Chapter 8 – Cosmic Alignment
"Well," I gasped the next night, "I think I've officially taught you everything I know.
Fuck, you're good, Araxis." I scrubbed hard at my face with my shirt, which I'd taken off entirely earlier in the warm training room.
Part of me thought it might work as a distraction and earn me a bit of reprieve, but aside from a few clumsy steps at first, Araxis was as competent and quick as usual. Better than usual.
He smiled at me and practically preened. "Do you think?" he asked, his own chest heaving.
"Don't play coy."
He trilled, delighted, and paced over to me to gather the practice blades. He plucked them from my hands, fingers brushing my own, and I felt the same, familiar instinct the moment my hands were free: to shove him backwards, or take his face gently, or –
There was another reason I didn't want to fuck him there in the training ring.
Do you think it might be different, he had asked me, if you chose just because of how you felt?
If I started something here, it would feel like payment.
A currency I traded in, just part of the same lessons that had been exchanged for passage.
That's certainly usually how these lessons ended with other clients, though we were well past the point where I would have already pulled the trigger.
So instead, I stepped away, jogging over to the edge of the room to grab a water. And because I had to know, I asked, "Does that about cover the trip, or are you going to put me to work scrubbing floors to make up the balance?"
Araxis was elbow-deep in the storage space, tucking the blades away, but he jerked back immediately, looking up at me from where he was crouched. His eyes were pinched in confusion. "I don't follow."
I gestured between us with the water. "We agreed: I'd provide lessons in exchange for passage. I mean, I think at this rate, you could teach me a few things. Are all sinnenthi this athletic? Part of being a protector?"
He flushed and stood, reaching and plucking the water from my hands to have a drink himself. "You owed me nothing for the journey, so the balance is paid. I am only grateful to have had this time – and to learn from you."
I had to be sure. "I mean, I've been eating a lot of soup. Are you sure I don't owe you anything else?"
From the charts, I knew we'd be arriving in the Thenat cluster in five days. The time span for this reprieve – this interlude, before the shit of my life caught up with me – was drawing to an end. So I had to know, and I had to know he knew as well.
Araxis waved a hand, dismissive. "You are foolish. There are no debts between us. We are… friends, are we not?" He tested the word, as if unsure.
That same strange tightness gripped my chest as he looked at me with his big black eyes. "Yeah, we are."
"In fact, though there are no debts between us, I had thought – Hm.
" He paused, pushing the bottle back into my grip.
"I will feed you, something that is not just dasha.
Go and shower, and find me in the dining room.
And put your shirt on, or the children will have three hundred questions if they see you.
" He reached out to the middle of my chest and gave me a gentle shove, rocking me back just barely on my heels.
I didn't move, eyebrows inching up as his hand stayed in place for a moment: his palm pressed to the skin between my pecs, chilled against my heat-flushed skin. His stare dropped down to the sight of his fingers splayed there, lips parted just slightly.
"Do you have three hundred questions?" My voice was hoarse, low.
As Araxis's eyes flicked up, I could hear an answering rumble – the start of a subvocalization I was unfamiliar with. He let his hand drop. "Only one. I will see you in the dining room."
He was out of the room before I could fully recover from the feeling of his cool palm on my chest. I took my time heading up to the top deck, trying to settle what felt inexplicably like nerves. How was I nervous? I was never nervous.
But… I've read it can be revelatory.
What a word, and what an expectation to live up to.
Sex had never been like that for me. And that wasn't to say I didn't enjoy it: I'd have found a different job if that was the case.
Even when I was lukewarm on my clients, I still enjoyed fucking.
There was still an undercurrent of transgression, of doing something forbidden, that really worked for me.
Yet again, the idea that my lack of hang-ups might indeed be a hang-up struck me as particularly unfair, and also likely to be true.
But revelatory… That was new.
Could I do that for him? I didn't know, but I sure as hell could try. And I'd be a better first time than a lot of other options. At least I had experience on my side, and more than a week's worth of sexual tension to bring to a head.
I scrubbed hard in the steam shower, scouring sweat from my skin and making sure I was thoroughly clean.
