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“…then she grabs my wrist, and puts my hand on her arm, and says ‘You have very steady hands.’ At this point I was completely baffled. How’m I supposed to respond to that? So I said, ‘Well, they get the job done, I guess. But right now the most important job is bypassing the plasma emitter.’ And then, out of nowhere, she says, ‘I assure you I’m quite fertile.’”
Julian nearly choked on his beer; Jadzia’s mouth dropped open and a wheeze escaped it like air from an untied balloon.
“I was so startled I hit my head on the top of the Jefferies tube; I’m already getting a lump,” he complained, rubbing a spot on the back of his head with a disgruntled look.
“Did she explain what any of that was about?” Jadzia asked, half-laughing.
“Of course I asked what she was talking about, and said I have a wife and a child! And then she asked why I’d been ‘leading her to believe I wanted her.’ I was stunned—and not just by the head-bump. ‘I’ve been doing no such thing!’ I said. ‘All we’ve done since we met is argue.’ Then she says—get this!—‘I took your overt irritability toward me as a signal that you wanted to pursue a physical relationship.’” He shook his head in wonderment. “Cardassians, eh? Everything’s upside-down and backwards with them. They decide the verdict and the sentence, and then they hold the trial; they show attraction by being ‘overtly irritable’ and arguing constantly.”
Jadzia shot Julian a sly sideways glance and he smiled uncertainly; if she was hinting at some private joke, he wasn’t getting it.
“Another one for the annals of humorous cultural misunderstandings, courtesy of Starfleet?” she said to Miles.
“Better than fatal ones, I suppose…” Miles muttered.
“Did I ever tell you about the time Curzon accidentally got himself adopted into a family of…”
Her voice faded into unintelligibility as Julian was hit by the realization. “All we’ve done since we met is argue.” Constantly disagreeing signaled interest in a physical relationship. Cardassians flirt by arguing.
Bit slow on the uptake, are we, genetically enhanced brain? I can calculate diagnostic probabilities to two decimal places within five seconds, but when it comes to people, it takes half a minute to draw a simple inference. My parents should ask for a discount…
“You all right there, Julian?” Miles asked him, breaking into his trance.
“Yes, of course,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Just tired. Long day… probably not as long as yours, but I experienced my share of tension, worrying about whether the runabout would come back.”
Miles smiled sympathetically and clapped him on the shoulder; Jadzia smirked knowingly.
“Speaking of, I’m about ready to drop,” said Miles.
“It would be a shame if we had to save you from drowning in your beer,” said Jadzia.
“Very funny.” Miles drained the rest of his glass and said, “Good night, young ’uns. Don’t argue,” he added, with a finger in Jadzia’s face. “You have the energy of a thirty-year-old. You’re insufferable, the both of you.” And with that, he was off toward the Habitat Ring.
Jadzia turned back toward Julian. “I saw when you figured it out,” she said with a smug smile. “It really did look like someone had turned on a light inside your head. Your whole face lit up.”
Julian scrubbed his hands down his face in frustration. “If I’m that transparent, I don’t see how this helps me at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it must be painfully obvious to everyone—let alone a trained spy—how I feel about him. If he’s interested, too—if he’s been flirting this whole time—why hasn’t he made a move?”
Jadzia shrugged and took a sip of her dark green cocktail (a ‘Risian Reverie’—a Quark original, on promotion, which she had declared “not bad”). “Maybe he was waiting for you to figure it out and make the first move.”
“Why would he do that?”
“You’re considerably younger than he is. Maybe he wants to make sure that you’re getting involved entirely of your own volition.”
“Maybe,” Julian said dubiously. “Or maybe he wasn’t flirting at all. Maybe he just likes arguing, and it’s convenient for him that I’m not Cardassian, so I won’t interpret it as anything else. Or maybe—” He swallowed painfully. “Maybe he is flirting, but he’s counting on me not to figure it out because he doesn’t want it to go anywhere. Maybe it’s just a game to him.” Maybe I’m just a game to him.
“Or maybe,” Jadzia said gently, “he’s been counting on you not to figure it out because he’s afraid that you would reject him.”
Julian raised his eyebrows, forehead furrowed. “Garak, afraid of being rejected? By me?”
“Why is that so implausible? I mean, look at you, and look at him.”
Julian frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t really need me to spell it out—and neither does your ego.”
Julian gave her a halfhearted glare, mouth pulled to the side. “So you’re saying… you think I’m attractive… and he’s not?”
She leaned forward slightly, widened her eyes, and turned her hands palm-up—a gesture that said eloquently, “Well, duh.”
“But— but he’s a master spy. He can hack into any computer system, and find information that was supposed to be deleted, and bluff his way out of Cardassian military inspections with secret authorization codes, and he can draw a weapon, turn, and fire it with deadly accuracy faster than someone with their weapon already drawn.”
“Julian…”
“I’ve heard two separate reports of that last one—from Quark, and from Sisko, Odo, and Kira. ‘Fastest gun in the West’ has got nothing on him—he’s the fastest gun in the Alpha Quadrant.”
“Okay, you’ve lost me.”
“Sorry—old Earth cultural reference.”
“Julian, all that is very impressive—if you need a secret agent for a rescue mission. That’s not what most people are looking for in a sexual or romantic partner.”
“Oh. Well, I know that. But… you have to admit, it’s damned sexy.”
Jadzia rolled her eyes. “Yes, I could tell you wanted to jump him while he was breaking codes in Ops. But he’s also a middle-aged Cardassian, exiled alone on a Bajoran station, with exactly one friend.”
Julian folded his arms. “Until quite recently, I was a young Human with exactly one friend. And before you ask, it was Garak.”
