Chapter 6
So Much Trouble
Jazil
We move to the galley. HORATIO gives the containment report — container sealed and logged, biological transport protocol confirmed, the pod itself flagged for inspection because the stress fractures mean it never goes back into rotation — and she listens and nods and asks one sharp question about the fractures, whether they were there before the breach or made by it, and it is the right question, the question that means she’s already thinking about who built that pod and why, and I want to press her against the galley hatch and kiss her for asking it.
I do not press her against the galley hatch.
The galley is small. Bolted table. Two bench seats. Prep unit. HORATIO’s display. One mug on the drying rack. One plate and one set of utensils. The kitchen of a male who has been eating alone for fourteen years and has never set a second place.
She stops in the hatch and takes it in. She doesn’t comment.
HORATIO makes tea. Two cups. “One Skiveth black, one station-standard. Ms. Vance, I have taken the liberty of assuming. If I am mistaken, I apologize, but I am not wrong.”
She takes the mug. Wraps both hands around it. Closes her eyes. Breathes it in. The sound she makes — soft, involuntary, a sound of warmth finding someone who needed it — goes through me directly. No defense.
I sit across from her. Pull up the incident report on the galley screen. The station will want it for the quarantine log. I need something to do with my hands that is not reaching across the table.
“Can I help?”
“You were involved. You’re a witness, not the filing party.”
“I triggered the quarantine. I feel like I owe you at least a damage inventory.”
“Fine. Start with the cargo manifest. HORATIO can give you the pre-breach list.”
She pulls the spare datapad toward her. Tongue between her teeth again. That concentration face. I focus on the report and do not look at her mouth.
I am certainly looking at her mouth.
The temperature climbs. The galley runs warmer than the hold — smaller space, climate rerouted. I am comfortable. She is not. Her cheeks flush and there is a sheen at her temples as she shifts inside the jacket.
“I need to —” she gestures. “I’m roasting.”
“Go ahead.”
She unzips. Shrugs the jacket off. It drops to the bench behind her, and she is in the lucky top underneath and —
The top has been under the jacket since her arrival at Bay 14.
Fitted. Sleeveless. Scooped at the neck.
Pale yellow-colored fabric pulled tight across her chest, embroidery at the hem.
It has been hiding under the jacket like a classified document, and it is now declassified, and I am not prepared for the declassification.
Her shoulders. The line of her collarbone. Bare arms from the shoulder down, soft and pale in the galley light. The curve where her neck meets her shoulder. A freckle — one freckle, right there, at the juncture of throat and collarbone — and my tongue wants to taste it.
I want to start at that freckle and work down and my teeth want the tendon at the side of her neck, not hard, just enough pressure to feel her pulse jump, and I want to follow the jump with my tongue and I want my hands on her waist and I want to feel what happens to her breathing when I pull her forward and put my mouth on the hollow of her throat.
I want to lift her onto this table. I want to stand between her knees and press my mouth to that freckle and feel the vibration when she makes whatever sound she’d make.
I want to find out what sound that is because I want to make the sound happen.
I want my hands under the hem of the top, pushing up, finding more skin, finding the curve of her ribs and the soft plane of her stomach and the underside of —
I want to chase her.
The thought arrives from the oldest part of my brain and it is the most Skiveth thought I have ever had.
I want her to run. Not from fear — from the game of it, from the heat of it.
I want her to run, and I want to catch her.
I want to crowd her into the narrow corridor between the galley and the cabin and put one hand on the bulkhead beside her head and the other at her hip and lean in and let my mouth find the skin behind her ear and say caught you and mean it.
I want to pin her wrists above her head with one hand and use the other to tilt her chin up and I want to take my time.
I want to take so much time she forgets there was ever a world outside the width of my body.
I want to make her shake. I want to feel her shake. I want to be the reason.
And then I want to do all of it again.
Ereux. The report. The REPORT.
“Problem?” she says. She caught me staring. She has absolutely caught me staring and there is something at the corner of her mouth that is going to be the death of me.
“No problem.”
“You stopped typing.”
“Thinking.”
“About the report?”
“About the report.”
I am not thinking about the report. I have not thought about the report since the top appeared. I type the word containment, and the word has three syllables and every syllable sounds like a different part of her body, and I am going to need professional help.
She reaches for the water pouch at the far end of the table.
The stretch pulls the top tight and exposes a strip of skin at her hip and the bruise is visible, pink going darker, and I look at the bruise and think about pressing my mouth to it and tracing it with my tongue and replacing every inch of hurt with something that would make her grip the edge of the table and arch her back and say my —
I stand up.
She looks at me. Startled.
“Refill,” I say. Taking my mug to the prep unit. Turning my back. Breathing. Three feet of distance. Not enough. Not nearly.
The prep unit hums. I stare at it. My ridges are so dark I can feel the heat of them from the inside, the warmth flooding through the raised tissue, and if I sit back down, she will see them and she will ask and I cannot lie about what she is looking at.
“Captain.” HORATIO. So quiet only I can hear it, routed to the prep speaker. “Your biosignature is significantly elevated. Your ridge coloration is — Captain, the color is remarkable. I have never recorded that shade. I am updating your file.”
“Do not update my file.”
“File updated, Captain. I will also note that you have been staring at the prep unit for thirty seconds, and the tea has been ready for twenty of them.”
