20. The Pat #3
“The Finder’s Market. Level 2, Unit 7.” She pulls up something on the display — a floor plan.
She has had a floor plan ready. She has been preparing a floor plan for the company I hadn’t officially founded yet because Morrison is always three steps ahead and two of those steps involve real estate.
“Commercial space suitable for a small recovery operation. Structural assessment is clean. Two private offices, a client intake area, docking ring access through the service corridor. The lease is reasonable. It is close to the docking ring, which is operationally advantageous.” A beat.
“And it is close to my office. Which is —“ She stares at the floor plan. “— also operationally advantageous.”
She wants us at Junction One. She wants us where she can see us, reach us, protect us. She is offering a commercial lease the way another person would offer an embrace — here, I made you a place, stay close, let me keep you alive.
“Unit 7,” I say. My voice has gone thick. “I’ll look at it.”
“You’ll take it. The alternatives are inferior.
I have researched them all.” She closes the display.
Folds her hands on the desk. The typing is done.
The safety net is built and labelled and entered into the system.
Morrison is sitting behind her desk with her hands folded and her back very straight and her eyes very bright and the silence in the room is the kind that has weather.
I hug her.
I don’t ask. I don’t warn. I don’t give her time to brace or deflect or retreat to operational mode. I walk around the desk and I put my arms around Morrison and I hold on.
She goes rigid.
Every muscle. The body of a woman who has spent years being the strongest person in every room.
Who does not get hugged. Who has built a career on the principle that vulnerability is a liability and affection is expressed through competence and coffee mugs and three-in-the-morning phone calls and never, never through arms and contact and the physical admission that another person’s warmth matters.
I hold on.
She smells like coffee and station recycled air and the faintest trace of the soap she has used since I met her — unscented, practical, Morrison in a bottle.
She is shorter than I expected. Or I have forgotten.
Or the woman who looms so large in my life takes up less physical space than the shape she occupies in my chest.
For three seconds, nothing. Rigid. The reinforced-steel desk between us figuratively even though it’s behind her now.
Morrison’s defenses are not doors; they are architecture.
They are load-bearing walls. They are the structure that holds her upright and if she removes them she does not know what shape she will be.
One arm comes up.
Pats twice.
Two pats on my back. Firm. Brief. The contact of a woman who is touching someone for the first time in — I don’t know.
Years. The pats say everything Morrison will never say out loud.
They say: I built you, and you are leaving, and I am letting you go because that is what you do with things you build well, you let them go, and this is the hardest thing I have done in twenty-three years of hard things and I love you, Florence, and I will never say that sentence, not once, not ever, so take the two pats and go before I become someone neither of us recognizes.
The arm drops. Morrison clears her throat. Steps back. Adjusts something on her desk that does not need adjusting. Straightens the coffee mug. Moves a data pad two inches to the left. Moves it back.
My eyes are streaming. I am crying in Morrison’s office and Morrison is straightening things on her desk and neither of us is addressing either fact.
“Go.” Her voice is rough. Not broken — roughened. The sound of a surface that has been worn smooth by something it will not name. “Before I change my mind about the allied services contract.”
“Morrison —“
“Go, Florence.” She picks up the coffee mug.
Holds it with both hands. Sits behind the desk.
The posture of a woman rebuilding her architecture one load-bearing wall at a time.
“And tell your Xarthian that if he doesn’t keep you alive I will find him and the conversation will not require an allied services contract. ”
“That’s almost a blessing.”
“That is a threat. Get out of my office.”
I get out of her office.
The door closes behind me and he is there.
Exactly where I left him. Tail wound around his own ankle.
Purring. The sound fills the corridor — low, steady, the bonding frequency that I feel in my teeth and my sternum and the bite mark at my collar.
Sprout hovering at his shoulder like a small amber moon.
Gold eyes fixed on the door, fixed on me the moment it opens, the pupils dilating.
“She patted me.” My voice is wrecked. Shaking. Radiant. “Two pats, Xor. On the back. She put one arm around me, and she patted me twice.”
“I know.”
Xarthian hearing. He heard the shapes of it through the wall — the sharp voices, the silences, the two soft impacts of a hand on a back.
“Morrison doesn’t touch people. In twelve years she has never —“ I press my hand over my mouth. The tears won’t stop, and I don’t want them to stop. “Two pats. That’s basically an ‘I love you.’”
“I believe you.”
He wraps me. Tail first — the same reflex as the first day, three and a half feet of prehensile muscle around my waist. Then arms. Both.
I disappear inside him. My face against his chest, my hands gripping the fabric at his ribs, the purr vibrating through my skull and the sternum that was Morrison’s first and is both of theirs now.
I cry. Not sadness. Overflow. The cost of leaving, and the certainty that it’s right, and the two pats that said everything, and the male holding me in a corridor who doesn’t fully understand human crying but understands I need holding.
His chin on my head. The size of him around the smallness of me.
“Morrison’s heart rate reached 94 BPM during the embrace,” Sprout says from his shoulder.
Quiet. “Highest reading in twelve years of monitoring. I am filing it under ‘significant.’” A pause.
“She cried for four seconds after the door closed. I am not telling you this. I have not said it. Move along.”
I laugh against his chest. A wet, broken, brilliant sound.
“Where you go, I go,” Sprout says. The orb glows steady amber. “Someone has to keep you alive. And someone has to keep logging.”
I pull back. Wipe my eyes. Look up at him — seven feet of crimson predator who stood in a corridor purring for twenty-five minutes, who heard everything, who came anyway. Who chose me.
“Right.” I straighten his collar. “The container’s still on the Petal. We’ve got a delivery to make.”
“The Petal is sealed, for the record,” Sprout says from his shoulder. “The Xarthian re-keyed both airlocks to SRS standard, and I remain resident in the ship’s systems — the orb is merely where I keep my opinions. Anything that touches those docking clamps will be loudly, publicly logged.”
“Together?”
“Together.”
I take his hand. My fingers lace through his — small, callused, fitting between his broad knuckles like they were always going to end up there. We walk through Junction One. His tail around my waist. The purr filling the corridor. People stare.
Let them.