeth bared.  “I have to say things a certain way,” he said finally, barely moving his jaw.  “It is purely political. The Empire must never be seen as bowing to the will of a weaker planet.”
    Her mask cracked.  “That makes it okay for you to call me a liar?  And a...And a pest!  You made me happy this morning!  Really, really happy!  But I wish you’d never done it if all it was for was just to…to shut me up!”
    “You misunderstood!”
    “Well that’s never going to happen again,” she said, pushing at her eyes, the dry eyes in the face of her