6. One Bunk
One Bunk
Tael
No uniform. No regulation starch. A black cardigan cut long, falling off her shoulders because it’s a size too big, and underneath it a shirt the color of cold tea with a soft V at the throat: two inches of collarbone I have not, in any office I have stood across from her in, been cleared to see.
Her braid is loose. A strand has already escaped at her temple.
She smells like soap and cold air, and her pulse is running four beats above her baseline because she knows, whether or not she’s ready to admit it, exactly what she just walked into.
My body answers before my brain does. Heat floods low and hard.
My cock thickens against the seam of my pants from the simple fact of her standing in my airlock in clothes that were never meant for a station corridor.
I lean against my bulkhead with both hands in my pockets because if I don’t put them somewhere with a mandate, my hands will find their own employment—and they want the cardigan off her shoulders and her back against the hatch.
“Torres.”
“Vosk.”
“I forgot to welcome you aboard. Now let me give you the grand tour.”
“This ship has three violations of civilian hauler protocol visible from the hatch.”
“Only three?”
The corner of her mouth stops one millimeter short of smiling and stays there, and that millimeter is a gift I am going to carry in my chest. The fact that I can pull that almost-smile out of her with nothing but a dry line sits makes it deeply satisfying.
I step aside to let her pass. The corridor on Helia’s Reach was built for one Draelith at a time, and making room for her puts me closer to her than the geometry strictly permits. Her sleeve grazes the rosettes on the inside of my forearm. Wool on skin. Half a second.
Every rosette on my body lights up like I’ve stepped into a shallow surf. The contact is brief and accidental, and it still goes straight to my cock which hardens fully against the fabric. My tail cracks against the deck plating. Loud.
She doesn’t turn her head.
She walks past me, and her scent cuts a warm line through the corridor behind her, and every instinct my species has spent a hundred thousand years calibrating is currently telling me to follow it nose-first into the nearest flat surface and put my mouth on the pulse under her jaw until she makes a sound.
I put both hands on the nearest hatch wheel, because the hatch wheel is a thing a male’s hands can hold onto with a clear operational justification, and I hold it for three seconds while my sensory system reboots the part of itself that is supposed to be a professional.
The reboot is incomplete. The heat stays.
Then I go find her.
Helia’s Reach is forty-one meters. One berth.
Built for long transit and solo work, registered to a dried-botanicals shell in the Veil Cluster, and three years of my cup in one place and my boots in one configuration, and in seven minutes the female standing in my cockpit has rearranged the gravity of it.
The ship is mine. She is in it. The combination is doing things to the territorial circuitry that my species does not turn off for the convenience of shared missions.
“Galley,” I say, and herd her aft.
The galley hatch doesn’t clear my shoulders on a direct approach; I’ve angled through it for three years.
Torres follows me, and the galley, built for one, now contains a human female in a cardigan too big for her, and I am in the corridor, because the corridor is where you stand when someone else is in the galley.
Which puts my chest eight inches from the back of her head. Close enough that I can feel the heat of her through the space. Close enough that if I leaned forward my mouth would be in her hair.
She reaches up for the rations locker.
The cardigan rides.
The shirt underneath rides with it, and when she stretches the right shoulder goes bare, shoulder to collarbone, a strip of skin that has lived under cloth, a shade lighter than the rest of her, and my brain produces, uninvited, a fully rendered picture of what her skin would taste like if I set my mouth against it right there, right now, on the first morning of a transit I volunteered for.
My mouth on her shoulder. My hands at her hips, pulling her back against the hard line of my cock.
The cardigan on the deck. Her back flush to the bulkhead and her braid in my fist and her legs around my waist, because the galley would hold her weight if I took it off her feet, and the geometry of this ship was built by a male my size for exactly this—for taking a female in the narrow spaces and making her forget the rest of the corridor exists.
She lets the shoulder show for three seconds.
She knows.
She tugs the cardigan at second four. No fluster.
The smooth adjustment of a woman who clocked herself, chose not to move, and fixed it.
The deliberate delay is worse than the bare skin.
It means she let me look. It means she wanted me to look.