“HORATIO.”
“Deep breaths, Captain. The therapeutic kind.”
The breath does not help because the breath is full of her — tea and skin and warm-sweet and a new note underneath that my hindbrain reads as interested and my forebrain reads as you cannot act on this, she is trapped in a sealed ship with you and you will NOT —
I sit back down. Ridges mostly under control. Mostly.
She is watching me with the patient, bright attention of a female who notices everything and says nothing until she’s ready. She doesn’t know what she’s looking at. She knows something is happening.
“So,” she says. Casual. Not casual at all. “Twenty-two hours.”
“Twenty-two hours.”
“In a sealed ship.”
“In a sealed ship.”
“With a deceased mutant predator and your AI updating your medical file without consent and —” Her mouth twitches. “What exactly are we supposed to do for twenty-two hours?”
I should not answer this the way I want to answer it. The way I want to answer it involves the table, the wall, the corridor, the bunk, and approximately none of our remaining clothes.
“I’ll think of something.”
She goes red. Not pink. Red. The flush starts at her cheeks and travels down her neck and disappears below the edge of the top, and she does not look away.
My ridges flood dark. Both arms. The warmth spreading under the gauze, visible, impossible to hide.
Her eyes drop to my forearms and widen, and come back to my face.
Neither of us mentions it.
“Are you always like this?” she says. Her voice is steady. Her cheeks are not.
“Like what?”
“Like —” She waves a hand between us. The hand is not steady either. “This.”
“For you?” I say. Low. Holding her gaze. “Special occasion.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. The flush deepens. She presses her lips together and looks at the ceiling, and I watch her try to compose herself and fail. And it is the best thing I have ever seen.
“You’re —” she stops. “You are very —”
“Very what?”
The hazel eyes come back to mine. Bright. Brave. The flush is still going.
“Tall,” she says. “You are very tall.”
“That’s the word you went with?”
“That is the word I am going with.”
“I’ll take it.”
We work. She does the manifest. I do the report.
Tea cooling between us. Pod feed running on the display.
The warm galley humming around us and the domestic impossibility of it — two people working across a table after nearly dying together, bare-armed, bare-shouldered, pretending the temperature in the room is the climate control.
She has organized the damaged cargo into categories. Color-coded. In fifteen minutes. With a bruised hip and a head wound. She is good at this and she doesn’t know it and the fact that she doesn’t know it is doing something to me that competence should not be able to do but is doing, anyway.
Her top shifts when she leans forward. The neckline dips. The freckle disappears and reappears. I track it with the focus of a man whose brain has decided a single freckle is critical intelligence.
She catches me. Again. The eyebrow goes up.
“You’re staring.”
“You have a —” I gesture vaguely at my throat. “Something. There.”
She touches her throat. Finds nothing. Looks at me. The eyebrow stays up. The corner of her mouth twitches.
“Liar,” she says. Soft. Almost fond.
The word goes through me like her hands on the ridges. The fondness in it. The ease. Three hours into an acquaintance and she is already comfortable calling me a liar. I want to lean across this table and put my thumb on that freckle and watch her eyes go dark.
Instead, I lean back. Hold her gaze. Let the almost-smile become the real one.
“Caught,” I say.
Something flickers in her expression. Quick. There and gone. The flush comes back, creeping up from the collar of the top. She looks down at the datapad.
I look at the report. I type structural damage to the port bulkhead and think about pinning her against it.
I type containment field re-engaged and think about the sound she’d make with her back against cold metal and my mouth on her neck.
I type incident duration: ongoing and think about twenty-two hours and all the ways I want to spend them and the specific order I would spend them in and the patience it would take and I have patience.
I have the patience of fourteen years. I have the patience of a long-haul courier who has run the same route for a decade and a half, and I would use every second of that patience on her.
Slow. Thorough. Until she came apart and then I would start again.
I delete a sentence I’ve typed twice. HORATIO makes a sound from the ceiling that is not quite a cough.
The galley is warm. She is warm. The air between us tastes like her, and the report is not getting written, and the twenty-two hours are ticking, and I am in more trouble than I have ever been in my life, and I have been in a lot of trouble.
She sets the datapad down. Stretches — arms above her head, the top riding up, the strip of skin at her waist appearing, and my jaw locks, and she catches the lock because she catches everything — and she looks at me with those hazel eyes and says:
“Do you have any games on this ship?”
Games. She wants to play a game. She is sitting in my galley with her arms above her head and her skin warm and her eyes bright, and she wants to play a game.
The instinct — the old, deep, Skiveth part of me that has been awake for an hour and has the patience of a hull breach — hears the word game and translates it into something that has nothing to do with cards.
The chase. The hunt. The oldest game. The one where she runs and I follow, and we both know how it ends.
She doesn’t know what she just asked. She has no idea. She is thinking of something with a screen and a scoreboard, and I am thinking about the corridor between the galley and the cabin and the exact number of strides it would take me to catch her if she ran.
Three. It would take three strides. I would give her a head start.
“Games,” I say. My voice is level. My ridges are not. “Yeah. I think I can find something.”
She smiles. Full smile. First one. It hits me in the chest like the Vrennak hit the rod — all the force in the world behind it.
“Great,” she says. “Because I am very competitive.”
I close my eyes.
I am in so much trouble.