6. The Touch #3
“Does it always do that?” I ask. Quiet. Because the purr is a small, precious thing and I don’t want to startle it.
“No.” One word. All he has left.
I move my fingers. Slower. Through the thickest part of the down where it’s almost fur, and the purr shifts register — deeper, resonant, a sound that fills the cockpit in a way the engines don’t.
I can feel it in the console beneath my feet, in the arm of the pilot’s chair, in the bones of my wrist where my pulse is doing something I’m not going to measure.
“No one has touched me like I am something worth being gentle with.”
The sentence arrives in the cockpit like something dropped from a height. He says it without inflection, without looking at me, his head still bowed, his neck still offered. He says it the way I write in the notebook — because someone should say it, even if nobody asked.
My hand goes flat against his nape. Warm.
Holding. Not stroking now, just — there.
Present. Telling him with my palm what I can’t say yet with words, because the words are too big and the cockpit is too small and there is a man under my hand who has not been touched gently in living memory and I want to burn every system that made him this way.
The feeling behind my ribs — the one with teeth, the one that drives the notebook — is so large I can’t breathe around it.
My thumb finds the spot behind his ear where the fuzz gives way to smooth skin at the base of his horn. The sensitivity there is — he makes a sound. Not the purr. Shorter. Sharper. A sound that goes through me like voltage and settles somewhere I am absolutely not going to name.
“Does your whole body do this?” My voice is not professional. My voice is not Morrison-approved. My voice is the voice of a woman who has found the sound a man makes when you touch the right spot and is going to be thinking about it at three in the morning for the rest of her life.
“Some areas are...” He stalls. The tactical vocabulary, the clinical precision, the nine years of SRS briefing language — gone. “...more responsive.”
“Show me.”
The air between us catches fire. Not literally — but his thermal output spikes so hard I can feel it on my face, and the markings along his shoulders darken visibly, flushing with heat, and the scent in the cockpit shifts to something warm and dark and spiced that my body recognizes before my brain does and responds to in a way that is immediate and specific and completely, catastrophically unwise.
His tail unwraps from his calf. Crosses the gap between the chairs.
Finds my thigh — the outside, above the knee — and rests there.
Not wrapping. Not gripping. Just weight.
His weight, on my body, a choice he is making with his eyes on my face and his hand closed into a fist at his side and the crescent marks still healing and the purr vibrating through both of us.
I look down at the tail on my thigh. Look up at him. My hand has not moved from the back of his neck.
“For the record,” Sprout says from the ceiling, “the Xarthian’s pheromone output has increased 340% in the past four minutes. I have switched to external air recycling and am venting the cockpit. You are welcome.”
I close my eyes. Open them. “Sprout, your timing is a gift to the galaxy.”
“I am aware.”
The moment doesn’t break. Sprout’s intervention should discharge the tension — that’s what Sprout does, that’s the valve.
But my hand is on his neck and his tail is on my thigh and the sentence about gentleness is sitting between us like a coordinate on a map neither of us has seen before, and I don’t want the moment to break.
I want to stay in it. I want to map every inch of the fuzz and find every sound he makes and follow the markings wherever they go.
I want. That’s the thing. I want.
I haven’t wanted like this in so long I’d forgotten the shape of it.
Sprout’s orb shifts from green-gold to tactical white. “Five new signatures accelerating. Revised intercept time: six hours.”
His hand lands on my shoulder. Not a decision — a placement, his palm against the slope of muscle where the cardigan has slipped, his fingers curving over the ridge.
The warmth sinks through fabric into skin and I can feel every individual fingertip, blunt, claws retracted, gentle with a deliberateness that tells me gentleness does not come naturally to these hands and he is choosing it anyway.
“We have a problem,” he says.
“The mercs?”
“The mercs are running SRS transponder codes.”
The words land in my sternum. His hand tightens on my shoulder — half a degree, blunt fingertips pressing into the muscle with an urgency that is not tactical — and his eyes are gold and dark and looking at me with something that might be fear, if fear wore the face of a man who has just realized the only structure he’s ever known has sent people to kill him.
“SRS sent them,” I say. Not a question.
“SRS sent them.” His voice is steady. His hand is shaking. “And I told them exactly where to find us.”