7. Shared Berth
Shared Berth
Flossie
SRS sent them. And he told them exactly where to find us.
The sentence sits in the cockpit like a live round. His hand is on my shoulder. His tail is on my thigh. Eight merc signatures blink on the tactical display, running SRS transponder codes, and I am looking at a man who has been honest with me about the worst possible thing.
“Right,” I say. My voice comes out steady, which is Morrison’s doing, not mine. “So we have six hours before the people you work for arrive to kill us.”
“The transponder codes indicate SRS involvement. This does not necessarily—”
“Xor.” No pet name. His actual name, and the weight of it lands because this morning he gave it to me like it cost him something. “They’re running your employer’s codes on an intercept course that matches the trajectory you reported. Don’t manage me.”
His hand lifts from my shoulder first. The absence arrives before I’ve processed it — the precise shape of his palm still radiating through my shirt, the muscle beneath it too aware of where he was.
I’ve been shirtless-adjacent with this man.
I’ve had my hands on the geometric lines of him and felt the heat spike under my fingertips and heard the sound he makes when you find the right spot. My shoulder has opinions about this.
The tail follows. Slow withdrawal, each inch deliberate, and my thigh tracks the whole slow length of the leaving .
The weight of it was specific. The heat of it was specific.
The particular pressure of three and a half feet of prehensile muscle choosing, without authorization, to hold me — specific.
My body has filed all of it under significant and is currently staging a protest about the withdrawal that I am firmly overruling, because eight SRS vessels are on an intercept course and I am a professional.
“I am not managing you.” Low. Something closer to the way he sounded when he said gentle. “I am stating that the situation requires recalculation.”
“The situation requires you to pick a side.” I stand. The cockpit is small enough that standing puts me inside his heat radius—the invisible line where his 103 degrees meets my 98.6—and I don’t step back. “Are you with SRS, or are you with me?”
He knows what I’m asking. The gold of his eyes darkens at the center, pupils widening, and his claws—which retracted for me an hour ago, both hands, a choice his body made before his brain caught up—dig into his own palms.
I see the crescent marks forming. Four small half-moons pressed into crimson skin.
My fingers twitch. The reach. I want to take his hand and open his fist and press my thumb into those marks. The specificity of that want is alarming. Not comfort him. My thumb. His palm. The precise pressure of saying stop hurting yourself with my hands.
I fold my arms instead. Press the wanting down behind my sternum where it can sit with everything else I’m not examining tonight.
“You.” He says it like a coordinate locked into a nav system. “I am standing next to you.”
The man who gave me his name an hour ago has been replaced by someone I want to hit with a data pad.
We spend two hours making the Petal invisible, and every minute of it Xor is colder, sharper, more condescending than he was before the touch, before beautiful, before the purr.
As if the last six hours never happened.
As if I didn’t have my fingers in the fuzz at his nape and feel him come apart beneath my hand.
He barks orders. Actual orders, on my ship, as if the SRS command structure has spontaneously reinstated itself in my cockpit.
“Recalibrate the port-side scanner array. The sensitivity threshold is inadequate.”
“Recalibrate it yourself, lovey. You know where the controls are.”
“The courier should focus on navigation. Technical recalibration requires—”
“The courier.” I set my mug down hard enough that tea slops over the rim. “I have a name. You used it an hour ago. You used it while my fingers were on the back of your neck, and you were purring. So you can either call me Flossie like a person or you can recalibrate your own bloody scanners.”
His jaw locks. The marking along the hinge flushes dark—the heat response I’ve learned to read, the one that means his body is doing something his brain hasn’t authorized. He turns back to the display without answering.
“The courier” it is, then. Brilliant.
Sprout’s orb descends from the ceiling. “I have updated the Xarthian’s threat classification from ‘Complicated’ to ‘Tactically Irrational — Classification Pending Review.’ I believe this is more precise.”
“Sprout.” My voice carries a warning.
“I said what I said.”
He feeds us SRS intercept protocols. Blind spots, access codes, tactical weaknesses—dismantling his employer’s architecture with quiet efficiency while simultaneously treating me like an operational asset he’s been assigned to manage.
