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trying.” His voice came out a weak half-cry. His arms reached out to encircle her.
    "Don't avoid me anymore,” she said.
    She felt Stuart shake his head against her forehead. “I won't."
    Rieko let her head fall onto his shoulder. Her face nestled into his neck. “You don't want to do this again?” she asked, leaving unspoken what they had done tonight. She wanted to figure out the secret rules he followed.
    "Not anytime soon,” he answered.
    "Then, we won't again until you say you're okay with it,” Rieko replied.
    "Not that I don't like you like that.” His tone showed humor. He ran a hand down the back of her pajama top and then over her bare butt. He gripped her butt loosely and playfully. “Here in my office, naked from the waist down.” He gave a rumbling chuckle.
    "Stuart.” She pulled away enough to mockingly glare at him.
    His face held a small smile, but it danced over his eyes. He lowered his hands. “Get dressed and I'll walk you back to your quarters."
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    Chapter Five
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    Slowly Stuart did start telling Rieko more about himself, especially if she asked the right questions. Stories about him in school finally opened him up. He considered himself a bad student, although she sometimes wondered how bad he had really been. She asked if he'd ever had any tutors, and he answered with the coarse, “MacEwan's don't need tutors."
    Instead, he told her how he had spent hours trying to teach himself subjects he didn't understand in class. He read and re-read the text books until he made it make sense. She was surprised to learn that Stuart with the great engineering mind he had, at one time had struggled to comprehend algebra. It all showed her his self-reliance, determination, and resolve, his patience and certainty in his abilities.
    Astronomy was his one failure in school. She could picture a young Stuart up late, a small study light on, while everyone else slept, studying until the types of stars and planets were imprinted into his brain. Then, he'd show up at class to hear the instructor mention things that didn't match with the data in his head. Even all those years later, such a silly failure really bothered him. Rieko almost wished to teach him astronomy just to show him he could do it, that he wasn't a failure.
    Stuart said he had been a small child, always smaller than the other boys. He had to always try harder to be their equals. He had found a way to get around his smaller stature. It didn't surprise her that he had played sports: cricket and football and rugby. He played them well, winning, but Rieko could tell he hadn't really enjoyed it.
    Then there were his allergies. Rieko wondered what all he was and wasn't allergic to. Stuart likely had an internal list of it. It bothered him because he saw it as a weakness, an imperfection. She tried to gently tell him, nobody was perfect.
    She learned the subjects he didn't talk about. In his quarters one night, they often now talked in private, Stuart was after all a very private man, she mentioned family. First, she told him about her parents and brothers, her aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents.
    He gave a little back in return. His sister was a schoolteacher, his mother a housewife, his father had been a Captain in the British Royal Navy. Family was not a subject he talked about and he wouldn't tell her why. Of course, he didn't talk about friends either. Rieko had a feeling many of the people he had ever interacted with in his life were just acquaintances. If he had ever made a real friend in the past, he would have told her, so likely there wasn't one.
    She learned a great deal about Stuart that seemed to not be his own thinking. The deeper he let her see of himself, the more she slowly saw the difference. She heard that voice he spoke about MacEwan's in that wasn't his. The MacEwan's were in the Royal Navy for as far back as any could remember, and that history ran back quite a