22. The Delivery #3
“The samples are for degenerative neural condition research,” Tessaro says, already turning to her team, already thinking about the science. “Three species affected. These samples could change treatment protocols across the sector.” She pauses. Looks back at me. “Thank you for getting them here.”
The mundanity of it. The ordinary, administrative, paperwork-and-signatures handoff of a container that caused explosions and betrayals and a love that rewired someone’s biology.
The extraordinary things that happened because of this ordinary object, and the ordinary object ending up exactly where it was supposed to go all along.
“The route was very eventful,” I say.
Tessaro, already walking away: “It always is.”
What happens next is not subtle.
Xor gets taller. He doesn’t move — no step, no flex, nothing a security camera would flag — but the posture changes, the stillness changes, seven feet of Xarthian rearranging itself around the fact that a stranger looked at his tail on my hip and named it for what it is.
Pair-bonding physiology. Territorial markers.
Said out loud, in public, by a xenobiologist with thirty years of credentials, and something in him has decided that the classification is now on the record and he intends to exceed it.
His hand settles at the small of my back as we walk to the Petal.
Flat. Warm. A stamp. Every person we pass reads it exactly the way he intends them to, and he knows I am cataloguing the whole display, and the knowing is in the set of his mouth — the not-smile, the almost-smirk, the male at maximum altitude.
My pulse is misbehaving. My knees are considering options.
“Walk faster, lovey.”
Home.
The word has a location now. Junction One.
The Finder’s Market. Unit 7 with the inadequate ventilation and the Morrison-annotated floor plan.
A transit berth reserved for the trip back, because the Petal needs to dock, and we need to sleep and by sleep I mean sleep and by sleep I also mean the other thing and the bonding bite hasn’t happened yet and my body knows it and his body knows it and the knowledge is sitting between us in the cockpit like a lit fuse.
He flies the return route. I let him. His hands on my controls, his corrections smoother than mine through the lane transitions — the Tier 1 piloting instincts that make the Petal respond differently, faster, and I should be territorial about this and I am not.
I am watching his hands on my ship’s controls and the watching is doing something to me that has no relationship to professional appreciation and every relationship to the way his fingers move.
His eyes leave the flight path once — twice — finding the thin line above my eye where the thermal seam has faded almost to nothing.
He thinks I don’t notice. I notice everything; he taught me the habit was mutual.
His thumb brushed it this morning, feather-light, before his hands remembered they were supposed to be doing pre-flight.
“You’re staring.”
“I’m supervising.”
“You are staring at my hands.”
“Your hands are on my controls. I’m supervising the hands that are on my controls. That is a professional assessment.”
Mid-transition between lanes, his right hand leaves the console and lands on my thigh. Large. Warm. Proprietary.
“Both hands on the controls.”
“The ship has autopilot.” His thumb traces the inner seam of my trousers, slow, exactly once. “My priorities are correctly ordered.”
“Your heart rate has elevated 12% in the last forty seconds,” Sprout offers. “I thought you should know. For professional reasons.”
“SPROUT.”
“I learned it from you.” The orb glows. “The tactical broadcasting of biometric data to create romantic disruption. I believe you called it ‘providing intel.’ I am providing intel.”
Xor’s tail wraps my ankle under the console. His eyes stay on the flight path. The corner of his mouth does something that isn’t a smile and isn’t not a smile.
The Petal flies through charted space. The container is gone.
The delivery is done. The job that started the book is finished and the notebook is full and the co-pilot’s chair is occupied and the woman in the pilot’s seat is watching the male in the co-pilot’s seat fly her ship and the AI is logging everything for posterity and the transit berth is two hours away.
Two hours.
Sprout is still running sweeps at combat resolution. The scope is clean. Xor checks it anyway. The world has not stood down and neither has he, and the warmth is warmer for the teeth around it.
The bonding bite hasn’t happened yet. The fuse is burning.
Xarthians have two bites. The mark he left on my shoulder says mine — I have worn it through every corridor on this station and enjoyed every double take.
The bonding bite is the other one: the permanent one, the biological one, fangs built for exactly one purpose, his heartbeat taking up residence beside mine and mine beside his. He has been saving the second.
“Two hours,” he says, low, over the nav display. His tail tightens on my ankle. “And then the clock is ours.”
Two hours.