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and suddenly, all these songs were about you
Will’s hand was firm around hers as the transporter beam took them away. Yet when they rematerialised on the Enterprise, it was back to work, the façade of the first officer decisively back in place. The ship was without a warp core and they would have to limp their way to the nearest starbase for repairs, doing whatever they could in the interim period to get themselves up and running. It was going to be a slow, tedious few weeks. But, as they filed out of the transporter room, he grabbed her arm, leaned in and asked in a hushed voice, “See you later?”
Her stomach gave a flip at the meaning in his voice and she smiled and nodded at him before they went their separate ways.
***
The mess hall was crowded and yet he couldn’t take his eyes from her. It had been that way for most of the evening, since she’d wandered in with Beverley and taken a seat in an out of the way corner. He’d worked his way through his favourite numbers – On Green Dolphin Street, Lament, Giant Steps and a couple of new ones he’d been practising recently – and now it was getting to the point of the evening where he usually did a spot of improv or requests. But tonight, he wanted to finish with something else. He paused and whispered his intentions to his band, then looked up. Deanna was talking with Beverley, a happy, distracted smile on her face, and he was struck yet again by how beautiful she looked in the low light of the mess hall, with the purple of her dress making her dark eyes somehow seem darker than ever.
“And so we come to the end. Thank you everyone for your time, I hope it’s been a pleasant evening. I’d like to break with tradition and do something a little different tonight. I’d like to dedicate a song to someone.” His eyes flicked over to Deanna. “It’s not Night Bird, Deanna, but I hope you like it.” At the sound of her name, she stopped mid-sentence and looked up and he smiled at her. “It’s called My Old Flame.”
He turned to his band and counted them in, then brought his trombone to his mouth and began…
***
There was still a flush in her cheeks as he played the final few notes and the drummer’s cymbals behind him quivered out a last flourish. The audience blossomed into applause and he bowed slightly, turning to thank his band, then ordered the computer to raise the lighting to two-thirds. He took his time packing away his trombone, wondering if she would come over and see him, but when he looked up, she was sitting alone where she had been all this time. Beverley had moved away and was talking to Alyssa Ogawa’s husband at the bar and so he headed towards Deanna.
“Hey,” he greeted.
She smiled at him. “Hi.” A beat passed. “Thank you for the song. It was lovely.”
“My pleasure,” he replied.
They looked at each other and for a moment, words seemed to fail them both. Finally, he held out his hand. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
She nodded and reached for his hand.
***
They walked to his quarters in a somewhat uncertain silence. Deanna could sense his emotions bubbling just beneath the surface of his carefully controlled exterior – nervousness, anticipation, a little dash of desire – and realised they reflected her own. They’d made this journey thousands of times over the years yet this time felt different. It felt like there was about to be a change.
When they reached his cabin, he thumbed the door lock and entered, the lights immediately coming on to ship’s night illumination. The place was familiarly untidy without being actually messy – it suited him, she thought. Will Riker was, to her at least, a place of cosiness and ease, where she could let her walls fall and still feel safe. Home.
“So here we are,” he said.
“Here we are,” she agreed.
She waited a moment while he placed his trombone back on its stand and shed the jacket he’d been wearing, flinging it over the back of a chair. Their eyes met and the sense of him being uncertain about what to do next resurfaced. He threw a thumb towards his bedroom. “I just need to use the bathroom. Make yourself comfortable.”
In his absence, she made a circle of the room, picking up an empty coffee mug and condemning it to the reclamator, then folding herself up onto his couch. A PADD was stuffed down behind a cushion and she fished it out, setting it on the coffee table, smiling to herself as she thought that it was almost as if the place had to reassert its inherent untidiness as soon as she’d made an effort to clean it up.
“Clearing up after me?” he asked as he emerged from his bedroom.
“Not really.”
Again, their eyes met. “Did you enjoy the show?”
“Very much. As always.” She paused. “I’d forgotten you were playing.”
“I almost didn’t,” he said. “Then I thought it might be a distraction for everyone.”
“It was.”
He smiled. For a moment, she thought he was going to come and sit beside her, then he called out, “Computer, play Riker playlist 7.”
Immediately, the room was filled with the sound of delicate, upbeat percussion, then a few moments later, a tinkling piano.
Jazz. Of course.
A saxophone burbled into life.
He hesitated, then held out his hand, a kind of vague smile on his lips that had become very familiar over the last few months. She stood and he folded her into his embrace, beginning a slow, rocking, undefined dance.
“This is the Dave Brubeck Quartet,” he explained and his voice was low and reverential. “20th Century jazz pianist and his band…” His head craned slightly at the flex of the notes. “This is one of their most famous tracks. It’s called Take Five.”
“I know.
He looked at her oddly for a moment, then smiled. “I’ve played it for you before.”
“Yes,” she confirmed.
His smile widened.
There was a moment of anticipation then like there had been other moments very similar in the recent past. His eyes were fixed on hers and for some strange and completely unfathomable reason, seemed to be streaming with starlight.
