“We’ve been over that,” Will reminded her. “The degree of tutoring he needs is more than I can handle and still keep my own grades up. I can’t really spare any time for him, much less the amount he’s looking for.”
“So what you’re saying is that your career takes precedence over your friends,” she translated.
He paused, understanding that he was about to go over a waterfall without so much as a barrel to ride in. “That’s right. It has to.”
“All your friends?”
Will swallowed but answered quickly. “That’s right.”
“I had a feeling,” she said. “At lunch, when you just let me walk away.”
“I really am not sure how I’m supposed to stop everyone from walking away,” Will said. “Flying tackles? Is that better?”
“Usually a simple word or two will do it,” Felicia told him. “But you have to want to say them.”
“What words? You know I’m not good at this, Felicia. You want me to tell you that I love you? I do. Or I think I do, and if there’s a difference I don’t know what it is. But that’s not really what this is about, is it?”
“Not really,” she said, keeping her steady gaze fixed on him. “Not whether you can say it, anyway. More whether you can mean it.”
“I do mean it,” he tried to assure her. “As much as I have ever loved anyone, I love you.”
“Are you sure about that, Will?”
“But obviously,” he went on, ignoring her question, “that’s not enough. For either of us. You want more than I can give. And I feel like I’m already too committed—like just being in a relationship with you is costing me too much. I can’t concentrate on my work, I can’t separate my personal life, my emotional life, from the things that I need to do to reach my goals.”
Now he realized that her eyes had gone liquid. She sniffed once. “I had hoped that you were different, Will,” she said. “I saw—I still see—a great person inside you, a wonderful, loving man who is driven and ambitious but also kind and generous and giving. It’s those qualities, in combination, that make you the man I want to be with—the man I’ve wanted to be with since I met you, even though I had to wait so damn long for you to figure it out. And these past few months, when you’ve actually been that man, have been amazing. I’ve felt things, being with you, that I could barely have imagined in my wildest fantasies.”
A tear escaped her eye and trailed down her left cheek. She ignored it and kept talking. “Your problem, Will, is that you haven’t yet figured out how to be the whole person you really are. You think you can only be one part of you at a time, and that’s not true. So even though you really arethe man I love, you can’t seem to give yourself permission to bethat man.” She turned her head away, finally releasing him from the withering assault of her nearly unbearable scrutiny. “Funny how I’ve always known you better than you know yourself. That’s backwards, William. You don’t have to let it be that way.”
“But maybe I do,” he countered. “If that’s the way I am. You may be right, but I can only be the person I am now, at this time, in this moment. If I can change that in time, fine. But that still doesn’t help us right now.”
“Apparently there is no help for us now.”
“It doesn’t look that way,” he agreed.
“Well,” she said, sniffling and trying on a smile. “Fun while it lasted, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I am sorry. Really, really sorry.”
“Me too, Will. Me too.”
He sat there a moment longer, feeling impossibly awkward. There was nothing to say or do that was the right thing, in this situation. He wanted to touch her, to throw himself at her, to scoop her into his arms and apologize, to tell her that he’d been stupid and he’d be different now. But he knew that wasn’t true, and he wouldn’t fool her for a second. He was right, he could only be the person he was. And the person he was put his career ahead of everything else. There would be plenty of time for relationships after he had achieved what he needed to professionally. For now, he had to prioritize.
“I guess it’s my turn, then,” he said at last. “To walk away.”
“Looks like it,” Felicia agreed. “Since it’s my room and all.”
Nothing left to say, Will rose and went to the door. He caught a final glimpse of Felicia, the most beautiful, loving woman he had ever known, sitting curled up on her couch, knees pulled against her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, and he walked out.
And she didn’t say anything to stop him.
Chapter 28
Even at the time, those last months, weeks, and days of Starfleet Academy ran together in a kind of watercolor blur for Will Riker. By the time a couple of years had passed, he was almost completely unable to remember the precise sequence of events that had transpired. As he was living it, he couldn’t see any rhyme or pattern, just work and more work.
He got up in the morning, forcing himself out of bed even though he didn’t feel like he’d had nearly enough sleep. Usually, he hadn’t. But when he rolled from his bed, the first thing he did was to check the computer, to make sure that any notes he’d made the night before—he had, in recent weeks, developed a habit of waking up at various times during the night with fresh ideas and inspirations—were, in fact, comprehensible. Then he quickly scanned the material he’d studied before going to bed. After a rushed breakfast, he dashed off to his first class. A series of classes interspersed with brief study breaks followed. In late afternoon, after his last class, he went to the gym for a hurried workout, then showered and had dinner. After dinner it was up to his room for more studying until he either dozed off at the computer or could no longer retain what he was working on. That was when he finally allowed himself to go to bed, only to begin the whole process again in a few hours.
But somehow, he got through it, and his grades, when he saw them, were the highest he had ever received. Around campus there was mixed relief and concern at grade time, as those who had done well hurried to call friends and family and share the news, and those who had not agonized over their missteps and the possible cost to their future careers. Will didn’t have any family to contact, though, if you didn’t count his father who, he was pretty sure, was still missing someplace. And he hadn’t seen much of his friends lately—some, like Dennis and Felicia, wanted nothing to do with him, and the rest had been more or less abandoned in the mad rush toward finals and graduation.
Now that it was over, Will could exhale and start working on mending some of those fences, he figured. But his relief turned out to be a little premature. With graduation looming, that meant, he had every reason to believe, posting to a starship, and there was work to be done in preparation for that. He spent what seemed like hours filling out the documentation necessary for a Starfleet assignment, and he had to pack his personal items, some of which he simply gave away, or recycled, on the theory that a starship berth wouldn’t give him a whole lot of personal space. And then, before he knew it, graduation day was upon him.
“I’m no Federation president or galactic celebrity,” their graduation speaker began, his plain, folksy voice amplified to fill the cavernous space of the Academy’s vast auditorium. “I’m just a country doctor who has become sort of important, if at all, simply because I’ve managed to outlive all of my enemies.” Admiral Leonard H. McCoy looked out across the ocean of cadets, and Will could see the blue of his eyes even from his seat midway back. His tuft of hair was as white as the dress uniform he wore. “And some of my friends, too, I’m sorry to say. And I guess that’s what I’m here to talk to you all about today.
“You’ve finished your time at the Academy, which is a hell of an accomplishment, and you’ve every right to be proud of yourselves. But don’t sprain your arms pattin’ yourselves on the back, because what you’ve really done is just the first step in a long process. From here, you become Starfleet officers. Like a lot of Starfleet officers before you, including my best friend in the world, James Tiberius Kirk, some of you will be asked to give your lives in the service of Starfleet. Nobody wants to make that sacrifice—nobody wants to ask you to make it, either—but when they do, when the time comes, if it does, I hope you’ll do it in the spirit of the great Starfleet officers who went before you.