Chapter 19 #2
“I can’t make much sense of it, but here, c’mon. There’s a little place down this way that sells—”
He froze. Her eyes were still glittering with the lights of the market, but so were her cheeks.
She was crying, and he immediately felt his stomach tighten with guilt.
You idiot.
If you count the brief exchange with the bartender, the hostess, and the tense chat with Theos on Driska, Fia had only had three decent interactions with her own kind since waking up.
And without warning, he had just launched her straight into the heart of Little Icthia.
Technically, it was called “The Lantern District”, and he was pretty sure Icthia wasn’t an actual city name, but that was beside the point.
“Oh, fuck, Fia, I’m sorry. Is it too much?”
She shook her head in the negative, and then a little in the affirmative.
“Somewhat.” She paused, blinking back a fresh bout of tears. Despite the waver in her words, she was smiling. “I was not expecting this. It is … complicated. It is much. But it is good.”
Davik gave her hand, which was still clutching his arm, a gentle squeeze. “C’mon. We’ll find a good people-watching spot that’s not in the middle of this all. How does that sound?”
Her grip eased, and she offered a weak smile. “That sounds perfect.”
It took a few minutes of meandering off the thoroughfare, but they eventually found a narrow maintenance access pathway tucked away at the top of a small flight of stairs.
It gave them an isolated vantage point above the fray.
From the spot, the sea of lights wasn’t blinding, and the roar of the crowd was just hushed enough to pick out occasional words.
They settled onto their perch and shrugged off their overloaded packs. Fia was humming something quietly, her eyes still glossy, but he noticed she didn’t look as fragile as she had been a few minutes before.
“Better?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet.
Her humming paused, and she nodded. “I needed that. I think sometimes you do not realize how much you have sitting in your heart until you let it out.”
“Oh, thank God, it’s a good cry,” he wheezed. “Because I worried I had just dragged you into a round of exposure therapy. Which, don’t get me wrong, that’s great stuff. But that is not what I was aiming for tonight.”
Fia’s eyes narrowed, and she looked at him quizzically. “Oh? What were you aiming for?” She leaned back, propping herself up on the stair behind them on her elbows, giving him a thorough once-over.
“I was just, you know. Trying to give you a little piece of home. I want you to know that I care about you, that I want you to be happy here, and—”
His nerve was faltering, but he gritted his teeth and clasped his hands in his lap to ground himself.
He was not a pious man, and he didn’t think there were any gods above or below that would do anything for him right now.
But Carissa might kill him if he fumbled this after she took a detour for him.
And she was far more tangible a threat than any god he knew of.
He breathed in deeply. So deep that his chest hitched in protest. He kept his eyes locked skyward, wringing his hands together as he spoke.
“I don’t want to make things weird. But I want to just … put my cards on the table.”
He felt warmth on his chin as she grasped his jaw and tilted his head to face her.
“Look at me when you speak.”
Her voice was low and smooth, and her eyes were locked on his. She hadn’t risen from her relaxed pose, and her composure made him feel even more out of his depth by comparison.
With a command and a look, she had sucked all the confidence and air out of his lungs and replaced it with lead. For a moment, he was convinced that maybe, perhaps, she really had magic powers.
Say it, you fucking coward.
“Alright, look,” he began. “I can’t tell if you are interested in me, or if I’ve misinterpreted things on a colossal scale.
But, like I said, cards on the table. I can’t get you out of my goddamn head, Fia.
And every time you get close to me like this, I can’t think anymore.
So I’m stuck between having nothing in my head, and then nothing but you in my head, and I’m going insane. ”
For a moment that felt like ages, she stayed still. Still, except for her own pulse thundering with what he hoped was the same crackling cocktail of hopeful jitters that were bounding around his chest. Her hand slid down from his chin to press against his chest.
“I was worried that I had pushed too far. That I had also, as you said, misinterpreted. Or that, perhaps, you were just interested in the novelty of what I am,” she murmured, her voice tinged with a note of pain that made him ache. “That has happened before.”
“No, God no,” he said, shaking his head. “Interested, very, but in the not-novel way. Though I damn near wrote a novel trying to think about how I would even say this to you. You should see my datapad, it’s a mess. It’s just…”
Fuck, what were words? I had more words to say, right? I think they all fell out of my head. They fell out of my head and into my lap, and now I’m about to have a panic attack or get hard enough to spear concrete. Or both.
