The Love Lost

Carter made sure that an eight-page addition to the book could be inserted last minute without a problem. He did everything he could to make sure that his editing and splicing on her essays was completed, so that he would be able to talk to her about using it as a possible epilogue.

Carter also made sure to talk to Ellen, because he wanted to have the chance to talk to someone else, so that he didn’t feel so alone. He liked Ellen, because he liked her intelligence, he liked the fact that he always saw her when she was working and thinking, and he wanted to make sure that she didn’t think he was trying to abuse his power as her potential superior.

He was just trying to be a friend.

###

Sloane wasn’t used to having to wait in lines at the airport. By 6:00 in the morning she was already inside the airport, and had managed to bypass the baggage check-in by only bringing a carry-on bag. But at the gate she stood in a long line and waited for her seat assignment to be confirmed.

She finally got to the front of the line.

“Are there any seats left with extra leg room, like at the exit rows?”

The woman checked from behind the counter. “I’m sorry, ma’am, those seats have already been assigned.”

“Can I get an aisle seat toward the front?”

“Are you flying alone ma’am?”

“Yes.”

The woman behind the counter typed for ten seconds. “The best I can do is seat 13D, which is an aisle seat.”

“That’s fine,” pulling out her diver’s license for the woman to check for security purposes. She was then asked if she had any additional forms of identification, so she pulled out her passport and waited to see if they wanted to see a credit card with her name on it as well. She knew that in light of serious terrorist activities there was so much more security, but she didn’t know what else she had to prove so that she could go to another location to do her job.

Finding a seat at the terminal close to her gate, she read over her notes until her block of rows was called to board the plane. She noticed that people were so anxious to get on to the plane that they’d stand and wait so they could pounce on the woman taking the tickets as soon as their rows were called. She knew that people wanted to get on the plane quickly so they might have overhead baggage room, since so many people wanted to use it for all of their belongings that didn’t fit under the seat in front of them, but if that wasn’t the issue did they not realize that they’d have to wait for everyone else to get on the plane anyway?

When she managed to get onto the plane she found herself next to an older couple talking about their grandchildren. She tried to tune them out and listened to the hum of the engines starting up. She found it was much more difficult to enjoy the experience of flight in a cramped seat with people talking all around her and a child sitting in the seat behind her, kicking the back of her seat.

By the time her plane landed it was past eleven in the morning. As she walked out into the terminal she saw Carter standing with two other casually dressed gentlemen.

Confused to see the additional men but pleased to see Carter, she continued to walk toward them

All Carter could think was that he wanted his first words to her to be “I love you” -- and then he knew that he would then have to explain that he meant that he loved her essay -- but he knew that he wouldn’t have the chance to say anything like that to her when he had coworkers with him to catch her at the airport. He had to think of something more appropriate to say.

“My flight got in fifteen minutes before yours did,” Carter said as he reached out to shake her hand, “So Mark and Todd decided we should just wait for you so that we could come in together.”

Introduced to their tour guides from the printing plant, they then walked out of the airport in Columbus and approached the car.

The printing plant was clean and very large. They got a tour of the entire plant; Todd showed them where pages go for plating before final color checks were made, and then they finally walked toward the printers.

Before they entered the warehouse-sized room that housed the printing presses, they were each handed headphones to protect their ears from the loud noise of the running presses. Carter accidentally hit Sloane in the temple with his elbow as he was trying to put the headphones on his head.

“Ouch!”

Carter turned around instantly. “Oh, I’m sorry. Are you okay?” He reached his hand to her head and curled his fingers under her ear and touched her temple with his thumb. He wanted so badly to keep his hands there and tell her he would never want to hurt her, but he knew this was not the time or place and she would not be interested in him coming on to her. Carter finally asked, “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Feeling his hand around the back of her neck, she instantly tensed up. “No, I’m fine really.” She tried not to think about Carter, but it was impossible for her. What she didn’t know is that they were both playing this game with each other; they were both playing this game with themselves, and they were both torturing themselves for the benefit of no one. She wasn’t used to being so cold around someone, and she didn’t know how else to act in situations like this. And she didn’t know how she was going to be able to handle the rest of the stay in Ohio.

And he didn’t know either.

They were guided into the large room where twenty sheet-fed presses and fifteen web printers were running. Giant rolls of paper were spinning at the top of each machine twenty feet in the air, and as they approached one press they could see the paper running first through a cyan blue printing, then up and around and down to where yellow was shot onto the pages, then over and through to a magenta printing, then down and around to where black ink was finally pressed on to the pages. She could see that for some papers, only certain colors were used; those papers wound around the top of the press until it reached back down for the ink color it needed.

A few men in jeans and head phones and goggles checked pages. Todd and Mark walked them over to the table the men were inspecting pages on.

