7. Shared Berth #2
“Confirming all eight signatures beyond effective scanner range,” Sprout announces. “The Petal is invisible. I am incredible. You are both welcome.”
The unclassified signal fires again at 0216.
Same signature. Same eleven-second window.
Gone before I can source it. Sprout’s orb pulses once — that tight, uncertain oscillation I’ve seen exactly twice now — then logs: Classification: Unassigned.
Recommend continued monitoring. I do not like it either.
Xor does not look up from the display. “They will regroup. Standard SRS protocol after a failed intercept is to establish a grid search. We have five to six hours before they sweep back to our current position.”
“Five hours,” I say. The adrenaline is draining out of me in stages, each one pulling something structural with it.
Eighteen hours since my last sleep. The cockpit chair creaks under me and my spine objects and I think about curling up in it the way I did last night—legs folded, cardigan over my shoulders, cheek against the headrest that still smells faintly of the lemon polish I use when I’m anxious.
Last night I didn’t have a seven-foot Xarthian watching me sleep from across the cockpit. Last night I wasn’t vibrating with residual terror and the memory of his tail on my thigh and the word gentle sitting in my chest like a stone I swallowed.
The chair is not going to work tonight.
“I suggest you both rest,” Sprout says. “Your cortisol levels are inadvisable, and the Petal’s insurance does not cover pilot error due to exhaustion. I will wake you if any signature re-enters range.”
“You’ll wake us,” I repeat.
“Flossie. I have kept you alive for twelve years. I can manage a scanner sweep. Go to sleep before I adjust the ambient temperature to make the cockpit uninhabitable.”
Fair point. Also, credible threat.
“The cargo bunk,” I say, and I’m already standing, already moving toward the corridor before the thinking part of my brain can lodge a formal objection.
The chair is eighteen hours of ache stored in my lower back and a crick in my neck I’ll feel for days, and I am forty-two years old, and there is a mattress twelve feet away, and I am not sleeping folded into a cockpit seat like luggage when I have a perfectly good bunk.
My bunk. The only one the Petal has — I gave it to him the first night and took the chair, and neither of us has said a word about it since.
Then I stop.
The cargo bunk is narrow. Built for one. Xor is seven feet of crimson muscle with horns and a tail that is three and a half feet long and has opinions about where it wants to be.
“I will take the floor,” he says.
I look at his frame. I look at the floor space—two feet of corridor with cables and cargo straps.
“Don’t be stupid, lovey. There’s room.”
There is no room. I know this as I’m saying it, and the knowing doesn’t stop me, because the alternative is watching him fold himself onto my ship’s floor like he doesn’t deserve a mattress, and something in my chest—something with teeth—will not allow it.
“The berth is designed for a single human occupant.”
“The berth is designed for me, and I’m small.” I’m walking past him as I say it, not looking back, because if I look back I’ll see him calculating and I’ll lose my nerve. “Unless you’d rather sleep on cable conduits.”
The berth is exactly as small as I remember. Narrow platform, thin mattress, the blue blanket from the Tessaro market. I kick off my boots. Unholster Betsy, set her on the shelf within reach. “Evening, Bets.”
Tessaro. The manifest surfaces the way it does at odd hours: advance treatment, degenerative neural conditions, three species.
Somewhere there are wards full of people losing their hands’ memory of buttons and their mouths’ memory of names, and the thing that might stop it is in my hold, wrapped in shock-foam, riding through the dark with the fairy lights on.
I think about the kind of person who would kill a courier over a cure.
Then I stop thinking about it, because tonight is already carrying enough, and thinking it too loudly feels like inviting it in.
I unbutton the fox cardigan. Fold it. Set it beside the pillow.
The tactical vest goes next—velcro strips loud in the quiet bunk—and beneath it I’m in a shirt that is thinner than I’d like, worn soft from a hundred washes, and I am aware of this in a way I have not been aware of my clothing in a decade.
He is standing in the doorway. His silhouette fills it—shoulders, horns, the breadth of him blocking the corridor light—and he is watching me undress with an expression that is trying very hard to be clinical and is failing at every level.