He stands at the co-pilot’s station—not the chair, the station, because the chair is where he sat six hours ago like he belonged there and neither of us has addressed that.
His forearm crosses my sightline as he adjusts the display.
The fuzz along his wrist catches the amber glow — dark and dense and I know exactly what it feels like now, the velvet-warm density of it, the way his skin temperature spiked beneath my touch when I traced the geometric lines.
I know what the sound is that he makes when you find the right spot at the base of his horn.
I know the precise weight and heat of him folded across the co-pilot’s chair, the way the purr started low and built into something that lived in my sternum.
My hands are wrapped around my mug. I am keeping them there on purpose.
The mug is doing important work right now.
He is standing eighteen inches away cataloging merc formations as if none of this is recorded in his body, and I am cataloging his body as if none of this is recorded in mine, and we are both liars.
It is. I can see every piece of evidence, and it is doing nothing to help me concentrate.
His nostrils flare every time I shift in my chair — an involuntary expansion, his olfactory system cataloging me against his will.
He is tracking my position in this cockpit through his senses while pretending to read the display, and I know this because I am tracking his.
The way the marking at his jaw flushes dark when I lean across the console for the navigation controls.
The way his tail twitches toward me and gets hauled back to his calf with a rigidity that must ache — three and a half feet of muscle fighting a decision his training made, and his body is disputing.
The fact that he has started two sentences in the past thirty minutes and swallowed them both before they cleared his teeth.
He smells me when I move. I feel the heat of him when he leans close to the display.
We are two people working in a very small space who have had their hands on each other and are both pretending this is a neutral state of affairs.
He reaches past me for the display controls, and his arm is six inches from my face and the fuzz on his forearm is right there, and I look at the ceiling instead. “You’re being an asshole on purpose,” I say, during a lull in the tactical planning.
He does not look up from the display. “I am maintaining operational focus.”
“You’re hiding behind operational focus because you told me no one has touched you gently and it scared you so badly you’ve rebooted the entire asshole operating system.”
Silence. The kind that has weight. His claws drive into the console polymer—five crescent marks, precise, the same shape as the ones in his palms—and the display flickers.
“Your psychological assessment is not required.”
“It’s not a psychological assessment, lovey. It’s an observation. I make those. I write them in my diary.” I lean back in my chair. “Which, for the record, you read at three in the morning when you thought I was asleep.”
His head turns. Slowly. The gold eyes are wide and the expression on his face is the closest thing to caught I have ever seen on a seven-foot Xarthian predator.
“You were not asleep.”
“I was mostly asleep. Sprout wasn’t.”
“I noted the notebook’s displacement,” Sprout confirms. “0317. Returned at 0342 at the correct angle but with a 2-degree rotational variance. The Xarthian’s attention to detail is adequate but not flawless.”
The silence that follows is spectacular.
He stares at me. I stare at him. His tail is doing something complicated near his ankle that he is pretending is not happening, and the flush along his markings has spread from jaw to collar, and I am enjoying this far more than the tactical situation warrants.
“The notebook contains operationally relevant intelligence,” he says, and his voice is almost—almost—defensive.
“It contains a list of lost things that nobody’s looking for. You read it cover to cover, and you put it back at the exact angle because you didn’t want me to know.” I hold his gaze. “That’s not reconnaissance, Xor. That’s caring. And you’re terrible at it, which is how I know it’s real.”
He turns back to the display. Says nothing. But his claws retract from the console, and his shoulders drop half an inch, and his tail uncurls one inch from his calf before he catches it.
I let him have the silence. Some things need to sit before they can be filed.
The last merc signature drops off the scope at 0214, deep in the ship’s night.
I watch them go—eight bright points scattering across the dust belt like seeds blown off course, search patterns widening as they chase the vector Xor fed them three hours ago.
The wrong vector. His codes, his protocols, his intimate knowledge of exactly how SRS formations lose coherence in low-visibility terrain, all turned quietly inside out and pointed at empty space.