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He was the boy Uhura shared childhood adventures with. Together, they canoed out into the Okavango Delta, when the floods turned the sands of the Kalahari into a lush wetland filled with living things. They observed the uneasy peace between natural enemies where precious resources were concerned, floating lazily as they watched lions and zebras come down to the waterside to drink. When a seemingly placid hippo suddenly charged their boat and forced them to paddle for their lives, they learned the hard way that things were not always what they seemed. They shared their love of freedom, the kind of freedom that is known only to twelve-year-olds in a canoe.
One day, he turned his soft, dark eyes on her in a way he never had before. “I want...I want...” He could not finish.
She smiled apologetically and said, “No thank you.”
Not long after, track meets and chess club and piano recitals and flying lessons had put an end to their delta adventures.
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He was the boy Uhura had hoped never to meet. Sloppy drunk and all hands, at first she took him for a harmless Academy boy who hadn’t yet learned to hold his liquor. Sexual desperation was written all over his face, but she had not yet learned to read the difference between a plea and a threat.
She made the mistake she thought she was way too smart to make: She let him get her alone.
If Uhura hadn’t been quite so drunk herself, she would probably have remembered not to lock his elbow when she pinned him to the floor. As it was, it took surgery to reconstruct the joint. She never did find out if it had healed up well, because he was expelled within the week. She didn’t dare ask his friends, who spread cruel rumors about her but crossed the street whenever they saw her coming.
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He was a townie in an Iowa bar, and she was pretty bitchy to him. “Xenolinguistics,” she said. “You wouldn’t know what that is.” Only he did, and that made her smile.
“It means you have a talented tongue,” he’d said, thinking himself clever. She felt sorry for the kid. His attempt to wheedle her first name out of her was an annoying, juvenile pissing match she could have done without, and his pickup lines were old long before he was born. The kid had a chip on his shoulder, but she admired the confidence behind his bravado. She could see he was someone who couldn’t resist a challenge, and she suspected that got him into a lot of trouble sometimes.
It wasn’t long before circumstances proved her correct. Within three minutes, the poor kid had landed himself in a brawl with a pack of drunken cadets with no necks and entirely too much testosterone. The cadets were to blame -- they were the ones spoiling for the fight, not the kid. But he just wouldn’t back down, no matter how obvious it became that he was going to get his ass kicked. And get it kicked he did. After landing a few blows, he was playing the role of punching bag before a captive audience.
She felt badly not going back to check on him after it was over. Last she saw him, he was a bloody mess. She wanted to let him know that she was sorry she’d been snarky, that he probably deserved better, and that she wasn’t on the side of the assholes who’d jumped him four-to-one in an act of colossal, booze-fueled cowardice. But Captain Pike had ordered them all back to base. It wasn’t like she’d ever see him again, anyway.
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The last person Uhura expected to see sharing her new quarters was a green Orion woman. She’d heard rumors there was one joining the cadet class, but she’d dismissed them as being the overheated fantasies of...at least half the cadet class.
Her roommate spent their first month together trying to be subtle about her seduction attempts, though the Orion version of subtle was somewhat different to what Uhura was accustomed to. Instead of lingering looks and suggestive double entendres, Gaila tried to get Uhura drunk and talk her into nude calisthenics.
Their second month together saw the beginning of a daily litany of “Please? Oh, c’mon, you know you want to,” with numerous variations. Uhura found that the effort to come up with an equal variety of refusals challenged her creativity. By the time she was falling back on Academy regulations prohibiting sexual activity in cadet quarters, she knew the well had run dry. Everyone knew no one had been called out for rookie nookie in 25 years.
“Look, if I say yes and we do it JUST ONCE, will you promise never to ask again?”
Her roommate swore on the seventh moon of the seventh planet of the Orion system, an oath Uhura knew to be considered absolutely inviolable by her roommate’s people.
After the event, Uhura spent the rest of the year kicking herself for having been so incredibly stupid. The green woman’s touch was downright intoxicating; Uhura had never felt sexual release like that before. Must be some damn unusual pheromones, she realized. Of course, the oath her roommate had sworn did not prevent Uhura from becoming the aggressor, but she had her pride. Barely.
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He had asked her out on a proper date -- not to a party or a bar, but a proper date that required tickets, dinner reservations, and presentable attire. He had arrived all washed and brushed, all bright smiles and easy banter, with a bouquet of exquisite Gideonite lilies in the most astonishingly subtle hues. He was a pleasant companion all evening, complimenting her appearance, laughing at her jokes, every once in a while staring deeply into her eyes.
Uhura hoped he didn’t noticed how often she was checking her chronometer through dinner. She was careful to keep her hands folded in her lap during the ballet to avoid brushing his thigh with a wayward touch, and she folded her arms across her chest as they walked home, commenting on the fall chill in the air.
When they arrived at the door of her quarters, she thanked him loudly for the pleasant evening, telling him she had a lovely time. The door swooshed open instantly and her green roommate emerged, grasped her arm tightly, and informed her that her mother had called three times and was desperately trying to get in touch with her because something just terrible has happened to her poor cousin, whose two husbands were beside themselves with worry.
Gaila was totally reliable that way, bless her. The signal always worked.
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He was a golden opportunity.
Uhura learned alien languages with remarkable ease, but conversing with the computer was never good enough. The computer could render a language with perfect grammar and syntax, a vast vocabulary, various dialects and accents, and even idiomatic expressions. The problem with the computer was that, despite all that, it didn’t have anything to say.
Language was about communication, and language rendered by a machine was dull and lifeless, however sophisticated the programming. So Uhura sought out native speakers at every opportunity.
She approached her computational semantics instructor, a handsome Vulcan with a serious demeanor and soulful eyes, after class one day. He agreed to meet with her during his free time for the purpose of conversing in his native language. At first their meetings took place in public venues, but they soon found the presence of others to be a distraction, and Mr. Spock invited the cadet to meet with him in his quarters.
It was during a conversation about the nuances and connotations of the fourteen Vulcan expressions that translate roughly to the English word “logic” when Uhura realized Spock had dropped the formal terms of address with her, using instead the familiar Vulcan pronouns. She suspected this was significant.
It was during a debate on the ethics of the Prime Directive when she noticed Spock’s gaze wandering more and more often from her eyes to her lips. She suspected this was involuntary.
It was during...she honestly couldn’t remember what it was during when Spock told her he had come to value her company above all others and then kissed her, his fingers gently caressing the soft skin at the back of her neck.
She vaguely wondered as he undressed her how to say “anticipation” in Vulcan.
END