Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
REYES
The maintenance hub isn’t a room I bring people to.
It’s not private in the way guest suites are private, with their soft lighting and polished surfaces and expensive lies about rest. It’s private because no one wants to be here unless something’s wrong.
Concrete-textured walls. A narrow hygiene alcove behind a sliding panel.
Emergency kits stacked by function and failure type.
It’s not a place for comfort.
It’s the place I sleep because the sub bay is seventy-three steps away if I move fast and the west service spine is twenty-eight. It’s the place I keep printed maps because screens fail.
Maren steps inside behind me, and the room changes shape.
The cot is narrow. The route board has red marks clustered around the bay. The coffee pot has enough residue in it to qualify as a minor engineering material. The overhead light hums with an electrical buzz I’ve been meaning to fix for two months.
But she’s here. That makes the room mean something else.
The door seals behind us. The atrium noise drops away.
Maren looks around once. Reading. “This is where you actually live,” she says.
I set the field kit on the desk. “I have assigned quarters.”
“That wasn’t what I said.”
I open the kit. “Sit.”
Her eyebrows lift.
“Your hand,” I say.
“There it is. Romance.”
“Blood under a rushed field dressing is rarely romantic.”
“You lack vision.” She sits on the cot, which immediately looks too small for her and too rough for what I want to do with my hands. She sets her bandaged palm on her knee. The gauze from the tunnel is spotted red at the center.
I pull the chair closer and sit in front of her. The hub’s never felt this narrow. I unwrap the bandage carefully. The cut runs across the heel of her palm, shallow, but angry. The lever bit harder than I thought. Blood has dried along the edges. There’s a small bruise forming beneath it.
She watches my hands. “You’re quiet,” she says.
“I’m working.”
“You’re always working.” Her mouth curves a little, but the atrium is still in her face. The tunnel too. The staff room. The pressure note through the glass.
I clean the cut with antiseptic. Her fingers flex once.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s fine.”
“No. It hurts,” I say. “Fine is a different category.”
The corner of her mouth moves again. “You’ve become very hostile toward imprecision.”
“I’ve always been hostile toward imprecision.”
“You hid it better.”
“No. You had more people to annoy you before I got a turn.”
That gets a small sound. Not the real laugh.
I want the real one. The simplicity of it startles me.
I want her hand under mine. I want the right to fix this small damage. I want her in this room that knows too much of me.
Want has always seemed dangerous because it misjudges load. I don’t trust want.
Maren leans forward slightly. “Where did you go?”
I tape fresh gauze over the cut. “Nowhere.”
“Liar.” Her uninjured hand moves to my wrist. Stopping me from disappearing into the next task.
“You should rest,” I say.
“That’s a terrible opening line.”
“I meant it. You’re needed awake.”
“I’m aware.”
“You’re also exhausted.”
“You’re hiding behind factors.”
Maren looks at me the way she looks at a model that’s given her one clean result and one impossible one. Her eyes move to the route board.
I’ve written her safety into the walls of my room in three colors and pretended it was logistics.
“I don’t know how to be careful and want this at the same time,” I say.
“So pick one,” she says. “You’ve been careful since I walked in. Try the other.” Her hand slides from my wrist to my palm. Scar against scar. Her bandage rough against the inside of my fingers. “I’m not a bridge,” she says. “I’m not asking you to prove you can hold me without failure.”
I look away.
She catches my jaw in her uninjured hand and turns me back. “I’m asking you to be here.”
That’s the thing I haven’t known how to do since Veracruz. Being here without turning every moment into prevention.
Maren rises from the cot. I stand because she does.
She’s close enough that I see the mark on her cheek where exhaustion has made her skin too pale. Close enough that the route board blurs behind her and becomes irrelevant for the first time since I hung it there.
Her hand rests against my chest. “I know what you told me in the tunnel,” she says.
My heart strikes once, hard.
“I know you don’t want forgiveness,” she says. “I’m not giving you that. I know you don’t want absolution. I’m not giving you that either.”
My throat closes. “What are you giving me?”
Her eyes stay on mine. “A choice.”
Then she kisses me. Her hand tightens in my shirt, and I stop thinking like a building.
I kiss her back. Carefully, at first. She makes a small sound of frustration against my mouth and steps closer until her body is against mine. The contact runs through me like current. Her mouth opens under mine.
