The Folded World Read Free

wanted to work out with me later,” he said.
    â€œOh, right,” she said. “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ve got an appointment with . . . somebody else.”
    â€œStanley.”
    She let out a little sigh. “Yes, Stanley.”
    â€œYou can say his name, you know. It’s okay.”
    â€œI know,” Tikolo said. “Only it’s—I don’t know. Awkward. I’m sorry.”
    â€œDon’t be.” He tried to follow the threads of their conversation. He had been eating his meal without tasting it, because his senses had been focused on her: the delicious way she smelled, like the first peach of summer, the way the light played on her lustrous black hair and caught the highlights of her dark eyes, the way her lips, so perfectly shaped, closed over her fork when she took a bite. He was admiring the way her short red dress hugged her figure when she looked up from her food and caught him staring. The idea of spending some time in the gym with her sprang to mind, and he went with it. Somehow she had used that invitation to expound a philosophical treatise on the necessity of exercise, because, as she explained, the universe was either uncaring or downright hostile, soa person had to keep her body in excellent physical condition, to be ready to defend herself against any danger at any moment.
    O’Meara understood, or thought he did, the mental paths she had taken. She rarely talked about her experiences on and off Earth Outpost 4 when the Romulans attacked, but he could see the fallout in the haunted look in her eyes, the way she flinched at loud noises, even the way it sometimes took her longer to laugh than it did other people. Miranda had been thoroughly vetted and cleared for duty, and he had no worries about her psychological state. That did not mean, however, that she was free of those memories, or would ever be.
    Mostly, when he looked at her, he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever met, and more and more often he found himself wondering if what he felt was love or just something very much like it.
    And then there was Stanley Vandella. O’Meara saw the way Vandella stared at her, and it was like watching his own reflection in a mirror. Vandella felt the same way he did, and if Tikolo had a preference between them, she didn’t let on.
    That couldn’t last much longer. O’Meara tried to pretend it didn’t matter to him, that he was fine with any decision, or the lack thereof. But as his feelings deepened—and already his heart seemed to stop every time he got a glimpse of her in the corridor, much less touched her velvet skin or earned a smileor a kiss—he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer. At some point, she would have to choose. She could pick him or she could pick Stanley or she could even say that she would continue on with both of them, but she would have to definitively say where her heart was.

Three
    Kirk sat at the desk in his quarters, answering communications and checking over status reports from crew members and Starfleet headquarters back on Earth. Running a starship sometimes meant making snap life-and-death decisions or facing down existential threats, but more often than not it was a matter of dealing with the forms, reports, and queries common to bureaucracies across the known universe. Right now, he would willingly have swapped all the busywork for a single megalomaniac determined to rule his quadrant of space.
    So when he heard the door buzzer, Kirk was delighted at the interruption. “Come,” he said, knowing that the number of people who would have interrupted him was a small handful.
    The door opened and Doctor Leonard McCoy walked in, his expressive brow furrowed. He was carrying a bottle and two shot glasses. Without a word, he poured out two fingers. The doctor raised his glass and offered, “Uncle Frank.”
    Kirk raised his own glass and drank. The captain suppressed a