Morning or night?

  Night or day?

  Yellow or bck?

  The gold necessary to live on Venus was worth more than blood.

  Those were the sorts of thoughts that ran through Ornette’s mind. Vangelis had popped into the suite to check on Desmond after their fooling around caused his bracelet to shock him. The sve didn’t say anything much, but he had a second bed wheeled into the room from the hospital floor and had Desmond installed in it. Vangelis checked on Desmond’s wound and having pronounced him well enough to stay the night with Ornette, he stood by the door.

  “I can trust you two to keep off each other for the rest of the night? The shock was enough to teach you not to get fresh? I would hate to have to come back in here,” Vangelis said coldly. All the heat he had during his st conversation with Ornette had gone.

  “We would hate for you to come back just as much,” Desmond replied humorlessly.

  On the other side of the room, Ornette was ignoring them. She was in Desmond’s closet and she didn’t care much if Vangelis stayed or not. It wasn’t like she and Desmond were going to have another heart-to-heart. He needed to rest and she needed to get out of the corset she’d foolishly fallen asleep in.

  Inside Desmond’s closet, she had undone all the ces in the back without having to turn it around. It should have had an easy way out, like hooks, but it was medieval in its design. It was her own fault. She’d chosen it for its color, not for its functionality. And maybe a little because it was hard to get out of. She’d chosen it for Varner. She needed all the complexity she could stand in case he decided to ignore regutions. It was fine by her if it took an hour to remove.

  In Desmond’s closet, she was not self-conscious. She took off every stitch of clothing she was wearing and put on Desmond’s clothes like they were her own. She put on a pair of his briefs and they barely stayed on. She was so tiny. Then she found an undershirt and slid that over her head.

  Gncing at his tie rack, she couldn’t resist and selected the most beautiful tie. It was navy blue with silver stitching in the shape of stars. She bet it looked amazing on him when he wore his white suit. Should he wear it with a blue shirt or a white shirt? She thought it over pyfully as she tied it around her neck like she was a young businessman about to go to work.

  Ornette was about to choose a shirt and get dressed up exactly like Desmond to surprise him. Surely, they’d have a ugh together… Except something caught her eye… Something over her shoulder… Something outside the closet.

  When Vangelis came in, he turned on all sorts of lights that Ornette had not turned on when she entered the suite. She hadn’t seen the painting that was catching her attention when she first came in.

  The painting wasn’t staring at her. There were no eyes pointing toward the audience. Yet something about it caught her attention and made her pause in her hirious prank. Having looked once, twice, thrice… She couldn’t stop herself. She dropped the trousers that she had been about to pull up to her waist and opened the closet door the rest of the way.

  She stared. It was something she had seen before, but not quite. She pointed. “Desmond? What is that?”

  His head lolled toward her. Across the open floor pn, he could see her. He could also see the painting that hung over the sofa.

  “The painting?”

  “Yes. The painting,” she crified, almost stupefied. How could he have the picture that was in front of her? It was impossible.

  It was a picture of the front of Hans’ watch factory. The window showed the gears and wheels of every tinkerer’s dreams. A little girl with blonde hair stood outside the window and her expression of unbridled astonishment at the dispy was visible in the reflection of the gss.

  The closer Ornette got to the painting the more she could see. The artist had painted the things that were behind the gss of Hans’ shop, but they had also painted the things that the gss reflected. The most obvious was the little girl.

  How many times had Ornette stood outside that window like it was a screen with delightful things to show her?

  But the little girl wasn’t the only thing in the gss. Behind her was a bck helocarrier that had nded outside the storefront. With the window down, she could see inside. In the back of the helocarrier was a little boy with bck hair.

  Ornette gasped.

  “This picture is the only thing I remember from my childhood,” Desmond said, suddenly standing behind her.

  Ornette stood, in his underwear, wearing his most fabulous tie, and she grasped the colr of his pajama top in a death grip. “What do you mean?”

  He was not bothered by her commandeering hand on his clothes and expined, “I don’t know what kind of childhood you had, but I wasn’t allowed outside. Venus is built with the idea that people are allowed outside, just so long as they are inside the bubble, but I wasn’t. I was always in a helocarrier going from this pce to that pce. Sometimes we were parked outside that watch store and I would see that little girl who was allowed to go wherever she wanted. She was free.”

