Chapter 13 What Civilisation Looks Like #2
"Good?" she asks, her back against my chest, her hands working station-issued cleanser through her hair.
"I have not had a proper shower in three months."
"That explains a lot about your general ambiance."
"You said I smelled like safety."
"You smell like safety that needs soap. Turn around, let me get your back."
Her hands on my back. Small and purposeful, working cleanser over the scars and the circuit traceries and the places where the harness used to sit.
The texture of the scars under her palms, the cold artificiality of the traceries against the warmth of living skin.
I feel what her touch does to the bond: the specific tenderness she carries for the places where they hurt me.
And underneath the tenderness, the heat.
Her hands on my bare skin in warm water, the steam rising between us, the full-body awareness of how close we are and how little separates us.
The drag of her fingers along my spine sends want flooding through the connection, and the feedback loop starts before either of us can stop it.
"This was supposed to be efficient," she says, her voice unsteady, her hands stilling on my lower back.
"You proposed it."
"I know. I underestimated the feedback loop." Her forehead presses against my spine. "The bond makes shared showers a terrible idea."
"Or an excellent one, depending on your priorities."
"My priority is supposed to be not getting distracted before the most important hearing of our lives."
"And?"
"And your back muscles are making that very difficult."
My hands find her hair, work the cleanser through the red curls that have been tangled with jungle debris for over a week.
The intimacy of it is different from sex.
Quieter. The simple, devastating act of caring for someone's body, washing away the evidence of what they survived together.
Her head tilts back into my hands, and the sound she makes is contentment so pure it resonates through the bond like a bell.
"Your hair is a structural engineering challenge," I observe, working through a knot that has its own gravitational field.
"It defies three known laws of physics. I've accepted this."
"Don't fall asleep in the shower," Bebo announces through the bathroom speaker. "Station water rations apply. You have approximately four minutes remaining."
We finish. Step out. And the logistics of getting dressed in station-issue clothing presents a problem I had not anticipated.
The sleep pants are standard human-male issue.
They are too short by approximately eight inches, ending mid-calf in a way that looks neither deliberate nor dignified.
The waistband sits low on my hips because the ratio of my waist to my thighs is not a ratio human clothing was designed to accommodate, and the fabric stretches across my thighs in a manner that leaves very little to imagination.
I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and consider the couch.
"Oh," Krilly says from the doorway.
A spike of heat so specific and vivid that my markings flash opalescent before I can control them.
"They don't fit," I say.
"They don't fit," she agrees, her voice approximately one octave higher than normal.
Her eyes are travelling from the too-short hems to the stretched thighs to the low waistband to the strip of emerald skin visible between waistband and the claiming color pulsing at my hipbone. "They really, really don't fit."
"Should I request a larger—"
"No." Too fast. She catches herself. "I mean. They're fine. You're fine. Everything is fine."
"Your heart rate has increased thirty-seven percent," Bebo observes from the kitchenette. "Which exceeds the twenty-two percent increase during the shower proposal. I am updating my correlation data."
"Bebo, I am going to remove your vocalisation chip."
"You have been threatening to modify my hardware for four years, seven months, and twelve days. I remain unmodified."
Krilly has retreated to the bedroom, where she is putting on her own borrowed sleep clothes with the aggressively focused efficiency of someone trying not to think about what she just saw.
She is failing spectacularly. I can feel the precise shape of what she's imagining, and it is not conducive to rest.
Her sleep clothes are the opposite problem.
Too large, hanging off her frame, the shirt slipping off one shoulder to reveal the claiming mark and the collarbone beneath it.
She looks small and warm and thoroughly bonded and the borrowed fabric is doing something to my brain that tight-fitting clothing never could.
"We should sleep," I say, standing in the main room in pants that barely contain me.
"Definitely." Standing in the doorway in a shirt that barely stays on her.
"Tomorrow is important."
"Extremely important."
Neither of us moves toward the bedroom. Two bonded nervous systems in a private room with a locked door and exactly zero external threats to redirect the energy toward.
"This is ridiculous," she says. "We've been sleeping pressed together for nine days."
"In survival conditions. With predators outside. The circumstances provided—"
"If you say the circumstances provided natural restraint, I'm going to throw something at you."
"I was going to say the circumstances provided distraction."
