Chapter 32
KIT
SFS POLARIS
They’ve been on the ship for eight weeks.
Eight weeks, and while she thought she’d made solid progress, the antidote still isn’t quite right.
Healing Knox was a fluke she can’t figure out, and the ambassador remains ill, as do twelve other Lumarian citizens.
The only good news is none of them are worsening, so she’s at least managed to slow imminent death. Someone give her a medal.
She hears footsteps behind her, and she turns, catching sight of Finn.
He’s up earlier than she would have expected, but she’s not sure that anybody is sleeping particularly well.
Especially not Finn, after his sister’s death, not knowing the fate of his parents back on Lumaria.
He slides into a chair beside her and lets out a sigh.
“Morning,” he says, pushing his hair back from his forehead. “Or evening? I’m not sure what shift you’re on right now.”
She smiles tiredly, bringing the tin to her lips. “Morning,” she says. “About to head down.”
She looks at him, his wavy brown hair and strong forearms, his deep brown eyes, and for the first time in what feels like years, her heart doesn’t race.
Her mouth doesn’t get dry. She doesn’t yearn for him.
She doesn’t know if it’s because of the utter chaos that they’ve been thrust into, or that the chaos has entirely snapped whatever string had still tied them together, but something has changed.
“Thank you,” Finn says quietly. “For getting her on the ship. For treating her.” He’s thanked her before, but since Pruett died, things have felt strained. They haven’t really talked about Pruett’s death, and Kit has carried that guilt around, let it fester between them.
She tries to think of the right words to say, finally landing on, “Of course. Anything for you and your family. You know that.”
“I wasn’t sure if…after everything, you’d still want to help,” he says, pressing his lips together. “Even if…” He pauses, swallows, tears welling in his eyes. “Even if Pruett is gone.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kit says, a rock plunging deep in her stomach at his words. “I’m so, so sorry. I wish I could have saved her. I think about it every day. I let you down.”
“You didn’t let me down, Kit,” Finn says, looking at his hands. “Pruett was already sick, and you did more than you needed to. You fought for me. For my family. In a way I never…didn’t do for you.”
Kit stays quiet. This feels like a conversation she would have wanted to have six months ago, but she’s not sure if she still wants to have it now. She swallows another sip of coffee and turns her body so she’s facing him more fully.
His face is illuminated by the one light she’d turned on the lowest setting, and she can see his pulse ticking in his throat.
“I still care about you, Finn,” she says, finally. “No matter what.”
He sets his own coffee down on the table, and before she knows what’s happening, he’s gathered her up in his arms, hugging her tightly against him.
He smells like him, even so far from home.
Pine and a little bit smoky. It’s awkward to be hugged while sitting, and why is that what she’s thinking right now?
She would have given anything for him to touch her again a few weeks ago.
“What if I fucked up?” he says softly, into her hair.
She tenses up in his arms, unsure how to react to his words.
The months after they broke up were some of the hardest of her life.
It had felt like her world was collapsing, like everything she’d thought she’d known was a lie.
The future she’d built for them in her head was ripped away, and she would lay in bed every night, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how loving someone wasn’t enough to keep them.
She shoves out of his arms, reclaiming space between them.
“What do you mean?” she asks, her voice wavering. She knows what he means already, but she wants to hear him say it out loud — that he’d made a mistake.
He shakes his head. “Letting you go, obviously.”
“I let you go too,” she says.
“Did you?” He cocks his head to the side.
Something about the question makes her angry, as if there is no way she could have actually moved on.
“I had to,” she says. “I couldn’t live in that space anymore, down in that hole.”
“Kit…” he says. “I’m so, so fucking sorry. If I could redo everything, I would. I would take it all back.”
She wishes she could believe him. “It’s done now,” she says, shrugging, walling off her insides so she doesn’t have to feel any of the hurt, the anger, the sadness when she thinks of what they could have had.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Finn says, taking her hand in his, running his thumb over her knuckles. Something about it feels all wrong. Her stomach clenches uncomfortably.
“Finn,” she says. She lets him keep his hand in hers.
