Chapter 10 #3
“Every time, little human.” Low. A growl underneath.
“Every corridor, every ship, every station in the belt. I will always catch you.” My teeth find the skin behind her ear — light, a promise, not a claim.
“And when you’ve read the manual — when you choose me with your eyes open — I am going to chase you through every room on this ship and pin you down and give you everything.
Both. All of it. Every inch of what you felt in your hands tonight.
” I press my mouth to the place where her neck meets her shoulder.
“Slow first. Until you’re begging. Then not slow. And you will not be quiet about it.”
Her body shudders against me. Full-body. A response to a promise. Her scent spikes — one last blazing pulse that hits my tongue and nearly breaks me.
“I’m holding you to that,” she whispers.
“I’m counting on it.”
She sleeps. On my sheets. In my arms.
I pull the blanket over both of us. Her warmth sinking into the mattress, into the pillow, into the place where I sleep.
My scent and hers mixing in the fabric. Tomorrow, when she gets up, the bunk will smell like both of us.
I will lie down in it and the scent will be there, and I will close my eyes and the hum-sense will say hers, here, hers.
Her face is against my neck and her breathing steady. Her fingers curled loosely around my forearm, resting on the ridge. Even in sleep. Even unconscious, her hand finds the ridge.
I do not sleep. I lie in the bunk with her weight against me and the blanket over us and the cabin warm and dark and I listen to her breathe, and I count her heartbeats and I think about the manual and the choice and the forever that I may not want out loud yet.
The mark on her collarbone. My teeth. A bruise that will fade. Not a bond. Not a claim. Just a mark that says I was here, the way a coffee ring on a page says someone was reading.
She will read the manual. She will read it, and she will understand what the bond means, and she will look at me with those hazel eyes, and she will choose.
I do not know what she will choose. The not-knowing is a weight I will carry on this bunk for as many hours as it takes.
But she said I won’t need long. And her hand is on my ridge. And her heartbeat is steady. And the scent of both of us is in the sheets.
“Captain.” HORATIO. A whisper. The gentlest I have ever heard him. “Madam Morrison has been hailing for nine minutes. She has my override code.”
I close my eyes. Her weight against me. Her warmth. The heartbeat.
“Give me sixty seconds, HORATIO.”
“Sixty seconds, Captain.”
I press my mouth to her hair. Breathing her in. The last breath before I have to let go.
“Stay,” I say. Into her hair. She is asleep. She cannot hear me.
“Stay.”
I ease out of the bunk. Carefully. She shifts.
Murmurs something against the pillow — not a word, not quite, but her hand tightens on the sheet where my arm was.
Holding the warmth I left behind. Her face turns into my pillow, and she breathes in and something in her expression — even in sleep — softens.
She is in my bed. In my sheets. In my blanket. My scent. Hers. Mixed.
I close the cabin hatch behind me. The metal is two inches thick, and it is not enough. It will never be enough. The hum-sense tracks her through the wall — there, safe, sleeping, yours.
I walk to the cockpit. My arms are scratched. My ridges are warm. My lips taste like her.
Morrison is waiting.
Mother Morrison’s face fills the cockpit screen.
She looks exactly the way she always looks — like a woman who has been running a station for thirty years and has seen everything twice and is not impressed by any of it.
Her eyes move over me once. The scratches.
The gauze. The ridges, which are still warm and not the color they usually are when I file a report. Her mouth twitches.
“Ereux. You look like you’ve been in a fight.”
“Vrennak woke up. Containment failed. It’s dead now. Damage to the hold. Filing the report now.”
“Mmhm.” She looks at me for three seconds longer than the sentence requires.
Her eyes drop to my forearm — the claw marks, the gauze, the ridges underneath that are broadcasting my entire evening in a color she has never seen on me in a decade of dock reports.
“And the SNAG courier? Ms. Vance? She’s uninjured? ”
“Bruised. A temple laceration. She’s resting.”
“Resting.” Mother says the word the way she says noted — with the full weight of a woman who knows exactly what resting means on a sealed ship at this hour and is choosing, with the professional restraint of a career station chief, not to elaborate.
“The quarantine lifts at oh-six-hundred. I’ll expect you at my office by oh-seven.
Ms. Vance reports to Flossie; I’ll let her know. Bring the incident report. And Ereux —”
“Mother.”
Her expression shifts. The thing that was not a smile becomes something else.
Something that has been waiting behind her professional face for a long time.
Something that looks like a woman who has been quietly watching a male she considers family pretend to be fine for a decade and who has just seen the pretending stop.
“Get some sleep,” she says. Soft. “You look like you need it.”
She cuts the channel. The screen goes dark.
I sit in the cockpit for ten seconds. Then I stand up and walk back to the cabin where she is sleeping in my sheets.