30. Full Effort #2
Her breath caught and her back went flush against Charlie's chest. But it was that catch in her breath, the part she couldn't hide, that made it clear she was noticed.
She turned her head. It simply happened, the way the breath had caught, her body moving on some instinct she had not issued, nor control.
And Charlie was right there, her eyes tracing the woman's face.
Charlie was closer than Reyna had let anyone come in longer than she could remember.
She was close enough that her own uneven breath reached Charlie's skin, close enough to feel the warmth coming off her, the steadiness of her, Charlie's warm hand still resting at Reyna's waist like it belonged there.
Reyna was looking at her, and she could not make herself stop.
Then Charlie's eyes lifted and found her gaze.
Caught. Charlie had caught her, and for a second, maybe two, Reyna did absolutely nothing about any of it.
All Reyna could do was stand there in the warmth of Charlie Wickett and let a second pass. And it frightened her, because none of this had been her decision. She lost the ability to stop Charlie from seeing anything Reyna was fighting against.
But then it came flooding back, like a deluge attached to a tsunami. Her walls and her stance as the captain as she stepped away from Charlie, picking up the armor she'd left on the floor where she'd briefly, stupidly, set it down.
Nothing showed after that.
She ran the graceless dance through clean on the next pass and let the crew applaud the wrong thing entirely.
She said the easy thing to Charlie, about having had a good teacher, and she watched it do exactly what she'd meant it to do.
It closed the door between them, pushing the last thirty seconds into just a lesson.
But then she hadn’t been able to simply walk away.
She had held Charlie's eyes half a beat too long, searching them, looking back and forth between them for something she had no business looking for.
She made decisions and spent all that effort making the last few minutes ordinary, only to succumb again.
Her body reached for one more second of Charlie before her judgment could stop it.
She made herself smile, and nod, and cross to the edge of the room. She looked at Tavi, at Maren, at the wreck of the dance still going on in the center of the room. Reyna looked at every single thing in that library that was not Charlie Wickett.
She made sure of it.
Now she sat in the dark with the day behind her and did what she always did with a problem she couldn't solve.
She went looking for the piece she could cut loose.
But it wasn't Charlie. Charlie stayed. Reyna had promised her that, back when it became clear Charlie could never go home, and Reyna did not break promises. Charlie was not the problem.
What Charlie made her feel was the problem.
That was the piece she needed to cut loose. It was what had crossed her face in the office before she could stop it. It was the breath she hadn't been able to hold in the middle of a dance.
That, she would cut.
She could decide, here, in the dark, that it did not have to become anything at all.
It could stay exactly what it was. A private inconvenience. Something she noted and declined to act on.
And it would pass, because that's what these things did when you refused to sustain them. And when it passed, Reyna would still be here, holding the ship and filling the role left behind by her best friend, the way she'd always been.
There was also no reason to believe any of it ran both ways.
Whatever had slipped out of Reyna in that office, whatever her body had done in the middle of a dance, none of it was proof of anything on the other side.
Warmth was warmth. It was often handed to the entire crew freely, and it would be the height of foolishness for her to mistake being treated like everyone else for being...
different. Reyna had no evidence that it lived anywhere but in her own chest. So, there.
Nothing to act on, nothing to risk, nothing that asked anything of her except to let it go quiet.
Something in her chest eased because she'd found the piece to cut. She had argued herself all the way back to the ground she'd stood on for thirteen years, still there, still supporting her.
Some part of her did not want the safe answer. But she was a woman who had put down objections before, from louder sources than this, or so she told herself.
The thing was, this one had a name.
Fine, she told the dark. She meant it as a truce and a surrender, both. Have it your way.
And then, because she had never once been able to leave a solved problem alone, she checked her work.
That was the mistake.
The solution meant nothing would change.
She would go on holding the line she had just drawn, and the years would go on the way they already had.
She could see those years all at once. Earth Nights she would attend and find reasons to leave early.
The Observation Room with Charlie beside her on the bench, the way she always was, close enough that Reyna would feel the warmth of her.
Their shoulders together, and Reyna never once letting herself turn it into more.
There would be years of that. And she would call it enough.
Steady and useful.
Alone.
She had asked for that. For the last forty minutes she had sat in the dark arguing for exactly this, and she'd won.
But the truth was, for the first time in years, she had wanted. And yet she had just talked herself out of it, calling it safety.
The ease went out of her chest.
What came in had no countermeasure. She had no tactic for it, nothing left to cut. It was a very quiet question, one she had spent time keeping out.
What if Charlie is what I want?
Not the fondness she'd been calling it, or the small, manageable piece she'd filed away an hour ago which now seemed like a joke.
What if what she had held gold against all evening, what had moved her blood and showed up on her face and pulled a hitched breath out of her she never authorized, was exactly what it looked like?
What if she had spent the entire night arguing against it precisely because it was true?
Before she knew it, her hand had reached for her datapad, as if her hands moved on their own, a step ahead of her the way her body had been all night.
She scanned her front page and opened the music program, just as she'd done another night when her own words weren't enough for what she was feeling.
Hours ago, she had told Charlie not to expect her, and she had meant it as mercy for Charlie, but also as armor for herself. She would not be walking three corridors to the Observation Room tonight. She had seen to all of that in advance, while she still had the strength to.
The music program was smaller. This she could allow. A song in the dark, in her own quarters, with no one to see. She could tell herself it wasn’t the same as going to find her.
She could almost believe it.
She scrolled Charlie's library, stopping abruptly on a single word.
Drive. A song, by some band of Charlie's called The Cars.
But it was the title that stopped her, because it was hers.
It was what she did every day, and had been doing for thirteen years, but not only with the ship.
She'd learned to drive herself, knowing that if she ever got the opportunity to sit still long enough to feel what stillness would cost her, she would never resurface.
So Reyna kept moving, one heading after another. It was how she had survived losing Elena, and then Jere. When you were moving, the years just passed underneath without being able to catch you.
She had never once had trouble. Until now.
She tapped it because, in the dark, it looked like the one thing she was still sure of.
It opened quiet. A slow, haunted thing, a man's voice over almost nothing. And the question in it was not about a ship, or a heading, or a crew.
It was about her.
The song asked, with no mercy in it at all, who was going to drive her home. Who would catch her when she fell. Who was going to take care of a woman who had spent thirteen years taking care of everyone else, and had built her whole life around the answer that it would never be anyone.
Reyna sat in the dark with Charlie's music in her ears and let the song ask its questions.
She didn't answer. But it wasn't as though she was searching for one. Truthfully, she had known the answer she wanted for a while now. Knowing had never been the problem.
She left it unanswered because saying it, even here, into the dark, to absolutely no one, would make it real. And once it was real, she would have to do something about it.
That was the one road Reyna Solas had never found the nerve to drive.
The song ended.
She played it again.