6. The Touch #2
Crimson. Dark geometric lines running from the base of his throat across the deltoid, down the curve of his bicep, forking into precise tributaries where the muscle meets the joint.
The black markings are darker against the skin than I expected, the edges sharper, like something etched rather than grown.
Between the lines, the velvet fuzz is dense and dark, covering the skin like something alive.
His shoulder is broad and heavy with muscle and the entire surface of it is a landscape I want to put my hands on.
I am still in the cockpit.
I realize this because I have not moved. I told him I was going to the aft junction and I have not moved because my feet have filed a disagreement with my brain and are refusing to process the departure order.
He looks over his shoulder. Catches me. Standing three feet away with a repair kit on the console and my hands at my sides and my eyes on his shoulder where the suit has fallen away and the fuzz and the markings and the crimson are all right there, lit warm by the fairy lights, and I have been caught looking and there is nothing professional about this.
“The aft junction,” he says. Flat. But the gold of his eyes has darkened at the edges, and his nostrils flare once — a sharp involuntary expansion — and whatever he’s picking up from the air between us, he didn’t go looking for it.
“Right. Yes. Aft junction. Going now.”
I go. I walk down the corridor and around the corner and press my back against the aft junction bulkhead and breathe.
The aft sensor check takes three minutes.
I make it take fifteen. I run every diagnostic I can think of, then run them again, and I listen to the sounds of him moving in the cockpit — fabric, the repair tool’s soft whine, the particular rhythm of a body in a space too small for it.
At one point something falls over — probably Gerald — and there is a pause, and then the careful sound of it being set upright again, and I press my palm flat against my sternum because the mental image of a shirtless Xarthian gently righting a ceramic figurine in a hat is going to live in my head rent-free for the rest of my natural life.
When I come back, the suit is sealed. The shoulder repaired — clean thermal stitching, better work than I expected from hands built for tearing, not mending.
He’s standing at the console reviewing merc data, looking exactly as clinical and unmoved as he did before, except that his nostrils flare again when I enter and his tail, which is locked against his calf, gives one hard twitch toward me before he kills it.
“Aft sensors are clear,” I say.
“I did not ask.”
“You’re welcome.” I drop into the pilot’s chair.
He’s at the secondary display, close enough that I can feel his heat along my right side — a hundred and three degrees of Xarthian thermal output bleeding into the air between us.
The cockpit is too small for two people who are not thinking about each other.
The cockpit is especially too small for two people who are absolutely, definitely not thinking about each other.
“The fuzz on your arms.”
The words are out before I’ve finished deciding to say them. Flossie Knight, twelve years of courier work, three interplanetary conflicts, trained by Morrison herself, and I have the impulse control of a child in a sweet shop when it comes to this man’s forearms.
He goes still. Not the combat stillness — something more complicated. The stillness of a man who has been asked a question his body wants to answer and his training says to refuse.
“You mentioned it was thermoregulatory,” I say, committing to the catastrophe now that I’ve started it. “The fuzz.”
“It is thermoregulatory.”
“Can I touch it?”
The cockpit holds its breath. Or I hold mine. One of us.
His claws cycle — extend, retract, extend, retract — a visible involuntary response, every black point sliding in and out as his body searches for the correct protocol and cannot find it.
His jaw is locked. The marking along the hinge has flushed darker, the skin beneath it running hot enough that I can feel the temperature shift from two feet away.
“You want to touch my thermoregulatory adaptation.”
“I want to touch the fuzz on your arm, yes.” I say it plainly. The way I said beautiful. The way I say everything that matters — without checking first whether it’s advisable, because the things worth saying never are. “You can say no.”
He extends his arm. Forearm up. The vulnerable underside, where the fuzz is finest and the markings fork into delicate tributaries across the tendons.
The gesture costs him something — I can see it in the rigid line of his shoulders, the locked jaw, the way his other hand curls into a fist at his side.
He is offering me the soft part of himself and every piece of his training is screaming at him to pull back.
My fingertips land on his wrist.
Light. Careful. The fuzz is — god. Softer than I imagined, which is saying something because I have imagined it in considerable detail over the past twenty-four hours.
Dense and fine, like velvet warmed by a fire, and beneath it his skin is hot.
Not human-hot. Xarthian-hot. Five degrees above mine, radiating through the down into my fingertips, and the heat travels up my hand, my wrist, settling in the crook of my elbow where the skin is thin.
He stops breathing through his nose. Switches to mouth breathing — I can hear the shift, the way the inhale changes, and I know why. He told me. His olfactory system tracks scents it classifies as significant, and whatever I smell like right now, he’s trying not to catalog it.
Good luck with that, lovey.
I trail my fingers up his forearm. Through the down, along the edge of a geometric marking, and the line flushes hot beneath my touch — a visible darkening, the skin temperature spiking in a radius around the contact point, and the marking pulses like something alive.
Like his body is answering a question I asked with my hands.
“You’re warm here,” I say. “Right along the lines. Like the pattern’s alive.”
Something behind his eyes fractures. Not breaks — fractures, the way ice cracks when the thing beneath it starts to move. His claws cycle one more time and then stop, fully retracted, both hands, a surrender of armament that he is not conscious of making and I am completely conscious of witnessing.
“The back of your neck,” I say. Not a question. An observation, delivered with the specific inevitability of a woman who has identified the next place she wants to touch and is not pretending otherwise. “The fuzz is thicker there.”
“Denser.” His voice sounds wrong. Stripped of the clinical contempt, the SRS briefing cadence, the flat arrogant precision. What’s left is raw. “The occipital region requires greater thermoregulation due to proximity to the —“ He stops. “It is denser there.”
He can’t finish the sentence. The man who has words for everything, who catalogs the galaxy in neat clinical categories, cannot finish a sentence about the back of his own neck because my fingers are on his arm and his body is doing things his vocabulary wasn’t built for.
I lift my hand from his forearm. The absence makes him flinch — a micro-movement, suppressed instantly, but I saw it. I see everything.
Then my fingers are in the fuzz at the back of his neck.
The sound he makes is not a word.
His head drops forward. Not slowly, not by degrees — a complete vertebral surrender, the entire weight of his skull tipping forward to expose the nape.
I know enough about predatory species to know what this means.
The spine is the kill zone. You do not expose it to anyone you don’t trust with your life, and he has just given it to me in a cockpit decorated with fairy lights because my fingers are in his fuzz and his body has decided I am safe.
The purr starts.
Not deep — not yet. Higher, thinner, localized in the throat where my fingers are working. A vibration I can feel through my palm, rumbling through muscle and bone and into my hand, and it moves up my wrist, my arm, settles behind my sternum where all the formless things live.
My eyes sting. I don’t know why. I do know why.