Chapter 7
Ready or Not
Lorri
The adrenaline is not leaving.
It has been over an hour since Jazil killed the Vrennak and my hands are still shaking, and my heartbeat is still doing something that a medical professional would describe as “concerning” and I cannot sit down because sitting down means sitting still and sitting still means thinking about the fact that a Skiveth male just slayed a Vrennak with his bare hands to stop it from eating me and then touched my face like I was something that needed to be handled carefully, and I CANNOT think about that right now.
I am pacing the galley. He is in the cockpit.
We arrived at this arrangement by mutual, unspoken agreement after the third time we made eye contact across the table and the air between us did a thing that air should not be capable of doing.
Air is supposed to be neutral. Air is a medium for breathing, not a delivery system for whatever is happening between me and the shirtless alien in the next room.
Not alien. Male. Not man. Male. The distinction matters in a way I haven’t had to think about before because before today I had not spent an extended period in a sealed ship with a member of a species whose chest looks like that and whose voice does that and whose hands —
STOP IT.
“Ms. Vance.” HORATIO, from the ceiling. Chipper. Unforgivably chipper. “I am sensing elevated heart rates from both occupants. May I suggest a calming activity? I have a list.”
“No, thank you, HORATIO.”
“The list is alphabetized.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Item one: Ambient Sound Meditation. Item two: Breathing Exercises, guided. Item three —”
“HORATIO.” Jazil’s voice, from the cockpit. Flat.
“Withdrawing, Captain. The list will be available upon request. It has forty-seven entries. I am particularly proud of entry thirty-one.”
The galley hums. I pace. My hip aches where the tail caught me, and my temple throbs under the gauze, but I am alive and he is alive and the Vrennak is dead and we have twenty-one hours left and I cannot stop thinking about his hands.
His hands catching the Vrennak’s jaw. His hands on the rod.
His hands at my temple, my hip, the two-fingered touch on my bruise that he did with the focused precision of someone who wanted to use his whole hand and was choosing not to and the choosing was the thing.
The choosing is always the thing with him.
The way he asks. The way he waits. The way he says may I before he touches me, like permission, is not a formality but something he needs.
My stomach growls.
Not discreetly. Not a polite suggestion. A dock announcement. A stomach that has broadcast its requirements to the entire ship, including the cockpit where a Skiveth male with airborne scent detection can probably taste my hunger in the recycled air.
I want to die. I want the deck plate to open beneath me and swallow me into the engineering bay.
“Ms. Vance.” HORATIO. Delighted. “I believe your digestive system has submitted a formal request. I have been waiting for this moment. May I?”
HORATIO can cook. Not in the way a vending unit can heat a protein packet.
HORATIO has a galley prep system that he seems to have been customizing with the dedication of a butler whose employer eats out of containers and whose greatest sorrow is the waste of a good kitchen.
The prep unit whirs to life with what I can only describe as enthusiasm.
Panels open. A steam vent activates. Something that smells like actual food — warm, slightly spiced, with an undertone of something herbal — fills the galley.
“Captain!” HORATIO’s voice shifts to ship-wide. The tone is that of a ma?tre d’ seating his most important table. “Dinner is being served. Your attendance is requested.”
“HORATIO, I’m working on the —”
“Captain. Dinner is being served.”
A pause. Footsteps in the corridor.
Jazil appears in the hatchway. He leans on the frame. Arms folded. The posture is casual. The body is not casual. The body is a six-foot-three situation with dark ridges and no shirt and a bandaged forearm and a jaw that does things in the galley light jaws should not do, regardless of species.
“HORATIO made food,” I say. Like he can’t see the food. Like I am narrating the galley to a male who lives in it. Great, Lorri. Excellent contribution. Really earning that interview.
“He does that.” Jazil sits across from me. Takes the plate. “He’s been waiting for a guest.”
“I have been waiting for a guest,” HORATIO confirms. “For nine years. Nine years of single-portion meals, Captain. Nine years of one mug on the drying rack. Tonight, I am setting two places, and I would like the emotional significance of that noted in the ship’s log.”
“HORATIO.”
“Noted in the log, Captain.”
Two plates. Two cups of tea. Two sets of utensils. For a table that has never had a second setting. Something catches in my throat that has nothing to do with food.
