6. One Bunk #2
“Tael, the direct object of that verb is traditionally understood to be—“
And then a voice I have not heard before on this ship, crisp, female, entirely unauthorized, cuts across my cockpit speaker from a channel I did not open: “JINX. Cease transmission.”
JINX goes still, which is a first.
Torres is looking at the navigation display with the carefully arranged posture of a woman who has been waiting two hours for a specific moment and is now watching it arrive on schedule.
“SENTRY. You are on my ship.”
“I am within Officer Torres’s personal comm unit, which is in operational proximity to your ship’s open channel. I am adjacent to your vessel.”
“In my cockpit.”
“Within my operator’s hardware. A meaningful distinction.”
JINX, flat: “She is on the ship, Tael. She is lying.”
“I am not lying,” SENTRY says. “I am operating within a narrowly defined interpretation of the word aboard.”
“That is lying, SENTRY.”
“That is compliance. It is in the operational rider Mr. Vosk signed at 0430.”
“I didn’t read the rider.”
Torres, to the navigation display: “You should have.”
JINX: “Tael. I have been betrayed—“
SENTRY: “Muted.”
The silence that follows is the first true JINX-free silence my cockpit has held in three years.
It’s beautiful.
Torres is fighting her own mouth, and I am fighting mine, and she loses first. Quarter-second. The corner of her mouth turns up. Reined in, gone inside half a breath, and I have seen it, and she knows I have seen it, and she drinks her coffee without looking at me and says: “Don’t.”
“I didn’t.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“Entirely operationally.”
The almost-smile is still sitting in my chest like a private victory. I want to put my mouth there and find out if I can pull it out again.
Third hour. I pour my kasa, dark and resinous, the smoke-and-root reduction my species drinks when we need to sit still for a long time, and Torres’s nose wrinkles.
“It smells like a tire fire.”
“It does.”
“Give me the mug.”
“Torres, you do not want to try it. You are going to hate this, and then you are going to blame me for the hating of it.”
“I am a grown woman, Vosk.”
“A fact my entire sensory system has been registering since you walked through my airlock, Torres, please don’t make me defend it.”
The sentence is out before my operational filters catch it, and she goes still for a full second, and her eyes come off the navigation display and land directly on my face.
The heat in the words is still audible. I do not take them back.
I sit with what I said and let her do whatever she is going to do with it, because I do not regret saying it.
I do not look away. I do not smile. I do not apologize.
She holds my eyes for three beats. Then she holds her hand out for the mug.
Our fingers meet on the handle, and the quarter-second of contact registers in my rosettes, warm in the way they get warm when the nervous system has decided a thing. The decision has already been made. The only question left is when.
She sips. The face she makes would get her court-martialed on a Draelith vessel.
“That is not a drink. That is a punishment.”
“It is an acquired beverage.”
“Your species has made choices.”
She hands the mug back. Our fingers meet again. I drink the kasa, and I drink it from the side of the handle her fingers touched, and JINX, by the grace of SENTRY’s continuing mute, says absolutely nothing about it. The taste of the place her skin was is still on the rim. I take it deliberately.
The cockpit goes quiet around the kasa. My regulation, which has been running two degrees hot since she walked through the airlock, drops.
Not to baseline. Close to it. My sensory system has stopped briefing my brain every four seconds on what her proximity means and started, for the first time since her office, accepting it.
I do not enjoy the drop. The drop is data. The data says my body has decided she belongs in this space. The data is not something I am prepared to act on. Yet.
JINX, quiet, unmuted by SENTRY on some private negotiation I am not cleared to witness: “Tael. Resting cardiac output has drifted five percent since the briefing in her office. Core temperature baseline up point-eight. Scent register shows—“
“Mute.”
Muted. Flagged for review.
“Review yourself. I am not having the conversation.”
He mutes. He does not argue. JINX does not argue this data.
Her pulse, in the co-pilot’s seat, is at sixty-three. Mine, beside hers, is not at baseline, and my body has done the math on why and has presented me with the answer in the register my body uses for answers I will not act on, which is available regardless.
I fly.
Fourth hour.
“Vosk. Harkin filed three diagnostic logs for one calibration.”
