22. Two Kinds of Difficult #3
"I should get some sleep," Reyna said, standing. Her gold steady, composure intact. The cup of mead she held was empty, but she brought it to her lips anyway. Though Charlie saw it, she said nothing. Because she needed to stop building patterns.
"Goodnight, Captain," Charlie said.
She used the rank without thinking. Or maybe she used it because she was thinking too much. Somehow, Charlie realized that the rank felt safer than the alternative.
But Reyna didn't.
"Goodnight, Charlie."
Charlie looked up at her name, and Reyna stood there, a gentle smile on her face. She hadn't used 'Wickett.' She'd used 'Charlie.' It was soft and deliberate, and it completely obliterated every bit of distance that Charlie's use of rank in her goodbye had tried to create.
Reyna left through the library door, and it closed behind her. Charlie sat on the floor, staring at the spot where Reyna's hand had been.
And then she measured the distance it had traveled, and the distance it hadn't.
The next morning, Tavi and Charlie were running post-rescue diagnostics on the containment unit when Tavi glanced over at her.
"No music today?"
"Hmm?" Charlie asked, in somewhat of a daze as she worked on her reports. "Oh, right." Charlie brought up her datapad, looking through a few songs, then tapped play on her screen.
Fleetwood Mac's Everywhere came on in the room.
"Don't get me going, Spark Plug, otherwise I'll think you're flirting with me."
"Who says I'm not?" Charlie teased, not looking up from her console.
"Every attractive woman on this ship that you've stared at."
Charlie's head snapped up. "Tavi!" A blush formed on her cheeks, instant and traitorous. "I would never—"
"I'm kidding," Tavi said, laughing. "Well, mostly. Maybe not every woman."
Charlie looked at him with a raised eyebrow, the heat still displayed on her face. Tavi was already back at his console, stylus moving, the picture of innocence. Neither of them said another word about it. Neither of them named who Tavi meant.
He didn't need to. Charlie's blush had already confirmed the hit.
All of it, she'd managed. She'd managed the proximity, managed her breathing, even managed to sound normal when Reyna asked about backup thresholds while their arms were touching.
She'd managed the exits, the redirects, the "probably nothing" she'd fed herself while Reyna picked up her mead at a very specific moment.
But the ceiling didn't care about her managing skills or whatever the hell she was trying to convince herself was the reality. The ceiling was where the managing would stop and the truth, no matter what it was, started.
That was when the thoughts began to cascade through Charlie's brain.
The arm brush and the specific temperature of a Kaelari forearm, and the way neither of them moved a millimeter. But no mention of it.
Petrichor, a word Charlie had tossed off on a bench at three in the morning. But Reyna had carried it home, looking it up to talk about it again. The callback to "the blood of gods." She called it beautiful.
There was the infuriating inch between their hands on the library floor. It wasn't planned, or intentional, they'd just ended up an inch apart. But the song playing in the silence had been called "Fragile," as if the ship was trying to tell Charlie to be careful.
Then Reyna's exit, and the empty cup she had lifted to her lips anyway, as though Charlie wouldn't notice a woman pretending to drink from nothing.
The goodnight was the one Charlie couldn’t stop thinking about. Charlie had said Captain, because rank was a natural wall, and the walls she'd built herself were starting to crumble. But Reyna had said Charlie, and taken the wall down with a sledgehammer.
A few minutes went by before Charlie opened her datapad.
She scrolled through Tavi's music program and looked back through the evening's playback history.
She found what she was looking for near the end of the queue, right where the night had gone quiet.
When the floor had become the most charged surface on the ship.
"Fragile." Sting. 1987.
She added it to her playlist.
She didn't need to think about why. The acoustic guitar was still in her head, barely there, accumulating the way the whole evening had accumulated.
The way everything with Reyna was starting to accumulate, so gradually that you didn't notice the ground shifting until the earthquake had already arrived.
She closed the datapad to lay back on her bed and stare at the ceiling.
Eventually, Charlie pressed her hands against her face and groaned softly into her palms.
As she stared at the ceiling, her mind recalled calling this trouble once. In fact, she'd happily go back to that if given the chance.
"Trouble doesn't cover it anymore though, does it?"
The ceiling stared back at her, unhelpful, making it so she couldn’t sleep for a very long time.
When she did finally sleep, Charlie dreamed about constellations on green skin. Gold light tracing patterns she couldn't read but somehow understood, warm against her fingertips, pulsing gently in the dark.
This time, she remembered.