"Right. And now we have no distractions. Just a bed and a locked door and a hearing tomorrow that means we should definitely be resting instead of—"
"Instead of?"
"You know what. You can feel it."
"I can." My voice drops. Not a choice; the harmonic registers respond to arousal with the same involuntary honesty that my markings do. "I've been feeling it since the shower. Possibly since the sleep pants."
"The sleep pants are a problem."
"I was not aware that ill-fitting clothing was a source of—"
"Everything about you is a source of. The sleep pants just made it visible." Her cheeks are burning. "Can we please just get in the bed before I say something we're both going to regret?"
The silence that follows has a specific texture. Two people who want each other and have a permanent neurological connection that transmits the wanting in both directions simultaneously, trapped in a feedback loop of mutual arousal that neither of them started and neither of them can turn off.
"Bed," she says. "Sleep. Now. Before this escalates."
"Agreed."
We approach the bed from opposite sides.
Climb in. Lie on our backs, staring at the ceiling, with a careful distance between us that the bond renders completely meaningless because I can feel her body heat and her heartbeat and the exact texture of her wanting from two feet away as clearly as if she were pressed against me.
One minute. Two. I count her breathing. She counts mine.
"Forget this." She rolls across the mattress into my side. My arm catches her automatically, pulls her against my chest. Full contact, head on my shoulder, leg hooked over mine. Both of us exhale simultaneously as proximity satisfies something the separation was agitating.
"Better," she says.
"Better."
Her hand finds my chest. Over the scars where the harness used to sit. The place she calls her favourite.
"Horgox." Quiet, in the dark.
"Yes."
"Tomorrow. Whatever happens. Whatever they decide." Her fingers trace the circuit tracery on my ribs, the cold blue lines that the claiming color now frames in opalescent warmth. "You are not what they made you. You are what you chose."
The words land in a place I didn't know was still wounded. Beneath the bond, beneath the claiming, there's a part of me that still carries the product designation. HX-347. Still hears the handlers' voices. Still expects the next room to be a containment bay and the next hands to carry instruments.
She feels it. The old pain, the deep doubt, the part of me that isn't healed yet.
Her arm tightens around me. "I chose you.
Sober, clear-eyed, with an engineer's understanding of exactly what I was choosing.
And tomorrow I'm going to stand in front of a tribunal and tell them the same thing.
You are not a product. You are not a designation.
You are the male I love, and they don't get to take that away. "
The male I love.
The words settle into the bond and reverberate there, travelling through shared neural pathways, registering in both our nervous systems simultaneously.
"Say it again," I manage. Rough. Raw.
"I love you." Simple. The way she says things she's certain of. "I love you, and we're going to win tomorrow, and when it's over—"
"When it's over, I will not be respectful anymore."
Her breath catches. The spike of arousal is mutual and immediate and threatens to undo every responsible decision we've made in the last hour.
"Promise?"
"When the hearing is done and your career is secure and no one can take me from you." My hand settles on her hip, thumb tracing the circle that has become our private language of soon. "I intend to be extremely thorough in my disrespect."
"Extremely thorough."
"Comprehensively disrespectful."
"You can't say things like that and then expect me to sleep."
"Consider it motivation for tomorrow." My lips brush her hair. "Win the hearing. Keep me free. And I will show you every disrespectful thing I've been imagining since you licked my palm during the truth fruit incident."
The sound she makes is small and desperate and does things to my discipline that the bond amplifies into a shared experience.
"Sleep, little flare." I pull her closer. "Tomorrow we fight. Tonight, we rest."
"Rest is a strong word for what's happening in my nervous system right now."
"Mine as well."
"I can feel exactly how much you want—"
"And I can feel exactly how much you want. Which makes me want more. Which you feel. Which makes you—"
"It's a feedback loop."
"It's a feedback loop."
"We're never sleeping again."
But we do. Eventually. Tangled together in a bed that's better than any moss padding, in a room with a locked door, with the bond humming between us like a current and the claiming color pulsing soft opalescent in the dark.
My last conscious thought: tomorrow, a tribunal decides whether I am a person or a product.
But tonight, the woman who loves me is sleeping against my chest with my heartbeat in her lungs and her certainty in my bones.
Whatever they decide, they can't undo that.