Page 214 of Every Almost

"No," Reyna scoffed, her playfulness in full swing. "But I think this one may actually stump you."

"Bring it."

Reyna grinned. "What is a piece of music that you would say has affected you the most?"

Charlie's expression went soft, and she didn't answer right away. Instead, she looked out the viewport. Reyna kept her eyes on Charlie, watching her as she thought about it, taking a long time doing so. Reyna sat calmly in the quiet, unable to remember the last time anyone had considered a question of hers so carefully.

"Probably a song called 'Heroes,'" Charlie said eventually, turning back to Reyna, her voice soft, delicate almost. "It's a song by an incredible man named David Bowie."

Reyna focused in on Charlie, her eyes moving back and forth between Charlie's. "Tell me about it."

Charlie leaned in. "It's about two people who are desperately in love with each other," she said. "There's a wall. An actual, literal wall, with guards on top of it and guns firing over the whole scene. They're not supposed to be anywhere near this wall whatsoever." Her hands began moving, accentuating the story. "But they go anyway. They stand right underneath it and they kiss."

"On a wall where guns are firing?" Reyna asked, confusion on her face. "Why?"

"Berlin." Charlie caught herself. "It's a city on Earth, in a country called Germany. Germany lost a major war, one where all of Earth was involved. The winners of the war cut the country in half, and then cut the city in half. And one day, somebody built a wall straight down the middle of it. But it separated so many people. Families on the wrong side, wives on one side and husbands on the other, and it lasted for twenty-eight years. The worst part was that if you tried to cross over the wall, those guards... they just shot you."

Charlie stopped speaking for a moment. "That was it, the rule. That was thewholerule." Charlie was not looking at Reyna anymore., instead looking down at her own hands. "Somebody built a physical line down the middle of a city and told everyone on both sides of it who they were allowed to connect with, reach for, and love." Charlie looked back up at Reyna. "Yet people did it anyway," she said softly. "That's what I can never get past. They knew about the guards and the guns and the possibility of death, but they went to the wall anyway. They went to that wall because the alternative was living the rest of your life without the person you love, just because they were on the wrong side of a line somebody else drew for them."

Charlie stopped. Whatever had been in her voice a moment ago, all the ease of the evening was now gone from it, and she seemed to hear it a beat after Reyna did. She moved her gaze away, looking at her hands, not saying anything for a while. Instead, she turned the small machine over in her fingers before setting it on the table.

When she looked up, she looked at Reyna, and something crossed her features that made her sit back slightly. Reyna had no idea what her face was doing. But she did know that she had not been quick enough to catch it, and whatever it had been, Charlie had seen.

Charlie took a deep breath, her eyes still fixed on Reyna. "If that doesn't describe love, I don't know what does."

The sentence sat quietly in the room around the two of them. Suddenly, Reyna became very aware of the floor beneath her, of the door into the library, of the fact that she was a captain, sitting on the floor after hours, with someone who was quickly becoming an exception. She'd spent years avoiding situations just like this one. She knew it so well that she even knew precisely how a person got out of it. You stood up, from the chair or the table or, in this case, the floor, you thanked the person you were with for a wonderful evening, and you left.

She was gathering herself to do exactly that when Charlie said, "Would you like to hear it?"

"Can I?"

The words were out of her mouth before she had any chance of catching them, thinking with a clarity that arrived far too late to be any use,that is not what I was going to say.

But then she watched Charlie smile, bringing out her datapad, along with a cord connected to two small audial receivers. She watched as Charlie fitted one into her own ear while holding out the other.

Reyna took it from Charlie's fingers, turning it over a few times, trying to work out which way it was meant to face. It was made for an ear that was not hers, but it shouldn't have been so far off that she couldn't make it work. But she was managing it badly, and on top of it all, she was beingwatchedas she managed it badly.

Charlie laughed, low and soft. "Here. Let me... let me help figure that out."

So Charlie took it back and leaned in towards Reyna, raising her hand to the side of Reyna's face, pushing some hair behind her ear as though it was nothing. Because it was nothing. It was just a person, seating a piece of audial equipment so she could hear the song.

Charlie's fingers found the curve, tracing where the gold ran as she brushed the soft skin behind.

She was not doing anything. Reyna knew, with total clarity, that Charlie was not doing anything, that Charlie's hands were simply on her to complete a task, competent and unthinking and generous.

But Reyna didn't dare move.

She could have turned her head. She could have taken the headphone once it was set and finished the job herself. But instead, she sat with her whole attention narrowed to four fingertips on the shell of her ear.

Charlie's hand came away, her fingers grazing her skin once more.

Neither of them said anything.

Instead, they settled against the shelves, joined by a wire that put them closer than Reyna thought was helpful in the moment. But she could tell that Charlie smelled like the Engineering Bay, like whatever she had been elbow-deep in that afternoon. There was also the faint trace of something underneath the smell ofthe bay, something Reyna couldn't name but knew exclusively belonged to Charlie.

Charlie touched the datapad, and Reyna kept still, waiting to hear what Charlie had decided was important enough to share.

The song began.