“Yes, he could tell you needed a friend… but I’m sorry to say I doubt his motives were pure. He probably thought a lonely young man, desperately in need of an affirmation of his worth, would be easier to manipulate… and, well, seduce.” She said this with a sympathetic gaze, which somehow made it sting even more.
“But he hasn’t seduced me. It would’ve been easy—you’re right, I would have jumped him that day in Ops if I’d thought he’d reciprocate… or, well, if we hadn’t all been about to die. Hell—that first time he shoved me into a dressing room to listen in on his meeting with the Duras sisters, I would’ve let him shove me against a wall.”
“Julian!” Jadzia gasped, pretending to be scandalized, her eyes twinkling with the very specific gleeful satisfaction that she derived from salacious gossip. “You shameless hussy!”
He shrugged. “That isn’t news to you.”
“Here’s what I think,” she said, turning serious again. “I think he’s been trying to seduce you all along, but with some degree of subtlety—he wanted to have deniability and be able to save face if you weren’t interested. I think he thinks that if you were interested, you’d have picked up on the signals. But you haven’t, so he’s kept courting you in the Cardassian way—which he doesn’t expect you to understand—just to amuse himself, to indulge in a little harmless fantasy without scaring you off.”
Julian considered this. “I suppose… that does make sense. I guess… I guess I’m not good at picking up on that kind of interest if it isn’t made glaringly obvious.”
“That certainly is your modus operandi…”
Julian tightened his lips and looked away in remembered shame.
“Remind me why you haven’t taken the ‘glaringly obvious’ approach with Garak…?” Jadzia teasingly challenged him.
Julian tipped his beer glass and peered down into it, as if fascinated by the drifts of bubbles. “Well… at first because I didn’t even know if same-sex relations are permitted among Cardassians. It might have been an appalling insult if I had proposed it. Then, by the time Garak was giving me Cardassian literature which indicated that it is permitted…”
“…you’d already established a friendship that you didn’t want to risk. Right.”
“It turns out that the ‘arguing as flirting’ thing is a very old feature of Cardassian culture,” Julian volunteered cheerfully. “I noticed it in the classic works Garak has been giving me to read—they’re mostly pro-State propaganda, but they do have romantic subplots—but I thought it was some sort of literary convention, like in Terran romantic comedies. Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, that kind of thing.”
“And he never gave you more recently written romance novels so you could compare the courtship styles…?”
“No, he flatly refused to give me anything written in the last century.”
Jadzia snorted. “Snob, much?”
Julian smiled fondly. “Garak is nothing if not a snob. A literary snob, a fashion snob, a food snob, a kanar snob… except when he’s trying to drink himself into oblivion,” he amended, recalling with a twinge of pain the bottle of Quark’s cheapest swill that he’d had to confiscate from a stumbling, slurring Garak when the implant in his head was killing him.
“Oh, Julian,” Jadzia said warmly, and put a hand on his. “You should see your face right now. You’re practically glowing.”
He groaned and buried his face in his arms. “I’m so fucked. What do I do?”
“Either get obvious… or, if you’re not comfortable with that,” she added—probably in response to Julian’s expression of mild panic—“make it clear that you know what he’s doing. Say something about Miles’s encounter with Gilora. Try to drop it into the conversation naturally, of course—just a funny example of cross-cultural miscommunication, ha ha—and oh, is it true that Cardassians show sexual interest by arguing?”
The thought of such a direct conversational route to the topic made Julian feel faintly nauseous. Then an idea occurred to him. “Or—I know! I’ll have him read Much Ado About Nothing. I’ll tell him that Shakespeare illustrated the sexual chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick through their verbal chemistry, while Claudio and Hero barely converse at all…”
Jadzia gave him an affectionate, lopsided smile. “Sounds a little convoluted for me, but perfect for the two of you.”
Julian’s face fell as a contrary thought occurred to him. “Oh, but he might not want to read a romantic comedy… we’ve mostly been exchanging serious literary landmarks of our cultures. War epics, multigenerational sagas, royal tragedies, that kind of thing. I’ve started him with the early works—Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey, the Mahabharata, Aeschylus and Sophocles…” He trusted Jadzia to know enough about Human literature, from her past several lifetimes living within the Federation, to have some idea of what he was talking about (even if the ‘fastest gun’ thing had gone over her head).
“So give him one of Shakespeare’s tragedies first, to establish him as a serious author. Then say ‘and would you believe it, he wrote these romantic comedies, too, and they’re just as good!’”
“Of course! He ought to like Julius Caesar; plenty of political intrigue and literal backstabbing…”
Jadzia clapped him on the back with a grin. “Right up Garak’s alley.”
“Yes. All right. I have a plan.”
Julian knew he was grinning like an idiot—he could tell from the touch of irony in Jadzia’s otherwise encouraging smile—but dammit he didn’t care because he was happy and terrified and his nerves were jangling like windchimes in a hurricane. Maybe I have a chance with Garak. Maybe he’ll want me, too. They would have to keep it secret, he knew—he dreaded to think what Starfleet would think of him striking up an affair with a Cardassian spy, and Garak doubtless still had enemies that might seek to use Julian against him… but oh, what a secret to keep! So much warmer and sweeter and more thrilling than the secret he had carried like a leaden chain around his heart for the past fifteen years. A secret love affair with a master spy! He’d been rebuked for thinking his life in ‘frontier medicine’ would be like an adventure holonovel, and yet…
Don’t count your chickens, Bashir, he scolded himself. He might not even be interested. But his irrepressible imagination was already counting the scales on Elim’s back.