He watched her lips part and felt her clutch tighter at his chest, the tips of her clawed fingers pressing into his skin.
She could rip his entire heart out right now and devour it in front of him, and he would die happy.
He’d die happy, smiling, and rock hard if there was still blood left in his lower body.
“If you are caught sheltering an unbound Icthian, that is a steep punishment,” she said with a low, urging trill to her words. “If you are caught ‘compromised’ by one, that is even worse. The Federation would not look kindly upon you.”
Her eyelids were low, leaving his gaze to follow down to where her hand was, the tips of her fingers tracing little circles in the chest hair that peeked out from his shirt collar. The gentle stroking felt nice, but he really, really wanted her to go back to the whole grabbing thing.
Maybe I do want her to rip my heart out. What’s wrong with me?
“I have made a threat assessment of you ‘compromising’ me, and I found the threat posed entirely acceptable.” He could hardly hear himself over the rushing blood in his ears.
Fantastic risk, actually. A really, really pretty risk, with really long legs and…
She sat upright, looming over him. He saw her slitted pupils flare as she drank him in, and considering he was almost a puddle at the moment, he had a brief thought that he should offer her a straw. And then, her pupils snapped to razor-thin lines as a bright flash of light swung over them.
“Oi!” There was a sharp whistle, and a gruff male voice below them from whoever held the bright beam directly at eye-level. “Get a room, or fuck off. Either way. Don’t care. You’re loitering.”
Fia pulled back, her fanged grin wide and devilish. “It would be in poor taste if you were arrested in my company a second time.”
“I didn’t get arrested, I just got almost-arrested, it’s fine!”
She leaned in close to murmur a throaty command into his ear.
“Behave…”
His cock surged against the seam of his pants, and he bit back a hiss. Words were failing him. He just nodded and rose with shaky legs as they both left their little vantage point, avoiding the grumpy security guard as they made their way to browse the stalls.
With the rest of the hour they had on Tescatua, he did his best to show her around.
And she took every opportunity to lean in close and whisper innocuous things that scrambled his senses so fast that he swore she was just sinking her tongue into his brain.
Little phrases, like “Oh, that is nice…” that, in the context of pointing out porcelain doohickeys, were incredibly tame.
But with her lips so close to his ear, he was sure the intent was far from it.
She’s ruined antiquing for me. I’m going to get hard looking at tchotchkes for the rest of my life.
When they returned to the ship and prepared for departure, it took him twice as long to finish his usual checklist. Fia was helping with verifying their fuel levels, finalizing their unmooring procedure with the port authority, and other very important things.
Unfortunately, those very important things were time-consuming, and not at all what he had hoped to end the night with. And his body was choosing a terrible time to remind him how much he had pushed it lately.
A worrisome pang of pain kept burning in his shoulders and fingers with every breath as he worked. The telltale warning that he had officially been too long without meds, and that his immune system was preparing to punish him for his hubris.
“You are overdue for sleep, young man,” Fia trilled in a dangerously low rumble as she leaned over his shoulder.
He looked up at her and felt his heart ricochet up into his throat, back into his groin, and then do some other impressive gymnastics as her eyes narrowed in on him.
“Yeah, but it isn’t every day I get to get dressed up and spend the evening with a tall, mysterious woman with an eclectic taste in collectibles.”
Fia grinned and produced the trinket she had bought in the market from her pocket: a tangerine-sized carving of some sort of Bhrellan rodent, made from a rich dark stone.
“This is a llevir, and it is not eclectic. It is … symbolic,” she corrected. “And there will be more days you are trapped with me on this ship, my overzealous tinkerer. Fewer days if your heart fails due to sleep deprivation. Understood?”
He begrudgingly accepted her gentle ushering back into his quarters.
There was a rather ambitious and turgid part of him that hoped she would take things a step further.
And there was even a moment of tense lingering at his doorway where he thought she might step forward, kiss him, and then immediately drag him into bed by his cock.
But he was fading fast. He had pushed his own body too far, too fast. He crashed into his bed, alone, and sleep came easily.
Much easier, knowing there might be more days like this ahead of him. Hopefully, many more days.
Maybe all of them if I play my cards right.