My hands find her waist. Asking with pressure. She answers by sliding both arms around my neck, her bandaged palm careful against my shoulder, her uninjured hand at the back of my head.
She kisses like she works. No patience for useless hesitation once the decision has been made.
I almost laugh into her mouth. Instead I back her toward the cot, then stop because the cot is narrow, the hub is small, and somewhere under the want there’s still the part of me that won’t let my body become another thing she has to manage.
“What?” she asks.
“The cot’s too small.”
“Your hub’s too small. Your coffee’s a crime. Your timing’s terrible.” Her mouth is still an inch from mine. Her eyes are dark and bright and tired and alive. “I’m staying,” she says.
She sits on the cot and pulls me with her.
The cot complains immediately.
We both go still.
Then she laughs. I feel it against my mouth when I kiss her again.
She kisses me harder. Her fingers go to the buttons of my coveralls, then pause.
“Tell me if I get it wrong,” she says.
The echo of my fear in her mouth nearly ruins me.
“You won’t.”
I look up at her.
Her hand rests against the side of my face. She nods. Then she opens the first button.
There’s nothing elegant about it. My coveralls are functional, stubborn, and not designed for being undressed by a woman with one bandaged hand and no interest in patience. She swears at the zipper. I help. She gives me a look for helping too much. I stop. She gives me another look for stopping.
“Difficult system,” I say.
“You dressed yourself like a service panel.”
She gets the coveralls open enough to slide her hands inside, over the shirt beneath, over my ribs. Her touch slows on the hard beat of my heart under her palm.
“You’re still calculating,” she says.
“No.”
“Liar.” Her gaze flicks once to the route board behind me, then back. “You’re counting exits from inside your own skin.”
I don’t answer.
She takes my hand instead, the one with old calluses and new chemical burns and tunnel grime worked into the lines. She turns it palm up and presses her mouth to the center of it.
The hub loses all sound.
I’ve had hands on my work. My tools. My mistakes. My reports. No one has ever kissed the part of me that keeps reaching for the failing wall.
She kisses my palm again. Then looks up.
I don’t know what my face does. Whatever it is, she sees it and opens her knees wider, making room for me.
I rest my forehead against her sternum, just for one breath.
Her fingers slide into my hair.
I turn my head and kiss the inside of her wrist. The pulse there is fast. Her breath shifts when I move higher, mouth along her forearm, then to the bend of her elbow, then to the bare skin where her rolled sleeve has slipped.
She watches me the whole time.
I stand long enough to strip the coveralls down and away, then the shirt. She looks without hiding it. The scars. The muscle. The exhaustion. The man underneath the maintenance function. I’d prefer a tool in my hands. A panel open. A structural problem between us.
She gives me none of that. Only her eyes. “Come here,” she says.
I do.
She pulls me down to the cot with more confidence than the cot deserves. We fit badly at first, all elbows, narrow mattress, my knee nearly sliding off the edge. She starts laughing again, breathless this time, and I catch it with my mouth.
The laughter turns into heat.
Her body under mine is smaller than the crisis and larger than everything else. I keep my weight off her. She hooks one leg around my hip and pulls me closer, not enough to hurt, enough to object.
“Stop making yourself lighter,” she says against my mouth.
I go still. “Maren.”
“I’ll tell you if I can’t breathe.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No.” Her hand slides down my back, firm and certain. “It’s trust.”
For a moment, I can’t move. Then I let more of my weight settle against her. I kiss her like that. With weight. Her fingers dig into my shoulder. Her hips lift into me, and the cot creaks a second warning nobody respects.
Her shirt comes off badly. Her bra follows with slightly more competence.
I kiss her shoulder, her throat, the place above her heart where her pulse works too fast. She grips my hair when my mouth closes over her breast, and my name leaves her in a low, rough sound that empties my head of everything except yes.
My hand moves down her side, over her ribs, her waist, the edge of her pants. I stop there.
“Reyes.” Her expression softens and sharpens at once. “I want you. I want this.”
I open her pants and slide my hand inside.
She’s warm and wet against my fingers, and my breath leaves like the room has lost pressure. I touch her slow at first, then firmer when she moves into it. Her head drops back against the thin pillow. Her hips lift. The cot knocks once against the wall.
I file none of it. No counting. No structural analysis.
Only her. The slick heat of her. The way her breath changes when I circle just right. The way she says yes, not because I asked, but because the word has become part of the rhythm.
I lower my mouth to her.