“You see, the customer supplies a color proof for their pages, but if they can’t we print one for the customer to check and approve the color on before we continue. These gentlemen here are checking that the color is okay off the test page. If it’s not, they can stop the press and lighten or darken any of the inks we have. They also make sure that the plates once again are in good registration, so that if we need green and use it by mixing the cyan and yellow inks on our press, that the edges perfectly match up so that you don’t get a yellow highlight or a cyan shadow.” He showed the two of them a sample of a page with bad registration before they turned back toward the presses.

“Let me show you the bindery before we go to how your book will run, okay?” She nodded her head in agreement and they proceeded through the warehouse to a large door into another room.

Stacks of papers lined the hallways of the next room, and there were more large machines all around her. Some of the bundled stacks of papers were twenty feet tall and ten feet wide. “These bundled stacks of paper you see here,” Mark said, “these go to the recycling plant. We recycle everything here we can. That’s why such a small fraction of recycled goods is post-consumer waste -- industries produce a lot more waste than consumers do, and companies like us produce a ton of paper we would otherwise throw away as well. An industry’s recycled goods are cleaner and easier to use at recycling plants, too. Here we recycle our papers, our excess inks, the silver from our film making processes and our excess film.”

Mark and Todd walked them over to a machine that was guiding stapled magazines through a massive stapler. The magazines were split open on the slanted, v-shaped belt while a staple machine held the pages together and stapled the center of the belt. “Saddle-stitched books are easy to print,” Todd said. “After they get bound the edges are trimmed in this machine over here, and then they’re ready to go. Perfect-binding a book, like a hard cover or a paperback book, is harder. We’ll show you that after you check on how your upcoming book will run, okay?”

They agreed as they walked back through the large door to the main printing room. She was amazed at the huge machinery that was producing such large quantities of printed materials. Machines cut the reams of paper down, collated the pages, then bound them and trimmed them. It was fascinating to her that these gigantic machines guided reams of paper through, and combined cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks to produce a full-color page.

Walking through the press, she began to understand what Carter meant when he talked about how he loved to do a press check on his books. She continued to gaze, and Carter occasionally glanced over to her to see her eyes widen to view the machinery around her. He loved the fact that she found this fascinating, and he loved the fact that in a way he was able to give this to her.

They walked through the warehouse and she watched the workmen walking back and forth. They wore large gloves and periodically checked the output of one of the machines to make sure everything was in working order.

When they finally arrived at a press in the corner, she noticed that the large roll of paper at the end of the machine was bypassing all of the inks except black. She looked over at Carter.

“That is how your book will print too,” Todd said to them. “This is how most books of this size run through us. We’re printing the inside pages, which are all just black. The paperback cover and the hard cover jacket will be done another morning. Care to have some lunch before you look over sample inside pages and see what it is like?”

“Sure,” Carter answered. All she could do was gaze at the press move the rolls of paper through the large web of machinery until Todd touched her shoulder and gestured that they were leaving.

After lunch they spent the rest of the afternoon checking over pages and samples of one of Quentin’s books without the covers, as it was a noraml policy to make sure the type was printing evenly on the pages and pages weren’t being printed on an angle, because it was easy enough to check when you had a rule at the header and footer of each page, which was common. When they had a break Sloane would just go over to the machines and watch the presses run.

Carter followed her to one of the machines once during the afternoon. He had to yell in order to be heard through the headphones over the other noises. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” she yelled back. “Now I know why you like this.”

As he started to walk away, Sloane had to yell to him, “I hate to ask this, but what did you think of my essays?”

Carter turned around and yelled back over the press noises. “Oh, you’ll get an earful from me when we get to talk after the press today. Couldn’t you pick a more quiet place to ask?”

She smiled at him and Carter smiled back before he walked over to the press check counter he was working from while she looked at the turning gears and the rolling paper.

Todd took them out to dinner at the end of the day and they discussed how they started on the book project.

“What else do you print, just books and magazines?”, she asked.

“Pretty much. Smaller projects like brochures and fleers are pointless to do here.”

In this small town three hours from Columbus, people didn’t worry about going to college, for if they wanted to live in their hometown they could just get an education for a job at the printing plant after they graduated from high school. If it wasn’t for the size of the plant and the jobs it provided, Todd explained, the town could have become a ghost town decades ago.

After dinner Todd drove them back to the hotel they were staying at and told then he would pick them up at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

As she walked with Carter down the halls to their rooms next door to each other she had to ask him again about her writing. “I had to send a few essays to see if anything could be mixed together. But was the essay idea that bad?”

“I...” Carter said as he did what he was afraid to do earlier today at the airport and at the press. He put his hand at her neck and curled his thumb up along her cheek in front of her ear. “I wanted to tell you after I read your essay that I loved you.”

