?No!? I exclaimed, shocked he would ask such a thing. ?Well then, what else?? ?Uh... you know I made pie today, right?? Joe exp...oded with laughter and I swatted at his upper arm. It may be an old trick of mine but it is still effective. When you hate answering the same questions you love to ask you learn to quickly utilize whatever resource you can to deflect, evade and if possible avoid the question altogether. ?You know you aren't off the hook, right?? He. "You can't be serious. I'm not going to have my brother stripping for you while he is up here." Well, I'm not the only one who would add money to the till to see him strip down to nothing." She commented."Besides, you seem to have always enjoyed yourself at Roscoe's for every other performance there." She jibed."Well, none of those involved my brother." I retorted."So don't look up at his face! Just keep your eyes on the prize, as you say! She chuckled."Damn, you are warped, Kami!" I. A bit more abstractly, he also guessed it was better for humans to face the Gorz in a system that had been set up for evacuation instead of Earth's system, though that was little more than an intellectual exercise for a man who had never seen Earth.Sangeeta had. Many times. It hurt to see his sister these days. Here he was, a crippled old man, while she looked hardly older than the day she stepped on the shuttle that took her off to the Fleet. It had been his choice to stay, and he had never. I looked up when he tapped on the open door."Hey," he said, holding up a bottle of wine. "Jon says being in the service means you're old enough for more complimentary swill. Come out and share this with me." Right on."There was no breakup-angst to the conversation this time. It started out light and laughing and quickly moved into flirtatious, Nic sitting close to me on the same bench as earlier and finding a lot of excuses to touch me and a lot of opportunities to compliment me.At first I.