“You have no idea how long I wished for you to say that to me, to tell me you’d fucked up.
But now…” she sighs, unsure of how to explain the strange detachment she feels.
“I don’t…I don’t think I want that anymore.
I just…I love you, so much. I’ll always love you.
But we shouldn’t be together, we can’t —”
The shuffle of shoes behind her stops her mid-sentence, and she glances over her shoulder to lock eyes with Task.
He hovers near the entryway, but it looks as though he’s caught every word.
He appears wounded for a flicker of a second, before he slides his blank mask back into place, a sneer on his lips.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt the declarations of love,” he says, gesturing towards her and Finn. “Get back to it.”
“Task—” Kit says, pushing up out of her chair.
Her heart stutters in her chest. Seeing him there, she can’t lie to herself.
She knows why she doesn’t want to get back together with Finn.
Even if there isn’t anything really there between she and Task, she feels an unexplainable connection with him that she doesn’t with Finn.
It’s like there is an invisible thread trying them together, drawing them closer to each other.
“It’s fine,” Task says gruffly, moving to dispense a cup of coffee. “I’m just grabbing a coffee and then I’ll be gone.”
He’s entirely shut down. The version of the man she got two nights ago in the lounge, the one that demanded she hold his hand, is nowhere to be found.
His exterior is cold and hard, from the angles of his face to the way he stands.
He’s stiff, despite being in his sleeping clothes, his movements jerky.
She wants to go to him, but she doesn’t know what that will accomplish, especially not with Finn here as an audience. The glimpses she sees of Task when it’s just them are not the same as what he presents to everyone else.
She sits back down, glancing at Finn, who has gone very still.
“Alright,” she says, too loudly, trying not to feel as though she’s just made a grave error, a very serious miscalculation on many levels.
Finn frowns at her, then arches an eyebrow. He senses some undercurrent from this exchange between Task and Kit.
She takes a deep breath in and tries to ignore Task puttering around behind them. “I should get moving anyway,” she says to Finn.
“Like I said,” Task chimes in, “no need to end the lovefest on my account.”
“Task,” she sighs loudly, standing and taking her coffee tin from the table.
She needs to get out of this room. She needs to not be trapped between these two men anymore.
She pushes the tin through the dish window and turns on her heel, moving quickly towards the doorway and slipping out as the door slides open.
She’s nearly made it to the lower deck when she hears footsteps behind her.
Her heart lodges in her throat, and she prays it’s not Finn.
She doesn’t know what to say to him. She loves him, but she doesn’t want to be with him.
She knows this with a certainty that she hasn’t felt in a very long time, since before her mother died.
She doesn’t want to break Finn’s heart more, not after losing his sister. Even if he broke hers first.
She turns around and is simultaneously relieved and angry. Because it’s Task striding down the hall behind her, looking stupidly good in his black, loose sleeping clothes, carrying two cups of coffee with cold fire in his eyes.
She stops without meaning to.
“Here,” he says, his voice still gruff, thrusting the metal cup of coffee towards her.
“I just had one,” Kit replies, not moving to take the coffee from him. She crosses her arms. “I need to get to work.”
“You can wait five minutes,” he says, frowning. “They’re not going anywhere.”
She wants to argue that five minutes could make all the difference in the world, but the way things have been going for her, she doubts it.
“You didn’t have to be such a jackass back there,” she says, her arms still crossed.
Task stands with both coffees in his hands, flexing his jaw. “I was simply making my presence known so you two didn’t start dry humping in front of me.”
“Oh, please,” Kit shoots back. “We were having a serious conversation. And you think I’m the type of woman that would dry hump somebody in a public place?”
“I don’t know what kind of woman you are,” Task replies, his eyes still burning.
“What do you want?” Kit demands.
“Are you getting back together with him?”
She’s floored by this question. “And if I was?”
He shrugs, a bit petulant. “Your prerogative, I suppose.” He looks put out, standing there with the coffees, and she grabs the one he holds in his right hand, annoyance still coursing through her. The side of his mouth quirks up, as if he’s won something.