I didn't have much in the way of clothes, definitely not many that were warm enough for this ship, but I sacrificed some comfort for allure and pulled on one of my dancing outfits from the den.
Dark pants clung to my thighs, leaving little to the imagination but allowing for good freedom of movement.
I pulled on one of my tops, which left my arms bare, the neckline and arm holes loose so that, when I shifted, flashes of skin would show.
But I knew I'd be freezing. Heated glances, as nice as they were, wouldn't be enough to keep me warm, and all of the sweaters I had were decidedly bulky and lumpy.
I settled, instead, on the jacket Araxis had loaned me and which I had been curling up under at night.
The idea that he might have guessed I'd been sleeping with it had been humiliating earlier; now I found it kind of hot, like he might realize I wanted to press him into my skin, I wanted to smell him all around me.
Virra were known to be ravenous, he'd said, and the closer we got, the more I felt like I was starving.
I'd rarely gone this long without sex… and the added pressure of knowing we'd be arriving in the Thenat cluster soon, that tension that just kept tightening between us every time we were near each other, meant that I was ready to break, in the very best way.
I found him an hour or so after we'd parted, there in the dining room.
The lights had been dimmed somehow to the softest yellow, like candlelight – impressive, considering how often they didn't want to work at all and how loudly I'd heard him cursing them, the ship, and whatever ancestor had thought to install budget lighting – and the low table was laden with at least a dozen bowls of varying sizes, little dishes arrayed over the surface like stars in a nebula.
I stepped in, and Araxis's pale face appeared from the small kitchen at the back, where I made my daily soup rations and where we'd found ourselves sitting twice for our late night conversations.
He blinked at me, then cleared his throat. "Hm. Sit, Sashen. I'm nearly done."
Steam wafted from some of the bowls, plumes of sweet and savoury scents that made my mouth water.
A few of these were familiar – I saw dumplings, pale and plump in one bowl; a grain that was more or less rice in another; green vegetables sitting in some sort of brine – but many weren't. There was a smoky quality to the steam, something warm and spiced and I wanted, all at once, to taste everything.
But I sat on one of the cushions arrayed by the low table, and I waited.
He trailed out after a few moments of clattering in the kitchen, placing three more bowls on the table and then returning with large, shallow bowls for us to use.
Araxis set one in front of the cushion next to me on the left side of the table, then rested one hand on my shoulder as he placed the final bowl in front of me.
His touch lingered, my skin buzzing where he touched me – electric.
"Is anyone else joining us?" I asked, looking up at him after surveying the massive scope of this meal, the sheer number of different dishes carefully arranged before me. His hand still rested on my shoulder, his thumb moving gently in a careful caress.
"No. This is just for us."
My throat was tight; Araxis's hand was a weight that pinned me in place, an anchor. My voice was soft when I spoke. "You didn't have to do this for me."
"Is it too much? Too sinnenthi?" he asked with a knowing smile, and I snorted at hearing my own words parroted back.
"It brings me pleasure to care for you in this way, Sashen.
And you cannot survive on dasha alone." His hand drifted down, along the seam of his jacket over my shoulder, and then he took a seat near my elbow, just around the corner.
We were close enough that I could see the dim lights overhead reflected in the black of his eyes.
"You'd be surprised what I can survive on," I said as Araxis leaned forward and began serving small portions of food from each dish onto my plate.
Seeing him like this, leaning forward and – tending to me made my skin flush hot, my body pulsing with something I was having a hard time understanding, much less naming.
From the way his smile sharpened, it was clear that he could see it too.
"Did Alet Trident not feed you?" he asked, placing a final dumpling in the middle of my plate and then nudging some utensils – essentially sticks with flared bottoms – toward me before he turned to his own empty plate.
"She paid us and kept a stocked pantry – but we logged everything we took and it was deducted from our pay.
When I first came to her and I could see my debts adding up every day – I mean, I wasn't working yet besides some eavesdropping; she was still training me for service – I tried to find cheaper ways to eat.
She put a stop to it when I started passing out during training. "