13. And Then
And Then
Flossie
The fight lasted less than four minutes.
I didn't go down.
He is standing in the corridor outside the cargo bunk.
Blood on his jaw. The repair seam in his tactical suit at the shoulder—the same shoulder, the remembered gap of crimson skin and geometric markings and dark fuzz.
My fingers have been twitching toward that spot since the day he boarded, and they are twitching now.
He moves first this time.
Not toward the pursuit craft console. Toward me.
The combat chemistry is still running—I can feel the heat radiating off him across two feet of corridor, the 103 degrees the recyclers are losing against—but his face is doing the thing where the weapon and the male are both present and the male is winning.
His hands find my face. Slowly—he gives me time to see them coming, the slowness deliberate, and I appreciate it—and then the smooth pads are at my jaw, tilting my head toward the light.
His thumbs are careful around the cut. Very careful.
The claws are retracted all the way, every point, and I can feel the fuzz at his knuckles against my cheekbone and I hold still and let him look.
He looks at the cut for longer than is medically necessary.
"It needs closing," he says. The stripped-down voice—no architecture, no operational distance. Just: this is true, and it needs doing, and I am going to do it. "The thermal thread in the field kit—"
"I can do it myself," I say. Which is true.
"I know." He doesn't move his hands. "I'm going to do it anyway."
I close my mouth.
His hands are steady. Both of them—the same hands that had Saar's throat five minutes ago, the claws that were in and not dimpling, the weight that was about to come down—and now they are holding my jaw with a precision I am going to be thinking about for a long time.
He produces the thermal thread from the tactical kit at his side and works with his head bent close to mine, his breath warm against my cheekbone, and the purr starts in his chest again—low, the frequency that means she's here, she's close, hold on—and I hold very still and let the predator mend what the fight broke.
When he's done he doesn't step back. His hands stay at my jaw. His thumb traces the line of the closed cut, once—the same slow stroke he used on my cheekbone in the cockpit, before the channel screamed—and the touch is so careful it takes something out of me.
"You went feral," I say. My voice is low. He is four inches from my face.
"Yes."
"You were going to kill him."
A pause. "Yes."
I let that sit. "And if I hadn't said your name?"
The gold eyes. Still wide, the pupils large, the combat chemistry working its way down from the red end of the scale. "I would have stopped." The pause before the next word is long enough to be honest. "Eventually."
The shaking has started in my hands. Post-combat tremor—the adrenaline finding nowhere to go—and it is not only the fight. It is the wall. The white edges. The copper taste. The fraction of a second between my dodge and not quite fast enough.
An inch to the left and I don't get to do this.
An inch—and the second drone has a clear shot and the three hours to Junction One are someone else's problem and the male four inches from my face is required to file a report about it.
I think about him filing that report. The clinical language, the operational framework, the way he would have put what happened in the hold and the corridor and the cockpit into SRS-standard terminology, and filed it, and carried it.
I think about that and something fierce and hot fills up behind my sternum and crowds out everything Morrison ever said about staying professional.
I am done staying professional.
I stop redirecting.
"Twice," I say. My voice is not steady. My voice is the voice of a woman who has been interrupted twice and is not going to be interrupted a third time.
"Twice I have been one inch from your mouth and something has intervened.
I almost didn't get to say that. The tactical weight was an inch off, and I almost didn't get to say anything at all.
" I look at him. The blood on his jaw. The shaking in my hands.
"If you want to say something noble about biology or bonding protocols or escalation, say it now.
In about three seconds I am going to kiss you and I would prefer not to have the conversation while I'm doing it. "
"I—" His throat works. The purr is building in his chest. I can feel it through his hands against my jaw. "I have no objections to—the bonding protocols are not—"
"Three seconds is up."
My hand finds his jaw and I pull.
Not gently. Not the careful thumb-stroke.
I pull his face down to mine with my fist in the fuzz at his nape and the other hand flat against his chest, and the sound he makes—against my mouth, inside it—lives below the purr.
In the register that bypassed my eardrums in the corridor and went straight to the part of my brain that knows what it means when a predator has found what it was looking for.
The combat frequency. Nowhere left to go.
He tastes like blood.
His jaw was bleeding from Saar's elbow and I can taste the dark iron of it when I open for him and I don't stop, I press in, and the sound in his chest surges in response—the frequency dropping, deepening, the purr rebuilt from the foundation up into something that vibrates through his mouth into my jaw and my teeth and the base of my skull.
