Chapter 21 - Ulterior Motives #2
A few sentences, and my body is hypersensitive, reacting to the slight chill in the air, the feel of her mouth scraping over my jaw, the idea that we both needed to hear the same thing tonight.
I squirm against her, needing more than words now.
My breathing has sped up, and the small pants are too loud in the otherwise low hum of the room.
She slides a hand down my torso, rolling my nipples and trailing her nails over my stomach, teasing me with pressure and pace but never letting me get to the point of no return.
I moan, try to turn around, but she keeps my arms pinned with hers.
There are no words; she just keeps touching me.
All I can do is shift my hips, spread my legs to straddle her thigh and press myself against her. She hisses in pleasure.
“Marlowe, please.” She sounds stained. “There’s no hurry. It’s just us now. Let me do this for you. Let me touch you until you fall asleep, make you feel good until you can’t keep your eyes open anymore.”
How does she always know what I need? It intensifies the bliss that fizzles along my nerves.
My toes actually curl when her fingers finally find me, wet and aching, and she dips into me.
But I heard her right down to my core; she wants to take care of me, so I let her.
I don’t even care about release, just so long as she keeps those hands on me. I need Tanisira to make me forget.
I relax against her, let her stroke me with talented fingers and bring me to a delicate, gentle orgasm. She gasps into my ear as I ride it out, moaning and twisting in her arms. I collapse, boneless, back into her arms and slip into a deep, deep slumber.
Tanisira is gone when I wake up, but I don’t mind.
Back in my cabin, I spend a while in the shower deep conditioning, shaving and exfoliating; all with new toiletries I charged to Dominik on Novus.
I use the shower gel I ‘borrowed’ from Tanisira’s bathroom and come out smelling like a Suryavan garden.
My body aches from head to toe, but I feel good, especially when I step into one of my new outfits—practical and comfortable, not to mention actually fits me.
The new boots pinch a little, but they’ll be perfect once they’re worn in.
I woke up with a thousand more questions, and I plan to get answers.
Tanisira and I need to lay it all out on the table, especially because we’ve become so entangled in each other within such a short time.
The situation is ripe for misunderstandings, and I don’t want to risk that happening when we only have two days left.
I go in search of the captain and find her on the bridge, standing next to her station. A goofy smile blooms on my face. Pausing by the door, I admire her strong figure. The tenderness of her touch last night, the gift of it, still plays on a loop in my mind.
“You sure know how to make a woman—”
“Marlowe,” she practically yells, spinning around with wide eyes.
It cuts me off mid-sentence, amazed. But then the chair beside her spins around, and Vee peers across at me with a huge grin. What a conversation that would have been.
“Good morning, baby.” I smile back at him, approaching. “What are you doing in here?”
“Captain Sek—” he stops at the noise she makes. “Tanisira said I could watch her captain the ship. It’s so much easier than I thought; even I could do it, Mum.”
Tanisira and I share an amused look. “Is that right?”
“She keeps saying these things mostly fly themselves!”
“They do.” Tanisira shrugs nonchalantly. “A ship of this calibre, anyway. Kit is very expensive technology, and it shows.”
“Sounds like you could replace her, Vee, and no one would be the wiser.” I nudge him.
Tanisira surprises me by joking. “I wouldn’t say no to a break.”
“On that note,” I say, “I’m going to borrow Tanisira here for a moment. You can hold down the fort, right?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
We put a few feet of space between us, and I tilt my head a little, eyeing Tanisira. “I’m sure I should be offended that my son wants to spend more time with you than me... but I don’t do anything nearly as cool.”
The corner of her mouth quirks, but there’s something else there, too. “Well, he has you for the rest of his life, and only me for the next few days.”
It sits in the air between us. I make an effort to overlook it.
“Speaking of,” I lower my voice. “I think you owe me a date.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “A date?”
I nod. “A date.”
“I’m interested in the phrasing you’ve used. I owe you?”
Gaia, my heart skips a beat. Tanisira joking with me, her eyes lit up in a way that rejuvenates her, is a sight. It’s in stark contrast to the grim lines of her face yesterday, and her beauty shines through in bursts of joy.
“Where are you gonna take me?”
I catch the exact moment when she goes to pull me in but curbs the action.
She ends up twitching instead, and I bite back a smile.
I don’t mind affection in front of others, but I don’t want Vee to think we’re together, only to say goodbye to her later.
I previously told Tanisira this, and even though it’s nice she remembered, a part of me clenches.
I want her to touch me so badly. I always want her to touch me.
“Hmm, there’s simply too much choice. We could visit the cargo bay, or perhaps the engine room. I know a supply closet with wonderful lighting.”
A giggle escapes me. “You had me at ‘closet’.”
Tanisira’s smile fades and she stares at me, the amber in her eyes like melted gold. I’m caught in her gaze: a creature trapped in resin. My skin feels electrified, the scent of her all I can smell. She takes me in, and I want to know what she’s thinking, what she wants. Time seems to stop.
Something changed yesterday. I don’t know what, can’t conceptualise it except to say that the shape of us feels smaller, closer.
She told me something harrowing, something that haunts her; unburdened herself and trusted me.
Even still, there’s a hesitancy in her, as though she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
When the spell breaks, Tanisira swipes her tongue over her bottom lip and steps away deliberately. “I’d love to take you on a date,” she says wryly. “But I promised Vee he could spend the whole day with me.”
And isn’t it just silly that I experience, for the first time, jealousy of my own child? I love him, I know he adores her, and I want him to spend time learning things that interest him. But I also need this day. It’s not a problem if Vee’s the third wheel—or, more accurately, me.
