Epilogue Stay #3
“Jazil.” She is looking down. Between us. At the place where the oil has pooled. “There is oil on your —”
“I know.”
“Both of them.”
“I know.”
“They’re glistening, Jazil. They look like they’ve been polished.”
“This is your fault.”
“This is entirely my fault and I am going to clean it up and I am going to enjoy cleaning it up and you are going to let me.”
She drops to her knees in the shower with soapy hands and the cleaning-up takes significantly longer than the cleaning-up needs to take and neither of us complains.
The bed. Our bed. Clean sheets that she did not make and I remade while she was in the shower because I cannot help myself. She curls against my chest. My arm around her waist.
“Jazil.”
“Mm.”
“The humming. I can feel it through your ribs.”
“Yeah. The frequency of you. I know where you are. If you’re safe. If you’re happy.” I press my mouth to her hair. “Right now it’s saying here, chest, warm, happy, mine.”
“All the time?”
“Every breath.”
“Even when you’re asleep?”
“Even then. Just quieter.”
She presses her hand flat against my ribs.
“That’s you finding me.”
“For the rest of my life.”
Quiet. Her hand on my ribs.
Her favorite color is green. I know that now.
I know she takes her tea with too much sugar and leaves mugs on every surface and sleeps on her left side and talks in her sleep — not words, just sounds, small arguing sounds, like she is negotiating with someone in a dream and losing.
I know the way her breathing changes when she’s reading something that scares her.
I know the sound she makes when she laughs so hard she snorts and the specific silence that means she is about to cry, and the difference between the two is a half-second of held breath.
Three months. I have three months of her. The bond is permanent. The bond was permanent in the first hour — my biology does not negotiate, does not trial-run, does not offer a cooling-off period. The bond said her and meant forever, and I did not know her middle name.
I still don’t know her middle name. I don’t know what she was like at fifteen.
I don’t know what she wanted to be before she wanted to be brave.
I don’t know what makes her angry — properly angry, not flustered, not the sharp-tongued-when-cornered angry but the deep kind, the kind that goes quiet.
I don’t know what she looks like when she’s sick.
I don’t know how she fights, not Vrennaks but us — when the thing that’s wrong is between us and not outside us. We haven’t had that yet. We will.
The bond chose before I knew. That is the Skiveth of it — the biology picks and the knowing comes after. Humans do it the other way around. They date and discuss and evaluate and decide, and then they commit. We commit and then we discover. The commitment is the starting line, not the finish.
She is asleep on my chest, and I have forever to learn her middle name.
“Jazil.”
“Mm.”
“I’m happy. Not just tonight. Not just the oil colonization.” She laughs softly. “All of it. The route. The copilot’s seat. HORATIO’s symphonies. I am the happiest I have ever been.”
“I know.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
Simple. Like coordinates. Like a heading. Like something true.
“Captain,” HORATIO. A whisper. From the remote terminal. “The female human is asleep. I will withdraw. May I recommend the wine reserve for the morning?”
He means coffee. The wine reserve has been coffee for nine years. HORATIO calls it the wine reserve because he believes the phrase has gravitas. Lorri figured it out in week two. She plays along. The wine reserve is coffee, and the coffee is excellent and the game is love.
“Thank you, HORATIO.”
“Captain. I am being good.”
“You’re being good.”
“Please note.”
“Noted.”
The lights dim. Nobody asked. HORATIO has been dimming the lights without being asked for three months and the dimming is love in the only language an AI knows how to speak.
I press my mouth to her hair. The scent of us. Tea and mineral-clean and the warm-sweet base note that only exists where we overlap.
“Stay,” I say. The word. Every night. The word I said on a deck plate when she was sleeping on my shoulder and I didn’t know she heard.
She is asleep. Her hand on my ridge.
She always hears.
Always.
Home is wherever she is.
We are home.
Okay. Breathe.
If you just finished that last chapter and you're not entirely okay — good. That was the whole idea, and I'm not even a little bit sorry.
Here's the thing: Junction One is so much bigger than one locked cargo bay.
There's a whole station out there. A recovery agency built by people the galaxy gave up on, six couples who bond hard and fall harder, and an AI in every single story who is far too invested in whose bed its operative ends up in.
I'd love to keep telling you about them.
Come a little closer — get on my list, and I'll bring you the cover reveals, the early peeks, and the bonus scenes that are too much to leave lying around in public. The ones I write just for the people who want to stay:
Stay. I'll make it worth it.
Lara x