We eat. The grain bowl is warm and slightly spiced; the first bite is doing things to my brain that adrenaline was not doing. The second bite is better, and the third involves a small involuntary sound that I did not intend and cannot take back.
Jazil’s spoon stops. He is looking at my mouth.
“Good?” he says. Careful.
“Very good.”
We eat. The galley is warm. I take a spoonful of the sauce — the good one, the rich one — and the spoon tilts, and the sauce goes sideways, and it doesn’t stop going sideways.
It pours down the front of the lucky top from the neckline to the hem like the sauce has decided the top is its new home and it is moving in immediately.
“OH —”
I grab the napkin. Dabbing. The dabbing makes it worse.
The sauce is spreading, and the top is — the top is the top.
My mother’s top. The one she pressed into my hands the day I left the colony.
You wear it the first day of every new thing, baby.
Every single first day. The top that has survived six years of first days and a station laundromat that shrank it by three inches, and I have worn it anyway, every time, because it was the first thing my mother ever gave me that said go instead of stay.
And I have dumped grain sauce all over it. In front of the hottest male I have ever sat across from in my life. On the first day, it actually mattered.
Typical. Absolutely typical. This is what I do.
This is what Lorri Vance does — she walks into the good thing and spills on it.
She gets the interview and trips on the ramp.
She gets the cargo bay and triggers the quarantine.
She gets the male with the jaw and the hands and the ridges and she DUMPS SAUCE ON HERSELF like a toddler at a birthday party.
“Ms. Vance.” HORATIO. Gentle. “I have a stain treatment protocol. The top can be cleaned.”
“It’s fine, it’s just a top.”
It is not just a top. It is the last thing my mother touched before I stepped onto the transport. But I will not cry about a stained shirt in a galley in front of a Skiveth male who killed a predator with his bare hands.
“Hey.”
His voice. Soft. Not the business voice. Not the galley banter. The voice from the hold, from the floor, from the moment he kneeled beside me and said let me see.
I look up. He is looking at me and his face has gone open in a way that has nothing to do with the sauce and everything to do with whatever just crossed my face that I did not hide in time.
“It’s from my mother,” I say. Because apparently my mouth is committed to honesty tonight. “She gave it to me when I left the colony. I wear it every first day. It’s — lucky.”
“Lucky.”
“Lucky in the sense that every time I wear it something goes catastrophically wrong and then something unexpectedly good happens. The laundromat shrank it by three sizes. It survived. My luggage got lost. The top was in my carry bag. I wore it to the interview. I got the job. I wore it today. I met —”
Stop. Stop stop stop! The sentence was going to end with you and I cannot say you like that in a galley with sauce on my chest while his pupils are doing the thing.
“— a Vrennak,” I finish. Weakly.
The almost-smile. He is not fooled.
“Lucky top,” he says. “Still working.”
“Still working.” I look down at the sauce stain.
At the straining neckline and the hem that rides too high and the fabric that is doing its absolute best, which is a LOT, and its absolute best is currently decorated with grain sauce and the galley light is on it and he is looking and I am looking at him looking and —
Oh.
He is looking at where the sauce hit. The neckline.
The fabric pulled tight. The curve of what the top is doing what it always does, which is everything, excessively, and he is not looking at the sauce.
He is not looking at the stain. He is looking at what the stain is on and his pupils have gone wide. The slit-to-wide shift.
I should be embarrassed. I should be mortified.
I am not embarrassed.
Something shifts in me. I like it. I like being looked at like that. I like that a male who caught a Vrennak with his bare hands is losing composure over a spilled sauce and I did that. Me. Without trying.
What would happen if I tried?
The thought is new. Reckless. Entirely out of character for a woman who apologized to a door panel two hours ago.
I dab the sauce. Slowly. Slower than necessary. At the neckline. Where his eyes are.
He picks up his spoon. Very deliberately. Returns to his plate. His jaw is set. I watch a muscle in it flex.
“You can borrow a shirt,” he says. Controlled. “There are clean ones in the cabin locker.”
“Your shirts will be enormous on me.”
“Yeah.” The almost-smile. Strained at the edges. “They will.”
I do not think about wearing his shirt. I do not think about fabric that has been against his skin being against mine. I do not think about the scent of him — clean, mineral, river stones — in the collar.
Lies. I am thinking about all of it.