“Then our date shall be a picnic in the greenhouse,” I say with emphasis. “And Vee can be our chaperone.”
Tanisira and I end up in the galley preparing the picnic whilst Vee takes a ‘nap’ before accompanying us to the greenhouse.
He’s not napping, he just doesn’t want to help, but I’m happy for the alone time.
Devyaan and Julian have been inseparable since last night, and we don’t want to bother him for something we could pull together ourselves.
With a lot less ease, sure, but it’s surprisingly nice to see Tanisira doing mundane things like making a sandwich.
I’m only a little embarrassed to discover that a knife in her confident hands does something to me.
“I have ulterior motives,” I declare.
She gives me the side-eye. “You don’t say.”
“I do say.”
“Marlowe.” Tanisira raises her villain’s eyebrow, though her voice is soft. “You can just ask me whatever it is you want to know. You don’t have to couch it in jokes.”
Well then. She goes back to slicing vegetables, and I narrow my eyes at her. “Anything?”
The slightest tension creeps into the set of her shoulders, but she doesn’t miss a beat. “Anything. It’s not like you haven’t now seen me at my worst,” she replies mildly.
“The problem is I want to know everything.”
She pauses, looks pensive. “Why is that a problem?”
“I might not matter soon.”
Her inhale is so sharp I hear it over all the sounds of the galley. She whips her head around, knife poised mid-air.
“You really think that? With you, I feel like someone finally cares enough to want to understand me. You make me want to unearth parts of myself I buried a long time ago, and through your eyes, I don’t hate them as much as I thought I did.
Everything about you is daybreak.” Tanisira turns away from me, before glancing over again. “You will always matter to me.”
For a long moment, I don’t know what to say; I just gape. She continues to chop, and I’m still staring so hard that I catch her cheeks slowly pinken. My heart already feels ripe off her words, but the sight of that blush sets it to bursting.
“Anything, Marlowe.” The lines of Tanisira’s body are soft and at ease again, as if nothing happened, as if she didn’t just hand me another piece of her—but she’s gone back to her task with excessive focus, and I take it to mean she’d rather not talk about her outburst. I couldn’t possibly build on what she just admitted to me with any grace, so I’m glad for the excuse to ignore it for now.
Instead, I take some time to gather my thoughts as I assemble a salad.
“Why did you join the IAF?”
She grimaces but it seems like more of a reflex.
“My Bava has been a gambler my whole life. The extended family would sometimes bail him out if he was being particularly pathetic, but mostly, it was just us. He dug us deeper and deeper into debt until the only correspondence we ever received was red-letter notices. I was the oldest. As soon as I turned eighteen, I signed up for the IAF and sent money back home to my Nayya.”
“That’s a lot for a teenager to take on.”
She shrugs. “Not really. It was easy compared to what I’d dealt with before I left.
He was a mean, mouthy drunk. He always drank when he gambled, and he was always gambling, so.
He hated that I stood up for my mother, that I didn’t respect him, and he held it against me.
I couldn’t wait to get out of there; both to stop my family from losing everything, and because the sight of him made me sick to my stomach. ”
“What happened once you started sending money home?”
“He kept gambling.” She laughs humourlessly. “I begged my Nayya to leave him, and she would always say that she was working on it. And then one day, she did. Just like that, it was over. I chose to re-enlist.”
“You left the IAF later, though.” I eye her. “Why?”
She waves a knife towards her reattached arm.
“This happened, and I was medically discharged while it healed. It was temporary leave, and I intended to go right back into service once I was allowed to. But my Nayya managed to wheedle a compromise out of me; if I wouldn’t leave the military, even though they didn’t need the money anymore, I would at least go home to heal. ”
The Surya-Vaani word for mother is so sweet on her lips.
“Can’t say no to her, huh?” I chuckle.
Tanisira snorts. “You haven’t met my Nayya.”
“But now you live on Telluria, don’t you? When you’re not working.”
“I live in Neo-London, in a little houseboat on the canal. I’m rarely home but when I am, it’s very peaceful.”
My mouth drops open. “You live on a boat?”
There’s a possibility that we might have crossed paths at some point and never even known it. Imagine that.
“Why is that so shocking?”
“You. Live on a boat?”
“Yes. Why is that—”
“You’re such a hermit. Of course, when you’re not flying ships across the galaxy, you’re holed up alone on a houseboat.”
“I’m not sure I like this.” Tanisira narrows her eyes. “I can’t figure out if you’re insulting me or not. It’s good for fishing.”
“You fish? With a rod and everything?” I plop my chin into my hand and stare up at her, amazed. I can’t believe Tanisira does things for fun. “What else should I know about you? Do you have pets?”
She shifts then, almost like she’s uncomfortable. “Two.”
“Two pets?” I cry. “Oh, my. Tell me.”
She sighs. “You’re definitely insulting me. I have two toads.”
“They were rescues,” she says in a hurry when my eyes pop open.
“How do you rescue a toad? And what are they called? And where are they right now? Captain, are you hiding toads on this ship?”
She huffs and gently pushes my elbows off the counter so she can reach the salad I wrapped. For a moment, she doesn’t reply, just gets on with packing our lunch away.
“They’re called Thing 1 and Thing 2, after characters from a Tellurian book my sister used to like.
I don’t know why; the author is horribly racist. Anyway, they’re staying with a friend right now and—” she raises her volume as I open my mouth.
“If you make a comment about me having friends, I will lock you in here and enjoy lunch with Vee.”
My teeth make a noise as they snap together, and I laugh into my hands. That’s exactly what I was going to do.