He instantly saw in her eyes a look of confusion. Her eyes turned to saucers, and Carter saw this as a sign that he made a huge mistake. “What I mean is that I loved your essay. I thought the essays were really strong. And I love the fact that it was you that wrote them. There were small details that could be changed, but I was really impressed with the way you were able to incorporate personal stories about government intervention into our lives and into the AIDS story; it made the story very personable.”

He had to pause at that point, he didn’t know if she was hearing him.

She finally spoke. “You thought my essays were personable?”

“Yes, I thought that last one was really personable. I also thought that it was very analytical at the same time, in a way that the rest of the book is, in a way that the subject material has to be.”

“Analytical?”

Carter had to quickly respond to her bewildered comments. “Now I don’t go around ascribing to any organizations, but I would say that was a very Objectivist essay of yours.”

“What is that?”

“Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged?”

“No.”

Carter thought for a moment, remembering that it was probably just his profession that allowed him to know so much about other writers. “How about The Fountainhead? That’s a better-known book.”

“Yes, I read that years ago.”

“Do you remember how the lead character in that book was an architect, and he wouldn’t give up his goals, or standards, which are his morals and values, and in the end he ended up building the tallest skyscraper?”

“Yes, but you have to admit that the book was a bit outdated.”

“Yes, but the idea wasn’t -- the idea was that someone driven by these standards, someone who had such high, direct, concrete standards, someone who had standards that were synonymous with their values as well as their morals -- those are ideas that do not fade in time.”

“That’s fine, but I don’t see -- wait, are you suggesting that I write like the author of that book?”

“Ayn Rand was her name, and I wouldn’t say that you are a dead ringer for her, I --”

“Why did you remember her name was Ayn Rand?”

“That is my job. To know these things.”

“Sorry...”

“I was just trying to say that it was very analytical, very logical, and very reasonable, like her writing was, but with your personal stories in there as well, it made it much more like a letter to someone, and not an essay that you would have to ’decree’ at a formal meeting in front of a group of people. Ayn Rand’s writing was very logical, but it gave you more reason to want to immerse yourself in her stories. Your personal stories in your essays -- you know, like the gas being turned off or your friend afraid of flying who was abused by her husband -- I thought it was a personal note that would make everything else that was said in the book seem that much more real. I think it would make a fitting ending for the book, even.”

Her eyes turned to round discs when she heard him say this. “What? We can’t do that! The book is about to start printing!”

Carter couldn’t help but think that he loved to see her eyes when they were that big and open, even if she was only having that reaction because of anger or fear. “Magazines print every month and they are usually late for some reason, so it could be made to fit at the end of the book. I checked with Ellen, and we could add another eight-page form to the back of the book, and the extra pages from after the essay could be additional notes space for the writer for information they need to keep,” Carter said. “I think it would make the book really helpful for people --”

“What, and make this seem like a more ’kind and caring book’?”

Carter didn’t know her adverse reaction of anything generally referred to as ’kind and caring’, because he did not see the struggles she had to go through with her work sometimes. Carter continued, “Well, that’s what we’re going for by producing the book in the first place. Moves like your press conferences and this book are going to help you continue to do your work.”

“Do you think I really need this much help to do my work?”

“Right now it seems like we all do. And if this helps, it can help Madison get more money as well, get more customer appreciation, and probably even get your department more funding to do more work that you need to do.”

They were standing in the hallway together, right by the elevator, and their rooms were at the other side of the building. They stood there in silence for a moment before she finally spoke again. “You’re spearheading the production of this book, even managing the editing, so I suppose you know best on this one. I’ll trust your judgment.”

Knowing that sometimes silence spoke louder than words, he put out his hand for hers. She took his hand and they turned to walk toward their rooms.

Carter finally spoke again. “I saw the look on your face when you were watching the presses running.”

“Yes?”

“I think you really are beginning to see what I see.”

This comment agitated her. She thought that she didn’t want to know the world through his eyes, because it would hurt her too much. She wanted to be a part of his life, but the pain of being near him and knowing she could not be with him was torturing her.

“It’s not as if it was your vision. People can look at a press and think it is an amazing piece of machinery without taking the idea from you.”

Carter seemed confused. “I know, I was just saying that it’s nice to have been able to show you how the presses made me feel.”

Sloane continued walking with him in silence. Carter decided not to say something else, lest it further aggravate her.

When they arrived at their doors, Carter spoke up again.

“Would you like to go somewhere? I don’t know where we could go to be social, but we could continue talking somewhere.”

“No, thank you,” she answered tersely. “I’m feeling tired. I should just get some sleep.”

Before Carter could ask her if something was wrong, she closed the door to her hotel room behind her.

