Chapter 15 Settling In
Settling In
Cetus
Two weeks since the claiming bite. Two weeks since my nervous system rewrote itself around her cardiac rhythm and I lost the ability to concentrate on atmospheric data for more than eleven consecutive minutes.
Not that I’m measuring.
(I’m measuring. Pickles has a graph.)
Dove returned from her first OOPS run three days ago.
Forty-one hours off-station—a supply loop through the Veridian corridor and back, routine cargo, no complications—and by hour six I was checking the long-range sensors with a frequency Pickles described as “statistically indistinguishable from compulsive behaviour.”
She’d barely cleared the docking bay before I had her pressed against the Rolling Pin’s hull, my face buried in her neck, breathing her in.
Forty-one hours had diluted my scent on her skin.
Unacceptable. My body knew it before my mind caught up—the claiming instinct flaring hot and immediate, demanding I mark her again, layer my pheromone signature back over every centimetre of skin until no living being within sensor range could mistake her for unclaimed.
“Missed you too,” she’d said, laughing into my shoulder while my hands mapped her like a navigation chart I’d temporarily misplaced. “You want to let me get my boots off first, or—”
I had not wanted her to get her boots off first. What I’d wanted was to carry her to our quarters and spend the next several hours rectifying the pheromone deficit. What I’d done was kiss her until Tavia appeared at a dead sprint and launched herself at Dove’s knees like a guided projectile.
We’d sorted out the boots eventually.
Now Dove is cross-legged on the operations centre floor, surrounded by data pads and supply manifests, building a logistics framework for the colonist families arriving next week.
Her hair is clipped up with a stylus she’s forgotten about.
She’s wearing my shirt—the grey one, two sizes too large, sleeves rolled to the elbows.
The claiming mark on her shoulder glows faintly where bonding enzymes have permanently altered the pigmentation: a purple-gold scar in the exact shape of my bite, broadcasting to every biological scanner in the sector that this woman is taken.
She catches me watching. Tilts her head.
“You’ve got that look again.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You absolutely have a look. It’s somewhere between ‘I want to solve a complex equation’ and ‘I want to bend you over the nearest console.’ Pickles calls it your optimization face.”
“I have never once used that expression.”
“I certainly have,” Pickles says from the overhead speakers. “And I stand by the classification.”
Dove grins. Goes back to her manifests. My gaze tracks the movement of her hands—quick, capable, reorganising a supply chain with the same ruthless competence she once used to outrun debt collectors—and the heat that’s been simmering at the base of my spine since she walked into the ops centre this morning tightens another notch.
Two weeks of bonded proximity has not diminished the response.
If anything, the bond has amplified it. I now experience her elevated heart rate as a phantom echo in my own pulse.
When she’s aroused—when she catches me watching her, or when our bodies brush in corridors, or when I speak in low harmonics and her breath catches—I feel it.
A warmth that ghosts across my chest, settles in my groin, makes the ridges along my cock stir with a sensitivity that borders on painful.
She knows this. She exploits it.
“Hey, Cetus?” She doesn’t look up. “When you checked this morning’s atmospheric data, did you notice the pressure gradient in sector nine?”
“What about it?”
“It’s trending twelve percent above your seasonal models.” She shifts her weight. The shirt rides up her thigh. She’s wearing shorts underneath so brief they may as well be hypothetical. “I flagged it in the shared log.”
“I’ll review it.”
“You should probably come look at this display.” She stretches one leg out. The shorts ride higher. “The anomaly is right here.”
“The anomaly is nowhere near your legs.”
“Isn’t it?” She finally looks up. Her eyes are dark and knowing and her pulse—which I can feel through the bond like a second heartbeat—has accelerated by precisely twelve beats per minute. Deliberate. She is deliberately elevating her heart rate to trigger my biological response.
My markings flare. Gold light pulses across my forearms, visible even through my shirt sleeves.
“That,” I say, with significantly less composure than I intend, “is manipulation.”
“It’s positive reinforcement. I read about it in a Lividian bonding study Pickles loaded to my data pad.”
“Pickles.”
“I provided educational materials,” Pickles says. “The Captain’s implementation of the research is her own initiative. I am merely a resource.”
“You loaded my mate a manual on how to trigger my arousal responses.”