  “How old are you, Desmond?” Ornette questioned suddenly.

  “Forty-three. Why?”

  “That’s me!” she said, her eyes on the picture and her fingers on the dusty frame.

  “It can’t be you. You’re at least ten years younger than me,” he replied.

  “No. I’m not. I’m forty-three. I’ve just been in cryostasis so long… that I have only been awake for thirty-two years. You have seen my file!” she asserted.

  His eyes went wide. “Oh. You’re right. We’re the same age.”

  They did the math and Ornette was two months older.

  “I told you that I used to stand outside Hans’ shop,” she reminded him, feeling desperate and off-kilter.

  “Yes, I remember now, but I didn’t think anything of it except that maybe that was a hot spot for kids to hang out. Is that really you?”

  “Who painted it?” she asked weakly, feeling dull and funny inside.

  “I did.”

  “You did?” she asked accusingly.

  He bobbed his head in confusion. “Not with a paint set and brushes like a fifteenth-century painter, but on a tablet with a stylus. I had it enrged to this resolution and I had it pced in this room.” Desmond looked at her distraught expression and then back at the painting. “If it is you, it doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to. I didn’t know it was you and I didn’t put it here to trap you. I didn’t know you would ever be here. If I had won you at auction or if, by some freak miracle, Varner decided to let me have you for the week, I would not have brought you here. I have a pce in Nepra I could have taken you. It would never have entered into my mind for you to come here and see this. I certainly would never have pnned it.”

  “If this painting is so valuable to you, why is it here instead of at your pce?” she wanted to know.

  He huffed. “Do you think I’m allowed to own things?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not allowed to own things,” he replied. “I can have houses and cars and sorships and whatever else, but I’m not allowed to have memorabilia. Silver Ashley can’t let her people have their hearts out on dispy. Either this painting had to be here, in her pace, or I had to get rid of it. You think I’m allowed to be a person and be her only male heir? I’m not allowed to do anything for myself unless she thinks it will go along with her wishes, her dreams for Venus.” Suddenly, he shut up like the walls had ears. Saying more would be dangerous.

  Ornette swallowed and loosened her hold on his colr. “I’m not trying to bme you for anything,” she said softly. “I just didn’t think anyone saw me or remembered me or anything from when I lived on Venus before I was sent to Ceres. When I spoke to Silver Ashley, she remembered my father’s name. That was one thing, but something like this shows that I was remembered by someone else. The feeling is a little overwhelming. I’m acting badly. Looking at it makes me feel like you know me, that you did something different than me when things got tough. You didn’t forget everything because it hurt too much to remember. You remembered me even though it was tough, even though you’re not allowed to own anything… You kept me.” She breathed heavily. “That’s overwhelming.”

  He pulled her into his arms and rested his cheek on the top of her head. “It’s been tough for all of us.”

  “For so long, all I’ve been concerned about was surviving. Except, I’m not sure I survived. I think maybe I didn’t. Perhaps every time I had a different boss, I gave up something of myself to him until the woman you see before you is a creature who has nothing in common with the little girl that I was.” She pointed at the picture.

  “Once upon a time, when you were a blonde little girl standing outside of Hans’ watch factory?” Desmond supplied.

  She was quiet. “I don’t like skipping down memory ne.”

  “I saw you there,” he said. The fact could not be ignored.

  Ornette scoffed, hoping to end the conversation.

  He held her without speaking.

  Ornette tried not to be moved, not to cry, and not to feel anything.

  Finally, when he spoke, he said something unimaginable. “Maybe this is the turning point for both our lives. I was a little boy and I wished I had nowhere to go and I could stand there on the sidewalk with you. You were a little girl who just wanted to go somewhere safe. Maybe now both of our dreams can come true at the same time.”

  Ornette looked at him, looked into his navy eyes with her aqua ones. The moment hung as they peered into the windows of each other’s souls.

  It didn’t matter if she believed him.

  Nothing more could happen that night.

  They put their arms around each other and she got into the bed Vangelis had brought for Desmond, intending to keep them apart.

  Maybe nothing could keep them apart.

  _______________

  Author's Notes: Thanks for reading! I'm pleased to say there is quite a bit more to this book before we reach the end. See you Thursday!