Carter walked into his hotel room and paced the floor in front of the foot of his bed. He took his jacket off and hung it up in the closet, then removed his tie and hung it on the same hanger. He could just tell that something was wrong with her, but he did not know why she wouldn’t talk to him. Carter knew that she always talked to him, and she always seemed happy near him, and he didn’t know what to do. All he could keep thinking about the fact that Sloane was just on the other side of the wall, and that it seemed like she was miles away and that there was nothing that he could do.

For almost an hour he tried to work in his hotel room when he decided he had to give her a call.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Yes?”

He could tell she was being short with him.

“What is the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Did I wake you?”

“No.”

“I thought you said you were tired.”

“I’m fine. Really, is that why you called?”

“Well, yes, I wanted to know if you were okay.”

“And I told you I’m fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Carter could hear her sharp inhale before her pause, as if his strength caught her off guard.

After gaining her composure and after him waiting for her to speak, she finally answered. “I guess that’s your problem, not mine.”

Carter didn’t know how to respond.

“Have I done something to upset you?”

“No, Carter, I just need some rest. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Before Carter had a chance to protest, She hung up the phone.

For a moment he felt like he was on a television show, where people were on the phone and people hung up on each other and people did not say goodbye to each other. He couldn’t believe he was going through all of this, and he knew he could not bring himself to call her back to try to talk to her, when it could just mean that he would make a fool of himself. For another hour he tried to get work done, but it was no use. All he could think of was her, in the room right next to his, just beyond that wall. He wanted to be able to put his arms around her and make her problems disappear. He wanted to be able to feel her next to him. He wanted to hear her admit to him that she loved him as much as he loved her. He couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

At just before ten in the evening he heard a knock on his door. He sprung up from his chair and opened the door. Sloane was standing before him, wearing her blouse and skirt from earlier in the day; she was no longer wearing her jacket.

Looking up at Carter when he opened the door, she noticed the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and saw the light on over the small table in the corner.

“Have I interrupted your work? I can go.”

“Nonsense. Come in.”

Carter held the door open for her and she walked into his room. He sat down on the foot of his bed and she immediately proceeded to start pacing across the room, where he had paced just an hour ago himself.

Carter could see that she was still angry. She barely looked at him and barely spoke.

“Did you come in here to pace my floor?”

“Do you have to be so sarcastic all the time?”, she nearly snapped back.

“Look, I’ve been pacing here myself because I have had no idea what is wrong.” Sloane continued to pace and she didn’t speak. He continued. “So you have come here now, and I assume it is because you want to tell me. Will you tell me what you’re so angry about?”

“You want to know?” She raised her voice. “You want to know?” She was now shouting at him.

Carter looked up at her. He wasn’t used to her yelling. “I assumed you came here to tell me.” She stopped pacing and faced Carter, who was still sitting at the foot of his bed. He could see she was infuriated, but he didn’t know why.

“Are you angry with me?”

Her shoulders fell and she started to pace again, this time more slowly. “There’s no point in my not telling you, I feel like I’m destroying our friendship either way.”

“What? You know you’re not going to destroy our friendship. There’s nothing you could say that could. So... what’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” She took a breath before she said the rest of her thought. “I’ve had this little problem...”

She dropped her head. “I’m becoming one of them.”

Carter leaned back; he was confused by what she said. “What do you mean, you’re becoming one of them?”

“Remember talking about people choosing to think or not to think?”

“Yes.”

“Well, in one aspect of my life, I chose for the longest time to not think.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was something weighing on my mind, but it was something that frightened me, something I wanted that I knew wasn’t possible, and so I tried to repress my thoughts. I tried to avoid thinking... I tried to not think.”

Carter sat there, looking at her. He was slightly astonished. “So you’re trying to say that you know that you aren’t thinking. That requires thought, you know. Like if a person thinks they are crazy, then they are probably not, because they thought about it enough to think that something was wrong, which is proving that they weren’t crazy in the first place. And I’m not trying to say that you are or are not crazy, it just proves that you are thinking, and --”

“No, it’s not that I’m not thinking now. I just know that I wasn’t thinking before.”

“So you’ve thought about it now.” Carter was again confused.

“Yes, but I let myself down. I let myself down by trying to avoid it. And I let you down.”

“Why do you think you let me down?”

“Because you’re the only mind I know that wouldn’t tolerate not thinking.” She almost started crying after she said that, and did not know how to stop herself.

“Momentary lapses are completely understandable. We’re human. You were smart enough to realize what you were doing, that you were trying to repress something and you decided to face it, you decided to think about it. If you didn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Stopping her pacing, she looked at him. Her voice suddenly sounded quiet. “So you don’t think I let you down?”

