Hulk, Peter David [best ereader for academics .TXT] 📗

at least he was consistent in that respect. Then, as if he had taken long seconds to recall what she had just said, he replied, “You are tired, but you look great.”

She smiled sadly. There was no doubt that he was sincere. But usually when a guy compliments a girl, Betty thought, she could sense any range of emotions or wants filtering through the carefully chosen words. Whereas Bruce was just . . . Bruce. She wondered, not for the first time, if he was gay. He reset the camera and then went to sit beside her. He put his arms around her and the camera took the picture. He looked at her and brushed her hair back. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

Betty had no intention of telling him, but she blurted it out before she could stop herself. “It’s the dreams. They’re terrible. I keep having them.”

“Then do like me: Don’t sleep,” said Bruce. There was an air of forced joviality in his tone, but it didn’t fool Betty for a moment.

She placed a hand atop his. “Not an option . . . and it shouldn’t be for you either,” she said in a serious tone.

It wasn’t difficult for Bruce to turn somber. It was his natural state of being; anything else he did was an affectation assumed for Betty’s benefit. His face clouded, he drew her closer in a protective manner. “Tell me about your dream.”

She liked the weight of his arm around her, and snuggled in even closer to him. She felt like she fit there, one piece of a jigsaw puzzle finding its mate. In doing so, she relaxed enough to talk about her dreams for the first time in ages. “It starts as a memory. I think it’s my first memory. An image I have from when I was maybe two years old. There’s this . . . this little girl . . .”

“You?”

She nodded, half-smiling. “You don’t miss a trick, do you? Yes, it’s me. I’m in an ice-cream parlor. And I’m being tossed into the air, caught, tossed again.”

“Who’s doing it?”

“My father. He’s in full uniform. He looks so—” She paused, trying to figure out the best way to phrase it. “He’s looking the way I always saw him when I was a child. Big, proud, invincible. More than human.”

“I’d be careful about things that are more than human, if I were you.” He paused thoughtfully. “So you’re bouncing up and down, and your father’s involved. Sounds vaguely Freudian.”

“Oh, you!” She elbowed him in the chest and was rewarded with a startled grunt. “One more comment out of you like that . . .”

“I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his chest where she’d struck him. “Okay, so . . . your father . . . invincible, et cetera. Then what?”

“Well, then this jeep pulls up, and soldiers are calling my father over. And things start getting jumbled together—you know, the way they do in dreams. Like, one moment I’m still in the ice-cream parlor, and suddenly I’m in a desert, and then there’s a house with a little boy looking out a window, and then I’m back in the parlor. Except it all makes sense when it’s happening.” She could almost see the images now, as if watching a film unspooling. “He’s putting me down. I’m crying. Then there’s this . . . this rumbling sound, like a storm coming in, but it’s not a storm. There’s this cloud . . . with a green tint. It’s almost like it’s alive. . . .”

“You think it’s a memory,” Banner asked, “or is it just a dream?”

She shook her head. “I think it’s something that must have happened out at Desert Base with my father, when I was growing up,” said Betty.

“Desert Base. That’s the one filled with aliens and UFOs, right?”

She knew perfectly well that he knew the difference, but she laughed anyway, appreciating his endeavor to lighten the mood a touch. “That’s Area 51, silly,” said Betty. “Desert Base is even more secret. Anyhow . . .” Her thoughts drifted back to the narrative, and now that she was talking about it, she could see it even more vividly. “The dream keeps going. Suddenly I’m alone. I’m crying and crying, and then a hand covers my face.”

“Your father’s?”

She shook her head, and couldn’t quite look him in the eye as she said softly, “Yours.”

He withdrew from her then, just as she suspected he might. Still seated, she turned to face him, expecting him to look appalled or horrified or hurt or . . . or something. Instead his expression, as always, was totally, infuriatingly impassive.

“But that’s terrible,” said Banner. At most he sounded ruffled, as if the idea was ludicrous. “You know I would never hurt you.”

“You already have,” said Betty, affectionately but pained.

“How?”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

She watched his eyes carefully as she said it. Once again she sought . . . astonishment? Surprise? Hurt? Anger?

Nothing. Just that same, infuriating calm, as if the very notion of acting in any manner that suggested depths of emotion was anathema to him. “I don’t understand why you would say that.” He made the comment with the same puzzled air that might pervade him if an experiment didn’t quite go right.

“Do you love me, Bruce?”

“Of course. You know I do.”

“You see! Right there!”

Finally an emotion: bewilderment. “Right where?”

“Right there, right now. The way you said that. ‘You know I do.’ Bruce, the woman you love has doubts about how you feel about her, and you respond with such detachment that you might as well be saying that it looks like it might rain.”

“I’m not detached,” he assured her.

“Aren’t you? Bruce,” and she squeezed his hand even harder, “we’ve talked about things, made plans, but I’ve never gotten a feeling from you that you have anything truly emotional invested in our relationship.”

“I thought you knew me better than that.”

“Oh, I know you . . . better, I think, than you know yourself . . .”

“No.”

Betty was startled at