Deanna leaned slightly forwards and so did he. Then she kissed him. Or he kissed her. Either way, it was a kiss and there was nothing friendly or platonic about it. As they stood together, with the red clouds of the Briar Patch glowing through the cabin windows, she heard the drums roll, a perfect reflection of the soaring sensation in her stomach.
***
He hadn’t kissed her like that in years. Sure, they’d shared occasional kisses throughout the time they’d served together, but always there was the line that had been drawn between them and neither of them had dared to overstep it. But this… this was like the first time they’d kissed, on that warm, fragrant night in the garden of her friend’s house in the suburbs of Rixx, though then it had been Betazoid music that had provided the soundtrack to their embrace and not Paul Desmond’s swooping saxophone.
The track moved on and now it was Chet Baker and I Fall In Love Too Easily. How apt, he thought.
His lips became swollen as they stayed pressed together, his tongue in her mouth and his mind flirting at the edges of hers. Their kisses never moved much beyond the most gentle of touches, more erotic than he could remember kisses ever having been before in his life. Another track, Stella by Starlight, and another, Mood Indigo.
Little by little, he realised that never again would he be able to hear those records without thinking of her, without thinking again of the dim light and the slow, unstoppable kisses and the smell of her perfume, the satin slide of that purple dress against his touch and the growing crescendo of his own heartbeat.
Wanting more, he unfastened the back of the purple dress and watched as it slid slowly to the floor, revealing the perfect alabaster of her skin.
They kissed again, and again, sinking back together as the track moved on once more. Body and Soul, this time. Amy Winehouse. He sighed, his hands hovering over her skin, feeling the heat rising from it like the desert at night. Slowly, he breathed in and met her eyes, brighter than the stars outside the window and very close.
“Imzadi,” he said.
It was just one word, but it was like a bell and with it, came clarity.
“I don’t want to listen to another song,” she said in a quiet voice that seemed for a moment to be struggling with its conviction. “I think I’m going to go home now.”
He blinked, taken aback by her comment. He couldn’t stop the frown that invaded his face, driven by arousal and the force of attraction. “You are?” he asked, confused.
“Yes, I think so. It’s late and we should think this over. What it means.”
“I don’t understand.”
She reached up and laid her hand along the curve of his face, where now there was just the hint of stubble returning. “I think you do, Will. If we do this now, this has to be it for us. The last place we can go together.”
“You mean—” he began.
“It has to be for good. No second thoughts. All in.”
She let her hand fall from his face and trace along his arm, leaving a trail of prickling hairs behind. He heard her draw in a steadying breath – she was as turned on as he was.
“Mm,” he said, mostly in agreeance. “You’re right.”
She nodded. “I am right. It’s been a difficult few days and we need to get some rest and think this over. Make sure that this is really what we want and this isn’t just…” She gestured outside the windows at the miasma of reddish gases with their cocktail of affecting radiation. “All of this playing havoc with our brains.”
“It’s been threatening for months, Deanna,” he told her, one last weak objection to her resolution.
“I know.” She pulled up her dress and secured it once again. “I know it has.”
***
It was gone midnight, but there were still people walking the halls of the Enterprise, a sign of the continuous repair work going on all around the ship. She walked the two dozen paces to her own quarters and entered. The bloom of the Briar Patch cast a reddened hue over the room, making the shadows seem darker and more defined. Without turning on the lights, she went to the window and stared out. Her thoughts were slow and heavy, as if she’d had a little too much synthehol, even though she hadn’t. Everything normal seemed to have stopped, slipped away somewhere, and all that was left was the mystery of this strange place, the possibilities it had engendered.
Her lips still burned from his kisses and her whole body tingled. She would have let him make love to her if he’d asked, but Will respected her far too much to push. He would let her think and he’d think too, and then…
Her thoughts soared and somewhere in her mind, Amy Winehouse’s smoky voice echoed…
***
He stood under the pulses of the sonic shower for the longest time after she’d gone, hoping to empty his mind ready for bed. When eventually he gave up and got out, dressing in pyjamas and climbing into bed, it was late, well past midnight. He was tired – exhausted really – from the desperate battle with the Son’a, but still he found himself unable to sleep, staring out at the coalescence of clouds that formed the Briar Patch. The words she’d said were still going around in his head and his lips still burned and tingled.
Everything had changed.
The friendship that they had shared for so many years now seemed second-rate, a poor substitute for the possibilities he’d dared to dream of while she held him in her arms. Deanna’s kisses had dragged his heart out of a deep and unacknowledged slumber and it lay so open he wondered that it couldn’t be seen beating in the night.
For a dozen years, he had locked his feelings up in an iron box and yet here they were threatening to break free and overwhelm him.
No second thoughts, she’d said. All in.
He lay awake for a long time, considering what it would be to take a chance or spurn one, the music of the masters running through and through his head and his body singing softly to itself.