Carter listened to the sound of her voice as it changed, and thought she almost sounded like a little girl that needed someone to guide her and hold her hand, but then and there he didn’t know what he could actually do, because he didn’t want to make her angry again. He didn’t even know what she stopped herself from thinking about. “You didn’t let me down. You never do. But it’s not me you have to worry about. It’s you. Do you feel you let yourself down?”

Sloane looked at her shoes and started pacing again. “Yes.”

Carter waited a brief moment before answering. “But you’re facing up to it now.”

“Yes.”

“And how does that feel?”

After looking up at the ceiling, she answered, “Terrible.”

“But why?”

“Because I’m a woman of science, I figure out what I need and I do it.”

“And you’re on the right track now. You’ll find whatever you’re looking for.”

“No I won’t; that’s the problem.” She sped up her pacing.

Carter watched her walk back and forth. “Why won’t you find it?”

“Because I can’t control what people think.”

“Do you want to control what people think?”

“No.”

Carter stood up and walked right in front of her. Only looking straight forward, she stared into his neck; she couldn’t bear to look up and see his eyes.

“Tell me what you want.”

Other problems she was having with her research came rushing to her mind. She thought about the fact that AIDS may have been intentionally engineered to kill people. She thought about the fact that the government she is supposed to trust is keeping this killing virus alive and possibly potentially stopping her from working in the future. “I want this research to come along easier, I do not want any government agencies stopping me from doing my work, I don’t want to think that the government engineered this virus as some sort of population control, I want -- wait, why am I even telling you what I want?”

Carter noticed that she wasn’t looking at him and did not answer her question. He placed his hands on her shoulders. “You’re going to eventually tell me what you mean by the government engineering AIDS. But you didn’t tell me everything, young lady, and I know for a fact that you are the only woman I know who can get whatever she wants.”

“Carter, why do you think that?”

“You’re the only woman I know who wants only what she deserves.”

Sloane then slowly raised her head and looked up at him. She thought that she didn’t deserve him, but she wouldn’t dare say it. She started to slowly cry. Carter instinctively moved her close to him, just holding her and letting her cry. He leaned her head against his shirt and stroked her hair. “You know, I wanted to go over to your hotel room and just hold you when I thought you were so angry. But I didn’t because you didn’t want to talk to me.”

“There’s no point in my coming to you. There still isn’t. What I haven’t said to you, what I still have to face, it will destroy any friendship we have.”

Carter leaned back and looked at her. “But why?”

“Because what I’ve chosen not to face actually relates to you. And I’ve wanted to talk to you about problems in my life, and things that I’m facing right now, but I’ve felt like I can’t talk to you. And I want to. But I can’t.”

Carter knew it could not be about her feelings for him, as much as he wanted it to be. If it was, she could have come to him sooner. Maybe their being together wasn’t meant to be, he thought for a moment, before he spoke. “You must really hate what you had to come to terms with.”

Sloane tried to raise her head again, but gave up the effort and let it rest on his chest. “I don’t hate it. I just don’t know if I can live with it.”

“Maybe if you tell someone you’ll feel better. What is it?”

She jerked her head up, because she knew he still had no idea she was in love with him; she knew he had no idea that he was the only person in the entire world that could make her laugh, that could make her feel better. She knew she loved him wholly, she knew she loved him because of who he was, at the core, and that no one in the universe could exist like him. She knew she loved how he thought; that she loved the fact that he actually thought. She loved the fact that he demanded the same ideals of the people he cared about. And she knew for some reason that it was wrong that she loved him, that they were meant to live on opposite sides of the country, that they were only allowed to work together like this on occasions that came maybe once every decade or two, that they were meant to be friends and nothing else. They were too far away from each other. And he could find someone else, anyone else, and that she couldn’t be right for him.

And all this time she had been thinking these things and he had no idea.

It almost looked to her as if Carter wanted to cry with her, even though she was sure he seemed to have no idea why she was even crying. Infuriated again, she broke away from his arms and walked away, pacing. “Of course you don’t know, you could never figure it out!”

What Sloane didn’t know was that Carter wanted to hear those words come from her mouth, he wanted to hear her finally say that she loved him. He was just waiting for her to say those words; he wanted nothing else.

“Then why don’t you tell me,” Carter flatly said as he sat back down at the foot of the bed.

