Instead his hands slid down her sides and he took her in his arms again and held her as if he would never, never, never let her go.
Recognizing a losing battle when she fought one, Janna sighed and cooperated with the inevitable. “Al?” she whispered in his ear.
“Mmm-hmmm?” he responded absentmindedly, wishing women’s fashions still featured buttons or zippers or something a man could make sense of.
“Does this mean I get to go shopping again?”
“Later,” he muttered.
She giggled and nipped at his ear. “I know this lovely little gallery on Water Street—”
Now it was his turn to pull away. “Are you nuts?” he said, with mock indignation. “Are you trying to send me to the poorhouse?”
She laughed at him, and he laughed back, and shut away the voice in the back of his mind that echoed, “ ... you have to go back and find out the most efficient change I can make that will let me Leap. . . .”
It was the weight and measure of friendship, against the weight and measure of love, and Al closed his eyes and set aside the scales one more time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Verbeena generally avoided eating with Tina; the Project’s chief computer architect didn’t have a lot of interesting conversation. She was always either wrapped up in some esoteric computer journal or engrossed in a debate on the merits of various shades of nail polish. Verbeena couldn’t decide whether Tina was too smart for her, too dumb, or both.
Today, however, she invited herself to a place at Tina’s table in the cafeteria for dinner. Tina looked up at her in some surprise. She wore, as most of the other Project personnel did, a white lab coat. Unlike most of the other Project personnel, Tina wore her coat this evening over a short body-clinging electric blue satin dress with a short frilly skirt and matching blue hose.
Verbeena’s preferred leisure attire leaned more to flowing caftans. She supposed she was in no position to criticize.
“Dr. Beeks!” Tina chirped. “How nice of you to stop by. Are you having the chicken? I think the chicken is just, you know, terrific....”
Verbeena smiled and unfolded a napkin into her lap. “Terrific” was too strong a word, in her opinion. Chicken and broccoli, in what purported to be lemon sauce, would never be her first choice anyway. Some days she thought she’d kill for a good jambalaya. Tina was eating what lookedlike corn clam chowder. With the right spices, Verbeena thought, that might almost work.
“How’s it going, Dr. Martinez-O’Farrell?” she said politely in return.
Tina looked bewildered. “Are you mad at me, Dr. Beeks?”
“Of course not. Why ever would you think so?”
“Nobody around here calls me Dr. Martinez-O’Farrell unless they’re being, like, really really formal, or they’re mad at me or something.” Tina batted huge blue eyes. Verbeena resisted the impulse to check to see if the napkin had survived the resulting breeze.
“Well, hardly anyone calls me Dr. Beeks, either,” she pointed out reasonably, sawing at the chicken. She managed to tear a piece loose and put it in her mouth, chewing determinedly. “Except Gooshie. And you.”
“But you’re a doctor Doctor.”
This almost made sense. Verbeena considered it, managed to swallow the bite of chicken, and smiled. “Tell you what. You can call me Dr. Beeks when you come in for your physical, okay? Otherwise you can call me Verbeena, and I’ll call you Tina. Okay?”
Tina thought about this. “Okay!” she said at last. “We’ll be, like, friends!”
“That’s right. Like friends.”
Tina seemed to run out of things to say to her new friend at that point and, smiling tentatively, bent to her soup. Verbeena was content to let the silence go. There were only half a dozen other people in the cafeteria at this hour, and the two women were separated from the nearest potential listeners by at least fifteen feet.
What on earth could Al Calavicci see in a woman like this when he had Janna, Verbeena wondered. Yet there was no mistaking Al’s tightly controlled anguish when he’d told her about the different past on the other side of the Imaging Chamber Door, a past in which Janna was just another face among the hundreds at the Project, and Tina Martinez-O’Farrell was the object of Al’s overwhelming interest. Well, at least that was his version.
The Admiral was known throughout the Project as an outrageous flirt, of course, the kind who left a red rose on every woman’s desk at least once a year and would pledge undying love at the drop of an eyelid. In private he’d been known to express a connoisseur’s appreciation of the female form. But he was married, for heaven’s sake, and very happily so. The women at the Project joked about it. If anybody actually took him up on his flirting he’d run like a rabbit.
Which made that other past intriguing. Definitely intriguing. That other Al that her Al described was no rabbit. Would be insulted at the very idea, she suspected.
Of course, this Al would be equally insulted. She chuckled to herself.
“I’m sorry?”
Verbeena looked up, startled. She’d been so involved in her thoughts and in the tough chicken that she’d almost forgotten about the other woman at the table.
“Oh, nothing,” she said hastily. “I was just thinking about something Al said.”
“Al? Admiral Calavicci?” Tina was intent suddenly, and wistful.
Interesting reaction, Verbeena thought. “Mm-hmm. Tell me, Tina, do you remember when you first met Al?”
“Sure I do,” she said promptly. “The first night I got here. There was a party.” She smiled a little. “It was right here. Dr. Beckett played the piano—that piano over there— and Al and I danced.” She twirled her spoon in her soup, moving pieces of clam and bits of corn around, and her voice dropped. “There were a lot of new people there that night. Janna was there, too. Jessie Olivera—you know, from the Senate liaison office?—she
