His watch showed 2030 when he exited the shower and picked it up to put it on ... in an apartment entirely too quiet and depressingly empty.
He was halfway glad not to spend the night here, with the silence and Grant's empty room, glad the way biting one's lip did something to make a smashed finger hurt less, that was about the way of it. Losing Grant hurt worse than anything else could, and Ari's harassment, he reckoned, even became a kind of anodyne to the other, sharper misery she had put him to.
Damned bitch, he thought, and his eyes stung, which was a humiliation he refused to give way to on her account. It was Grant had him unhinged, it was the whole damned mess Grant was in that had his hands shaking so badly he had trouble with the aerosol cap and popped it a ricocheting course around the mirrored sink alcove. It infuriated him. Everything conspired to irritate him out of all reason, and he set the bottle down with measured control and shaved the scant amount he had to.
Like preparing a corpse for the funeral, he thought. Everyone in Reseune had a say in his future, everyone had a mortgage on him, even his father, who had not asked his son whether he wanted to grow up with a PR on his name and know every line he was to get before he was forty, not, thank God, a bad sort of face, but not an original, either, —a face carrying all sorts of significances with his father's friends—and enemies; and Ari cornering him that first time in the lab storage room—
He had not known what to do, then; he had wished a thousand times since he had grabbed hold of her and given her what she was evidently not expecting out of a seventeen-year-old kid with a woman more than twice old enough to be his grandmother. But being seventeen, and shocked and not having thought through what his choices were before this, he had frozen and stammered something idiotic about having to go, he had a meeting he had to make, had she got the report he had turned in on a project whose number he could not even remember—
His face burned whenever he thought about it. He had gotten out that door so fast he had forgotten his clipboard and the reports and had to rewrite them rather than go back after them. He headed toward this appointment of Ari's, this damnable, no-way-out-of-it meeting, with a carefully nurtured feeling that he might, maybe, get something of his self-respect back if he played it right now.
She was old, but she was not quite beyond her rejuv. She looked—maybe late forties; and he had seen holos of her at twelve and sixteen, a face not yet settled into the hard handsomeness it had now. As women six times his age went, she was still worth looking at, what she had was the same as Julia Carnath's in the dark, he told himself with a carefully held cynicism—and better than Julia, at least Ari was up front with what she was after. Everybody in Reseune slept with everybody else reasonable at some time or another, it was not totally out of line that Ari Emory wanted to renew her youth with a replicate of a man who would have been three times too young for her when he was seventeen. The situation might have deserved a real laugh, if things were not so grim, and he were not the seventeen-year-old in question.
It was not sure he could do a damned thing, but, he told himself, she might at least be an experience: his was limited to Julia, who had ended up asking him for Grant—which had hurt so badly he had never gone back to her. Which was about the sum of his love affairs, and he had almost decided Jordan was right in his misogyny. Ari was a snake, she was everything reprehensible, but the key to the whole thing, he thought, was his own attitude. If he used it, if he handled it as if it were what Jordan called one of his damnfool stunts, then Ari had no weapon to use. That was the best way to take care of the problem, and that was what he had made up his mind to do—be a man, go along with the whole mess, learn from it (God knew a woman Ari's age had something to teach him ... in several senses)—let Ari do what she wanted, play her little games, and either lose interest or not.
He reckoned he could take a page from Ari's notebook—that a seventeen-year-old wasn't going to be besotted with a woman her age—but a woman her age might have a real emotional need for a handsome, good-humored CIT bedmate. Let her get hooked.
Let her have the problem, and him have the solution.
Age and vanity might be the way to deal with her, the weakness no one else could find, because no one else was the seventeen-year-old boy she wanted.