[Confluence 01.0] Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells

Author:Jennifer Foehner Wells [Wells, Jennifer Foehner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780990479826
Amazon: B00L3U9OCG
Barnesnoble: B00L3U9OCG
Publisher: Blue Bedlam Science Fiction
Published: 2014-06-18T06:00:00+00:00

14

As Jane rose, Walsh and the others immediately gathered their things. She stood apart from Bergen, her chin lifted, keeping her expression stern. No one else needed to know that inside she was roiling with conflicted thoughts. A good leader acted the part no matter what they felt.

She didn’t allow her gaze to linger on Alan as he labored to his feet. Alan’s confession was heartening. He believed in her. She hoped his faith wasn’t misplaced.

But there was the nagging doubt, the suspicion that he was affected by the agent that had felled the Sectilius. She’d seen hints all along that he was attracted to her. The possibility had always seemed tantalizing and thrilling, but she’d never believed he really meant any of it. She’d concluded that it was just part of his nature to be flirtatious in a razor-sharp way, that he couldn’t help but be enigmatically charming to stoke his own tremendous ego.

Now he seemed to be saying it was more than that, and the timing couldn’t be worse. She was already scattered enough, dealing with a constant influx of revelations, insights, foreign concepts—all creating a tumult inside her head. She didn’t have the luxury of time to consider what his proposition might mean about him—what it might mean to her—what it might mean for the mission… any of it.

She wondered—if he’d done something similar just a month before, would she have responded in the same way? There’d been that moment in the capsule, the day she’d succumbed to childish grief, reeling from the news that her closest confidant had just given birth to a healthy child. Suddenly she’d found herself unable to contain her feelings, which ran a gamut of extremes—joy, sadness at missing the event, jealousy, loneliness, disconnectedness, and shame.

He’d embraced her tenderly, throwing her concept of his character into complete disarray. It had been a bewildering moment because it hadn’t changed anything between them. Things had continued on just as they’d been before, as though she’d just imagined it. It had left her watching him curiously for other signs of depth or gestures of goodwill. When nothing else had surfaced, she had decided that it had meant nothing to him and had done her best not to think about it. Though, if she was completely honest with herself, that had been hard.

At the time, she had found herself behaving like a young girl, suddenly self-conscious about her appearance, finding reasons to engage him in conversation, asking for his assistance when she didn’t really need it, surreptitiously watching him work, eat, exercise… dress.

She had tricked herself into thinking that he was playing along, that he felt the same, that they were both feeling their way in that bizarre environment, knowing that such thoughts were prohibited, should be ignored, or extinguished. Then he would do something callous or would say something that was so off-color that she had been sure she was fabricating the whole scenario as a mental defense against boredom.

She shouldn’t have kissed him. In that moment, it had felt like clinging to life as it was shattering around her.

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