“I loaded your mate a comprehensive guide to Lividian pair-bond psychology. Section seven happens to cover arousal triggers in detail. With diagrams.”
Dove is biting her lip to keep from laughing. The sight of her teeth pressing into that soft lower lip triggers a cascade of sense-memory—her mouth on my chest, my shoulder, lower—that makes my claws extend involuntarily.
I sheathe them. With effort.
“Tavia’s lesson block,” I say.
“Doesn’t start for another twenty minutes.”
“Then we have a problem.”
“Do we?”
“I have twenty minutes, an elevated biological response, and a mate who is deliberately provoking me on the operations centre floor.” I hold her gaze. Let the harmonics drop. “That is a significant problem.”
Her breath stutters. The playful confidence wavers, replaced by something rawer—want, naked and mutual, the bond transmitting it in both directions until the air between us feels pressurised.
“Twenty minutes isn’t enough,” she murmurs.
“It’s enough if we’re efficient.”
She schedules Tavia’s xenobotany module to start fifteen minutes early.
Pickles assists by informing Tavia that the fungi specimens require immediate morning observation “before the spores enter dormancy,” which is not technically true but is technically plausible enough that an eight-year-old with a passion for biology doesn’t question it.
The greenhouse lab door seals. Pickles confirms Tavia is engaged and happy.
“I shall be running comprehensive diagnostic routines,” he announces. “All non-essential monitoring systems in corridors B through D will be offline for the next ninety minutes.”
“Ninety minutes?” Dove raises an eyebrow. “I thought we had twenty.”
“I have observed that your time estimates are consistently inaccurate. I am providing a buffer.”
The cockpit of the Rolling Pin is eleven metres from the operations centre. We cover the distance in what I estimate to be four seconds—not running, precisely, but walking with the urgency of two people who have been eye-fucking across a room for the better part of an hour.
The hatch seals. Dove spins. I’m already moving—lifting her, her legs locking around my waist on reflex, her back hitting the bulkhead beside the nav console with a force that makes the ship’s proximity sensors chirp.
“Autopilot disengaged,” the Rolling Pin’s basic nav system reports.
“It was never engaged,” Dove says against my mouth. “Shut up, ship.”
I kiss her. Deep and claiming—tongue sweeping past her lips, tasting coffee and the faint sweetness that’s purely her biochemistry, the flavour my body has encoded as essential.
She moans into it and her fingers rake up the back of my neck into my hair, nails dragging across the markings at my hairline, and the sensation cascades down my spine in branching light, every nerve between scalp and cock firing in a synchronized pulse that makes me grind against her involuntarily.
She gasps. Rolls her hips. The friction of her body against the ridge-line—swelling now, each node engorging rapidly through my trousers—drags a sound from my chest that vibrates the hull plating.
“Off,” she pants. “Everything off, now, we don’t have—”
I set her down. Strip her shirt over her head—my shirt, always mine, and the claiming mark blooms purple-gold against her brown skin and the sight of it hits me like a systemic shock.
Two weeks and it still does this. Every time.
She’s bare underneath because she stopped wearing anything beneath my shirts four days ago and she knows precisely what that does to me.
“You are going to destroy my ability to function in professional settings,” I tell her while pulling my own shirt off.
“That’s the goal.” She unfastens my trousers. Her hand closes around me and the contact—her fingers finding the ridges, thumb pressing the first node and rolling—makes my vision split. “God, you’re already—they’re so swollen—”
“I’ve been aroused since you stretched your legs on the ops centre floor. Approximately forty-seven minutes of sustained engorgement.” I press my forehead to hers. Breathing hard. “The diagrams Pickles provided did not adequately prepare you for the consequences of deliberate provocation.”
“Show me the consequences.”
I lift her onto the console. She hooks her ankles behind me, tilts her hips—the angle we’ve perfected over two weeks of stolen encounters in this cockpit, in the supply closet off corridor C, once against the atmospheric processor housing when Tavia was at lessons and we couldn’t make it anywhere with a door.
Her shorts are gone. I don’t remember removing them. My trousers are around my thighs and her hand guides me to her entrance and she’s wet—soaked, the scent of her arousal thick and intoxicating, triggering the pheromone feedback that makes my cock pulse and leak.
I push into her.