“You’re staring, lovey.”
“I am assessing the available space.” His voice is flat. Professional. His pupils are so wide the gold is a thin ring. “The dimensions are insufficient.”
“The dimensions are fine. In you get.”
He doesn’t move. His gaze has dropped to my collarbone, where the shirt falls open at the neckline, and his nostrils flare once—a sharp involuntary expansion—and his jaw locks, and I can see the war playing out across his face.
The asshole operating system fighting the man who purrs.
The training that says do not against the body that is already leaning forward, already pulled toward the narrow bunk and the woman in the thin shirt who is patting the mattress like this is normal.
“This is inadvisable,” he says. But he’s already ducking inside.
“Most things worth doing are. Boots off. I’m not sharing with boots.”
He removes his boots. The domesticity of it lands somewhere I’m not prepared for—this man, this weapon, sitting on my bunk unlacing boots because I told him to.
His bare feet are crimson, the fuzz trailing fine down his ankles, and the urge to touch is immediate and specific and I contain it because there is a sequence to this, and I am not going to rush it.
He lies down. The bunk objects. Audibly.
The frame groans, the mattress compresses, and then he’s on his back, and I’m on my side and the eight inches between us have become four, and I can feel his heat along the entire length of my body—a wall of warmth, 103 degrees of Xarthian thermal output radiating through the air like a banked fire.
I press back against the wall. He angles toward the edge. We are two adults performing the fiction of adequate space, and we are both losing.
“Roll toward the wall,” I say. “You run hot. I run cold. Thermodynamics.”
He rolls. The bunk protests. And then his back is to me—the broad expanse of his shoulders, the dark fuzz trailing down his spine between the geometric lines, the sheer heat of him—and I fit myself against him before the thinking part of my brain can object.
The contact is a detonation.
My forehead against the nape of his neck, and the fuzz there is dense and impossibly soft, and his warmth hits me through the shirt, through every thin layer between his skin and mine, and my body goes liquid with it.
Ten years of sleeping cold. Ten years of solo bunks and empty co-pilot chairs and nights where the only warmth was the mug in my hands.
And now there is this—the furnace-wall of his back, the ridged muscle beneath the velvet, the way his heat sinks into me like water into cracked ground.
I press closer without deciding to. My breasts flatten against the hard plane of his spine and the contact sends a jolt from my nipples to the base of my belly, sharp and bright, and I go still with the force of it.
He goes rigid. Every muscle in his back locks against me. I can feel the tension through every contact point—my forehead, my chest, my hips, my thighs pressed to the backs of his.
“Breathe,” I tell him, mouth against his neck, and the word vibrates into him, and he exhales—shaking, controlled the way you control a weapon that wants to fire.
His tail uncurls. Slow, deliberate. It finds my hip, traces from hipbone to waist, and then the full weight of it drapes over me—heavy and warm, settling into the curve between hip and ribs like it was built to fit there.
Then his hand. Reaching back—blind, finding my thigh first, fingers spreading across the muscle through the thin fabric.
Not practiced. The motion of a man who has not touched anyone in longer than I want to guess at, and is rebuilding from raw materials.
His palm slides from my thigh to my hip and his fingers curl over the bone, claws fully retracted, smooth pads against fabric.
A grip. The kind you use on something you’re afraid of losing in the dark.
My breath catches. The specificity of his hand on my hip—the size of it, the heat, the way his fingers span the distance from bone to the soft dip of my waist—registers in places that have nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with the fact that his hand is enormous and warm and holding me like I’m the fixed point, and he’s the thing in danger of drifting.
The purr starts.
Low. So low I feel it before I hear it—a vibration in his chest traveling through his spine into mine. Below sound. More texture than noise. It moves through the mattress, through my bones, through the ribs where all the formless things I can’t name have been living.
My hand finds his. I lace my fingers through—mine small and callused, his broad and warm—and hold on. The contact sends something electric up my wrist, settling in the crook of my elbow where the skin is thin.