Unable to look at him, she continued pacing as she raised her voice. “Of course you would never know what I was going through! I haven’t even been able to tell you about my fears for my life because agents have told me secrets and given me information that I could not decipher, I could not even tell you because you mean that much to me. Every time you see me you think I’m some unsocial clod, someone who doesn’t know how to dress, or be feminine. You look at me, and you think, ’Oh, that poor fool, she’ll never find a husband, no one will be able to tolerate her.’ And you know what? You’re right! I can’t be all of the things that men would want from me. But the thing is, I wouldn’t want to be those things, not for someone who expected them from me. It’s like you said, I could be a housewife, I think, for someone I loved. But for someone who wanted me to be a housewife? I’d hate them for it. I don’t want anyone, no, I don’t want anyone. I had to go fall in love with you, someone who would never notice me, save having to study with my roommate our junior year in college. And I could never be all the things you need me to be, which are all the things every other man in the world would not want me to be, but I still can’t do it, I love my work too much, and now I’ve destroyed my relationship with my best friend because of it. And you probably didn’t even know I thought of you as my best friend, so there you have it, I have once again revealed too much about myself, and I still can’t do what I need to do, and I couldn’t hold it in anymore, and now look what I’ve done.”

Carter didn’t know how much time had passed before she had stopped speaking, or even if he had cut her off in her speaking, when he stood up. “What did you say?”

He watched her walk past him over and over again as she replied, “Oh, you heard me. What difference does it make if I say it now? I’ve had to back away from you for so long now I may as well not even be your friend. Why do you think I wouldn’t go into the Jacuzzi tub with you when you were in Seattle? And now I’ve gone and ruined our friendship because of this, but I’m sure I was ruining it anyway. Why do you think I tense up when you touch me? Why do you think I felt awkward when you tried to teach me how to use chopsticks? Why do you think I try to --”

“You love me?”

Sloane stopped pacing and looked at him. She walked up to him, to face him square on, and took a breath before she continued rambling again. “You know I do. You know I couldn’t help but love you, you know that there could be no one else I could ever love. You know that I admire your beliefs. You know that I admire not only the fact that you think, but also the way you think. You know that you are the only person that can make me happy. What you don’t know is that outside my work I can’t seem to be happy anymore unless I’m talking to you. You know that you embody to me what a man should be.” She started crying again. “And the more I see you, the more I’m sure of it, and the more it depresses me because --”

“Because why?”

Sloane looked at him squarely and stopped crying. She knew that this was the beginning of the end of their friendship. “Because you don’t love me.”

Carter waited for a moment before speaking. “Is that what you think?”

Surprised by his question, she asked, “Wouldn’t you have told me if you were in love with me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you wouldn’t have been ready to hear it.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you didn’t want to think about your feelings for me, how would you have reacted if I told you I loved you?”

Standing before him, she was confused and slightly stunned. “Well, it doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it?”

“... Because you don’t love me.”

After she said those words she turned around to leave the hotel room.

Carter grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around before she could get away. He pulled her up to him and rushed his head down toward her; his lips met hers in an almost violent push. Her lips parted as he kissed her harder and harder; Carter slid his hands across her back to her neck and pulled her head back by her hair to kiss her cheeks and neck. Sloane threw her arms around his neck and held on to him with a fierce intensity and she pressed her mouth against his face. They kissed each other with an insurmorntable urgency; all they felt was that they needed to be together that very moment.

Carter stopped kissing her long enough to put his head over her shoulder and hug her. She responded by doing the same.

“I’ve always loved you, Sloane,” Carter whispered.

She started laughing, almost uncontrollably, almost as a reaction to what had just happened. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Didn’t we just go over this? What would I have said? ’Hey, buddy, I want to spend my life with you.’ How would you have taken that?”

“So you were willing to risk never having me?”

“First of all, knowing you exist, knowing someone in the world existed that I could wholly love, that would be better for me than never finding you. If we weren’t meant to be, then I would face that -- but I also knew that at least I had the pleasure of knowing this remarkable woman that I could truly admire. Secondly, I couldn’t have you, unless you wanted to have me as well. I had to wait for you, to see if you loved me. When you visited me in New York, I knew by the way you acted and the way we were when we were together that you loved me, but you had to come to terms with it.”

“And you knew that, and you let me struggle?”

“I couldn’t tell you to think about it. You had to face it on your own.”

Sloane pulled back from their embrace to look at Carter. She realized that he was waiting for her to learn the things he had known. She thought she knew everything; this time someone was waiting for her to learn. The things she had been struggling with for the past months he had been struggling with as well. She reached her hands around and ran her fingers over the hair on the back of his head.

“Mr. Carter Donovan, I love you,” she said, as a declaration to the entire world, although she wondered if anyone in the world could possibly understand what love meant.

Carter leaned over and kissed the tear left on her cheek. He smiled and moved his arms to her waist. “Ms. Sloane Emerson, I love you.”

She started to laugh as Carter reached down and kissed her again, first slowly, then with more and more intensity. Responding like a dancer, she followed his lead. They stood kissing at the foot of Carter’s bed until Carter took a step and leaned forward, kneeling onto the foot of the bed, guiding Sloane to follow him. She stopped kissing him long enough to sit on the bed, and Carter leaned over her and guided her down to the pillows below them as he started to unbutton her blouse.