The knowledge sits in my blood like a claim I have not yet been given permission to enforce.
“Coffee, middle shelf,” she says. Neutral.
“Middle shelf.”
“You keep coffee on board.”
“I keep a range of provisions.”
“You don’t drink coffee.”
“No.”
“When did you buy this.”
I could lie. The lie is cheap and Torres would clock it.
“Yesterday afternoon.”
Her pulse jumps. The sound of it is a direct line to the heat still sitting hard between my legs. I bought the coffee for her. The knowledge is doing something to both of us.
She picks up the coffee tin. She puts it back down. She says, still addressing the tin: “Head.”
“Starboard.”
She pivots.
Ninety degrees, in a galley built for one, with a male my size in the corridor, and the pivot brings her sternum-to-sternum with me for a full, catastrophic second.
Her heat through two layers of wool against my chest. Her braid against the inside of my right forearm.
Her breath at my throat. The soft pressure of her breasts against the plane of muscle she has never been this close to.
My cock, already hard, throbs once against the front of my pants at the contact, and there is nothing I can do about it except not move.
My tail cracks against the nav-chart rack.
She looks up.
Eight inches shorter than me. The eight inches are doing something to the angle of her chin that I am going to need the rest of the transit to come back from.
The look of a woman who has just felt exactly how hard I am and is choosing, for now, not to comment.
The restraint of it is almost as hot as the contact was.
“Head is starboard,” I say. Low. One decision away from closing the gap and finding out what her mouth tastes like when she is this close.
She steps past. The door locks.
I stand in my corridor with my hands flat against the galley hatch and I breathe the way my species trains itself to breathe when it needs to come down from an intake spike. The spike does not come down. The memory of her body against mine is still running under my skin like a live current.
“Bunk,” I say, when she comes out.
This is the part I’ve been managing since 0430.
I pull the charcoal curtain aside. She looks in.
The bunk is made. Not regulation-tight; better than that.
Blanket folded square at the foot. Pillow centered.
Clean towel on the shelf, folded in thirds.
Reading light on its low setting, because I set it there last night when I made it, because I did not know what setting a human female prefers to walk into a bunk at, and I picked the setting that watching her under Junction One fluorescents would suggest. I made the bunk for her.
The knowledge is territorial and deliberate and I am not going to apologize for it.
Her jaw adjusts. Her pulse climbs.
“One bunk,” she says. Flat.
“One bunk. It’s yours for the transit.”
“Where do you sleep.”
“Cockpit couch.”
“The cockpit couch is six feet long. You are six-five. You are flying this ship into a dead node in nine hours. Take your own bunk.”
“Your duffel is already at the foot of the bunk, Torres. The argument is closed.”
“The argument has not been opened.”
“Closed.”
She holds my eyes for three beats, the way she holds a suspect’s eyes across an interrogation table.
Neither of us looks away, and eventually her shoulder drops a quarter-inch, which is as close as Torres has ever come to conceding a point in the time I have been reading her file.
The concession clicks. I have just put her in my bunk.
Her scent is about to be on my sheets. The knowledge is a slow, possessive burn.
The duffel goes down. The setting-down is the concession, and I just won an argument I could not afford to lose, and who is about to pay for it by spending nine hours not-sleeping six feet from a bunk six feet from a woman whose scent is already in the recycled air.
My body is already calculating the exact distance between the cockpit couch and that bunk and finding every number insufficient.
I fly to Velarkis. She reads. The eight inches between her knee and mine are a live wire. Every shift of her weight registers in my overlay as heat and proximity and the continuous, low-level ache of not closing them.
Second hour, she stands, goes aft, and comes back with my mug, because my mug is the only mug on the ship, and she is drinking from it, and the sequence of those facts is doing something to my chest that has no operational application and very little dignity.
She is drinking from my mug. Her mouth has been on the rim where mine has been.
My territorial circuitry lights up again, slow and deep and satisfied.
JINX, because JINX has no self-preservation instinct: “Tael. I note with professional interest that the behavior you are currently engaged in is cataloged in the Draelith species lexicon under the heading of provisioning, and that the verb in our species lexicon takes a direct—“
“Mute, JINX.”