22. Two Kinds of Difficult #2
"I doubt that, Cap," Tavi said. Maren's shimmer flickered from laughing.
"Well?" Charlie asked, already laughing because the whole night had been about laughter. "What did the Captain say on his private comm channel? You can't just say it happened and not spill the goods, Tav."
"Poetry," Tavi said, with absolute sincerity.
"Poetry?" Maren asked.
"Oh, it gets better. He was reading poetry to his cat."
"He had a cat on a starship?" Reyna asked, clearly surprised and slightly intrigued.
"He had two cats on a starship. Coalition regulations are very clear on companion animals. He had filed the paperwork."
"For both cats?" Orion asked.
"For both cats. Individual forms completed and everything. In fact, he'd named them after former Admirals."
Reyna, from the floor, said: "Admiral Vondra would have been honored."
Everybody turned to look at her. She was holding her mead, expression neutral, and the timing was so perfect that the laugh hit Charlie before she could prepare for it.
"Look at that, the Captain does have a sense of humor," Tavi said.
Reyna's mouth twitched, but not a smile. It was the suggestion of one, held at the edges, offered to the room as proof that the Captain did, in fact, have a sense of humor she only let out for special occasions.
Charlie had an overwhelming desire to make her do that again. She didn't bother pretending otherwise.
The night drifted the way the best ones do with the conversation moving without anyone steering it, from Tavi's stories to Maren's gentle corrections that no one ever argued with to Orion's quiet questions that always landed deeper than they sounded.
At some point, Charlie was explaining thunderstorms.
"You mentioned that once before," Reyna said. "The rain and how it smelled different before it arrived. 'Petrichor,' you called it."
Charlie blinked. She had mentioned that, just once, during one of their late nights in the Observation Room.
Charlie recalled it as barely a sentence, an overlooked stray thought about Indiana weather while they watched a nebula drift past the viewport.
She hadn't thought it was worth remembering, but Reyna had.
"You remembered that?" Charlie said.
"I looked it up," Reyna said, as though this were a perfectly normal thing to do with a word a human had mentioned once in passing.
"Petrichor. Greek roots, which I understand is a race but also a language on Earth?
Petra, it said, which means stone. And Ichor, which is the fluid that flows through the veins of the gods.
" She took a sip of her mead. "I thought it was beautiful.
That your species named the smell of rain after the blood of gods. "
Charlie stared at her. Reyna had gone back to her quarters after that night, pulled up the word, researched its etymology, and kept it with her. She'd been thinking about Charlie's words between conversations.
Charlie noticed. And something about it, the care, the quiet effort of someone going and looking up a word just because Charlie had said it once, made her go still for a moment as she realized someone had been paying attention to her when they didn't have to be.
She kept talking about thunderstorms.
"The air changes taste?" Reyna asked with genuine interest.
"I mean, maybe not taste, exactly. It's more like... the air around the storm gets thick. Really thick. Charged, even, because you can feel the electricity of the lightning around you. You can completely feel the storm before you see it."
"We have something similar," Reyna said. "Before a solar flare reaches a planet's magnetosphere, the ambient field shifts. Most species can't detect it, but Kaelari can feel it through their markings." She paused. "It's the feeling of something there before it arrives."
Their eyes met, but Charlie was the one to look away first.
"Is it difficult?" Reyna asked. "Being here? On a ship where I imagine nothing is familiar."
"Difficult," Charlie repeated, testing it. Then, with a soft smile, because it was the truest answer she had: "Two kinds of difficult. There's the kind that breaks you and the kind that changes you."
Reyna was quiet for a moment. "Which kind is this?"
"I'll let you know when I figure it out." Charlie smiled. "Give me about three and a half months."
Something crossed Reyna's face. "I promise I'm going to hold you to that."
And Charlie believed her, because Reyna kept every promise she made.
Later that same evening, after Tavi had fallen asleep sitting up and Maren had quietly excused herself; after Borran had retreated to his kitchen and Orion had carried his datapad to bed, Charlie and Reyna remained the last two in the library.
They were sitting on the floor, backs against the same shelf.
Charlie didn't remember when the distance between them had closed.
It had happened gradually, through small shifts neither of them seemed to be steering.
Seeking comfort or a different position to let feeling back into a leg with pins and needles; adjusted limbs after stretching or getting up and retrieving something more to drink.
It was the kind of incremental migration that settles you.
At one point, Charlie was talking. Later, she wouldn't be able to tell you what she'd been saying, probably something about California, or Helen's kitchen, or the way the stars looked different from Earth. But honestly, it didn't matter. What mattered was the silence that followed her story.
In the silence, she heard the music.
Sting's voice, barely there, acoustic guitar so spare it sounded like someone playing in the next room with the door cracked open.
"Fragile." It had probably been playing for a while.
Charlie hadn't noticed until the talking stopped and the room went quiet.
There was nothing left between them but the song and where their hands were.
Charlie couldn't tell you exactly how or when it had happened, but her hand was resting on the floor. And she noticed that Reyna's hand was also resting on the floor. But it was the gap, the gap that was maybe an inch, possibly less.
Neither of them had placed their hands where they were now. They had just ended up where they were. And Charlie suddenly felt as though she may have been gravitating toward Reyna because she had run out of space to pretend this whole thing wasn't happening.
Charlie felt it like a current. Suddenly, this inch of air between her hand and Reyna's hummed with something she could practically hear.
She didn't move a single degree. She stayed exactly where she was, feeling the proximity pulse against her skin. All she could think was to just not move because then it could keep being accidental.
It was Reyna who moved when she reached to pick up her mead.
There was nothing special about the move. It was smooth, unhurried, just a casual gesture that would only look like something else if you were watching for it. Reyna's fingers left the floor. The inch of charged air dissolved. The cup came up to her lips.
And in that moment, Charlie realized she had been watching for it.
She didn't know what she'd expected. For the inch to close? For Reyna's hand to find hers? But she'd been watching, and what she saw was Reyna reach for the mead at a very specific moment, with very specific timing, and something about the precision didn't look casual. It looked like an exit.
Charlie understood exits. She'd been building them for herself recently.
The warmth that had been sitting in the space between their hands was gone, and what replaced it was an emptiness that felt specific. A space where something was supposed to be and wasn't.
But then again, it was probably nothing.
Maybe Reyna just wanted her mead. And that was the problem with noticing everything about a single person you were paying too much attention to.
You'd start building patterns out of ordinary moments, and after a while, it would make it almost impossible to tell the difference between what's real, and what you wish was.