Sloane reached up for Carter and pulled him toward her.

At two-thirty in the morning Carter rolled over and saw Sloane in bed next to him, staring at the ceiling.

She didn’t notice that Carter woke up. Eventually she turned her head to look at him. She saw his eyes wide open in the darkness, and he was staring at her.

“How long have you been looking at me?”

“How long have you been awake, Sloane?”

Sloane turned her head back to the ceiling.

“Sloane?”

“Yes?”

“Do you regret what we did?”

She turned her head back to him. “God, no. Do you?”

Carter rolled over, touching her waist. “No. Never. But are you unhappy?”

Sloane leaned over and kissed him. “It’s not you. You’ve made me feel sane through all of this.”

“You never told me about the government and AIDS, like I asked. Is it work that is bothering you?”

She turned around and leaned against him in bed. “It’s more than that.”

“Well, let me see.” Carter kissed her head in between every sentence. “Your book about to print. Your integrase inhibitor is going through more tests and waiting for F.D.A. approval. You at least temporarily got the government off your back with that press conference; for the past few weeks they have left you alone. You now have time to work on vaccines for AIDS.”

He waited for her to speak. She said nothing. He leaned over and added, “And you’ve got me.”

She leaned her head back to see Carter’s eyes. “You know, you do make life make sense.”

“As do you for me, Sloane.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Carter started kissing her neck. “If I kiss you more, will your problems go away then?”

“They may. But you’d further satiate me if you did other things to me some more --” she said as she started laughing and Carter started kissing her neck and chest.

Sloane woke up before the wake up call. She turned to look at Carter. He was already awake and looking at her.

“What are you staring at?”

Carter smiled. “Good morning.”

“What time is it?”

“Just after six.”

They were to receive a wake up call at 7:30 in the morning. They were being picked up to go back to the printing plant at nine in the morning.

Knowing she had some time, she decided to talk.

“Carter?”

“Yes?”

“I have reason to believe that the U.S. government engineered AIDS and is using it for its own purposes. I have reason to believe that they also have a cure for it and are holding it from the public.”

Carter asked her about this before and didn’t get an answer, but hearing it still stunned him, and then he began to understand all that she had been going through in the past month. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her. “I’ll assume that this is what you were referring to before, when you were angry and pacing last night. So where did you get this information from?”

“A lot of things were making me angry and making me pace like that last night, but... but someone contacted me by e-mail and told me. They worked for the Department of Defense; previously they worked for the CIA. I met with them in Colorado Springs -- that was right before you came into Seattle to check on the book’s progress.”

“That was when you were disconnected...”

Confused with his remark, she responded, “What?”

“You said you were under a lot of stress. I didn’t know what it was. What exactly happened there?”

“I met with him, he gave me a long story and a few files with some information that might be able to help me in looking for the truth.”

“Files?”

“Yes. That’s what I gave you a copy of.”

“And that’s why you didn’t want to tell me about them.”

“Well, yes, because people who know too much could be hurt or killed, and now I want you to destroy them, because I don’t want any link with you and this. I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Carter, you don’t understand. I’ve been working on this, and I haven’t had much regard for my own safety. But you -- I don’t want anything to happen to you. For once I feel like I have something on this planet worth fighting for, other than my work. And I don’t want to jeopardize that.”

“Well, maybe I have regard for your safety, and I will not let you do this to yourself --”

“What? You don’t understand -- you’re not going to stop me.”

“Then I’m not going to let you do this to yourself alone. And I don’t think you will be in any trouble because a man gave you files. Do you even know if they’re authentic? I mean, can you believe this guy?”

“After he was followed to our meeting he was hit by a car later that night and was killed. Police thought it was a hit and run accident, but I’m sure it was the man who works for the CIA that was following him while he met with me.”

Carter was stunned by every answer she gave him to every question of his. “You know a guy from the CIA was following him? How do you know that?”

“I went to the Seattle police, Kyle’s brother is a policeman, and I asked their sketch artist to come up with a drawing of the man who was watching us. That’s what I told them ... I found the match for the sketch in the CIA database.”

“How did you find a match for your sketch?”

“Well, this is the sort of illegal part.”

Carter sat up in bed. “Sort of the illegal part? What happened?”

“I went to my contact’s office after he died, posing as a friend that would clean up his personal belongings. I got onto his computer, guessed his password and was in the Department of Defense’s main system. This is why I knew he was legit, that he wasn’t feeding me a line. Then I was able to access the CIA employee databases from there, hence the match to my sketch I had of the follower. The only problem there is that my contact was dead already, so they have to know that someone hacked into their system. They just haven’t come to get me yet. And I don’t know why.”