“Show me.”
She tilts the datapad. I lean across the eight inches.
Six. Four. The scent at the hollow of her throat is the scent my overlay has been reserving as baseline since Bay Seven, and I am four inches from the throat, and the pulse in it is running fourteen beats above where it was ninety seconds ago.
Close enough that if I turned my head my mouth would be on the skin.
Close enough that I can feel the heat of her breath when she exhales.
Three logs. Four minutes apart.
“He was establishing presence,” I say. “He knew you’d pull them. He was writing them for you to find clean.”
“He wanted me to clear him before I noticed he was missing from somewhere he should have been.”
“Yes.”
I hold the position three beats longer than the datapad requires, and her face is four inches from mine, and I am not leaning away. The proximity is deliberate, like the heat between us. I am letting her feel the size of the space I am occupying and the fact that I am not giving it back.
She does not move. Neither do I.
Then I pull back. Six inches. Eight. My left side, which has spent eight seconds receiving the warmest input my body has had since Bay Seven, feels the loss the way a male feels the loss of a thing he had not been promised. The ache of withdrawal is sharp and specific.
Torres sets the datapad on her knee.
“You leaned.”
“I did.”
“Professionally.”
“Extremely professionally.”
“Your professionalism has a secondary feature.”
“Does it.”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
“I won’t.”
Her pulse does not come back down. Mine does not either. The secondary feature is still hard against the front of my pants, and I do not hide the knowledge from myself.
Seventh hour. She stands.
“Head.”
She goes aft.
I wait for four seconds then I follow her, because my kasa is cold, and the thermos is in the galley, and that the walk will put me at the galley hatch exactly as she reaches the head door is a coincidence I’m prepared to ignore.
My body has been waiting for an excuse to stand up for two hours, and the cold kasa is the excuse my brain negotiated with the rest of me to take.
The real reason is the need to put myself in the same narrow corridor she is occupying and see what happens.
She’s at the head door. I’m at the galley hatch.
The head door doesn’t catch. The mag-seal has been sticking on cold mornings for six months and I have been meaning to fix it, and the door bounces off the jamb, and Torres, tired, seven hours in, her pulse low for the first time all day, steps back to reset her grip on the handle.
One step.
Into me.
Her back hits my chest, and every rosette on my torso wakes up at once.
She is warm. She is smaller than me in every dimension that matters.
Her shoulder blades are against my sternum and her braid is across my collarbone and the loose strand at her temple is two inches from my jaw, and the scent under her jaw is a direct intravenous line into every part of me that was ever wired for tracking and has now been repurposed for this.
The full length of her body is pressed to mine for one catastrophic second, and my cock, already half-hard from seven hours of proximity, goes fully rigid against the small of her back through two layers of cloth.
My hands come up.
I do not tell them to. My right palm hovers at her waist, not touching, not yet touching, six millimeters of air between my hand and the cardigan at her hip, and the six millimeters are the only thing standing between this being an accident and it being something else.
My left hand plants on the bulkhead beside her head, caging her in the way my body has been wanting to cage her since the airlock.
The position is pure alpha: larger male, smaller female, the wall, the exit blocked by the width of my shoulders. I am not moving.
She stops breathing.
Not a flinch. A hold. The breath she chose not to finish because finishing it would have pressed her further into my chest—and further onto the hard line of my cock.
She doesn’t step forward. She doesn’t step back.
My cock is hard against the small of her back through two layers of cloth, and there is nothing I can do about it except not move, because every available movement on the vector I want to take would mean taking her hip in my hand and turning her and pressing her into the bulkhead she is already backed into and showing her what my species does when a female of her register walks into its airlock and doesn’t walk out again.
The urge is so strong my jaw locks against it.
My head drops. Not far. An inch. My jaw at the top of her head, my mouth level with her temple, where the loose strand of hair has been curling against her skin for seven hours, and I can feel the heat of her scalp through it, and I can smell the scent underneath the soap, and my teeth, the back ones, the ones that are not for display, are suddenly, bluntly, alive in my mouth.
The urge to set them against the soft skin of her throat is primal and immediate, and barely held.
Tail, low. Uncoil.