His hands hit the wall. Both of them, on either side of my head, bracing—and then they close around me, and I'm between him and the mineral surface with nowhere to go and all the reasons to stay.
The corridor is four meters wide, and he is taking up most of it and my spine is against the wall and I can feel every degree of the 103.
The ridges. Through the tactical suit, through my thin ship's-issue shirt, the shape I cataloged in the hold—I have that map, and I am checking it now, my body flush against his and nothing between us but fabric.
The pressure of them against my stomach draws a sound out of me into his mouth that I will be embarrassed about later.
His hands are shaking.
I feel it when they find my waist—the slight tremor, the post-combat chemistry running out of road.
The shaking is not fear. The shaking is a seven-foot-tall predator whose body is processing the fact that I'm alive, that the tactical weight missed, that this is happening.
His grip tightens until his fingers are nearly spanning my ribs and the calibration is visible—the chosen gentleness in hands that five minutes ago had claws in another male's throat—and watching him choose careful while shaking with the effort of it does something to me, I don't have a word for.
He is shaking because I nearly didn't make it. He would have been required to file a report. I find this thought does nothing to cool me down.
The fuzz at the edges of his jaw is rough against my chin and cheeks and my fingers dig harder into his nape and I pull him closer.
His mouth is softer than anything that large has any right to be, and he kisses me back with a thoroughness that I feel behind my sternum and between my thighs simultaneously, and the purr is everywhere—in my teeth, in the soles of my feet through the deck plating, in the wall at my back through his hands.
His hand slides up my ribs. Palm hot through the thin fabric, thumb tracing the curve beneath my breast—and stops.
The restraint. Even now. Even with his mouth on mine and his body pressed against me and the pheromones in the corridor doing whatever it is they do.
He stops and waits, and the waiting is a question.
I take his hand and press it higher.
His palm closes over me and my spine arches off the wall and the sound I make is embarrassing and specific, and he absorbs it with his mouth and his hand and the purr surges to a frequency I feel between my thighs, a deep rhythmic pulse that my body responds to with a clench that leaves me boneless.
"Flossie." Against my mouth. My name inside the purr. Wrecked—the most thorough destruction of a single word I have ever witnessed.
"Not here." His forehead drops against mine.
The horns bracket my temples—careful, angled away from the cut, the geometry adjusted in the same breath he used to find my mouth, the spatial awareness of a male who has lived with horns for forty-six years and has just added one more variable he will not hurt. "Not here."
"Junction One," I say. Against his mouth. My hand still in the fuzz at his nape. His pulse hammering under my palm. "We get to Junction One. We deal with Drask. And then—"
"And then." His tail tightens at my hip. His thumb traces one slow circle through the fabric and I bite my lip to keep the sound inside. "I am going to hold you to the ‘and then’."
"Lovey, I'm counting on it."
I step back. The distance arrives, and it is terrible and necessary and my body objects at every level. His hand slides from my ribs. His tail unwinds. The purr drops to the low steady frequency that means she's here, she's close, she's mine—the frequency I know is not going anywhere.
"Sprout," I call. My voice is rough. Kissed-rough. I don't hide it. "Set course for Junction One. Full speed. How long?"
"Hours yet in the corridor, ten after. Course set." A pause. "I am choosing, in my professional capacity, not to review the atmospheric data from the past six minutes. The Xarthian's biometrics suggest he requires medical attention, but I suspect the cause is not treatable by conventional means."
Three more hours of mineral dark and nothing in scanner range. The tactical vest is stowed under the console — the first time since he boarded, because there is nobody left in reach to armor against. Which leaves the thin ship's-issue shirt, and the precise knowledge of how little that is.
I look at him. He looks at me.
My lip gloss is on his jaw. His thumbprint is on the closed cut above my eye. The blood has smeared where I wiped it earlier and my thumbprint is visible in the dark crimson at the corner of his jaw, and his hands are warm at his sides and I can still feel where they were.
"Junction One," he says. "And then."
I pick up the cold tea from the console where I left it a lifetime ago. Take a sip. It's terrible.
I'm grinning anyway.
In the cargo bunk, Saar is quiet—thinking, probably, about routing irregularities and what it means that we're still breathing and asking questions instead of the other way around.
In my notebook, the transaction reference sits waiting.
Somewhere in the galaxy, Varren Drask's problem just got significantly more complicated.
In the corridor, the purr goes on.