Carter was beginning to feel like he was on a television show again, and that none of this could be real. He rubbed his head. It looked like he was making a physical effort to make sense of everything that was just told to him.

“And you think the U.S. government has a cure for AIDS.”

“My contact told me he had had AIDS and they cured him of it. There’s a vague paper trail of it in the files you have a copy of.”

“So... What are you going to try to do?”

“There was a contact name in the files, and I’ve left messages for him. And by the way, I like the fact that you just asked me what I was going to try to do, and not that you would be the type of guy that would want to quote-unquote take care of everything for me. But anyway, this contact, he left me one message on my machine after I repeatedly called him, telling me that he would get a hold of me when he needed me.”

“When he needed you?”

“I don’t know what it means, so don’t even ask me. But now I don’t know what to do. But as soon as this all happened I started feeling the additional pressure from the U.S. Scientific Research Advancement Department.”

“Are you jumping the gun with any assumptions on that one, or do you think those two things are related?”

Realizing she forgot to fill Carter in on all of the pieces to the puzzle, she continued. “I was also informed by my contact, before he died, that this would be the next step in stopping the success of AIDS drugs -- government intervention. Toby, my friend doing similar work at the University, has been having similar problems with government funding. Carter, I can’t help but think that it’s all related.” She sat up in the bed, holding the blankets up to her chest, and looked back at him.

All Carter could think was that she had been worrying about a book, an AIDS drug, work on a cure, vaccine research, and this. He was at a loss. He knew that her feelings for him fell short of her research problems, and all he could think about was the fact that she might be in danger.

“Don’t make things more difficult for yourself.”

“How? With making me work so hard for you?”

Carter smiled, but that was not what he was thinking. “That too...”

“All of this -- and you? It was worth it.”

Carter reached over and put his hands on her shoulders. “What can I do?”

She turned around and leaned up against him. “Could you either make love to me, or just hold me for a while?”

Carter wrapped his arms around her.

“I’m not used to leaning on someone. And I’m not used to asking for it,” Sloane whispered.

Carter gently tightened his grip. “When I get better at this, you won’t have to ask. And if you are not dumping this many problems on me all at once, I may be more inclined to turn around and make love to you without you having to ask. Hell, when I get better at this, hopefully I won’t be causing you any more grief.”

“You’re not causing me grief, Carter,” she said. “You’re my salvation.”

Carter smiled. “That sounds a little religious of you...” He jokingly said as he pushed the blankets out of the way so he could be next to her as he started kissing her again. They ignored the phone when it rang with their wake-up call a half hour later.

###

Sloane stayed in bed as Carter got up and walked to the washroom. She watched his figure move through the hotel room as he turned the corner and switched on the bathroom light. She heard the water start running out of the showerhead.

After sitting on the bed for a moment, she realized he wouldn’t be able to hear her under the pounding water of the showerhead. Suddenly she started laughing. For once she felt like she didn’t have to hide anything from someone. For this moment, alone in his hotel room bed, she couldn’t think about her work, or the government, or the fact that Carter lived on the other side of the country. All she could think was that he was there, that very moment, taking a shower, and that he loved her.

Instinctively, she got up and walked over to the washroom.

Not asking, she walked into the washroom and over to the shower curtain that separated her from Carter. She started to open the shower curtain and stood right outside of the bathtub to watch Carter for a brief moment, until he turned around to wash his hair under the showerhead. Then he saw her.

Carter smiled. “Are you going to stand there? Or are you coming in?”

Sloane bowed her head. “I’m shy.” She followed his lead and smiled. “I just wanted to look at you for a moment like this,” she said, “to see your shoulders. You really are gorgeous.”

Carter reached his hand out toward her. She took his hand and moved the shower curtain out of her way.

Carter pivoted so she could get under the water. She dropped her head back and leaned under the showerhead to get her hair wet. She could once again feel Carter staring at her. She pulled her head back and looked at him. He took a step closer and placed his wet lips on hers.

For a moment Carter even forgot that he was even in the shower to bathe in the first place. He told her that it would be fine if they were late. She agreed with him that they could be late; neither one of them had much interest in going to the press in the first place. She knew that the majority of her work there would entail looking over colors, and inks on pages.

Knowing her mind would be somewhere else, she didn’t know how much work she would be able to get done that day.

Their ride understood them being late for the press check. The second day of the press check was much more sedentary than the first, she thought. She checked the colors of sample book jacket sleeves, but otherwise didn’t do much as Carter checked individual pages of other books. Press men gave the Carter and Sloane seats at empty desks in an office to work. Carter checked pages while Sloane read. They each tried not to think about the fact that they would soon leave each other and go back to their lives on other sides of the country.