6. One Bunk #3
It goes around her right calf through her pants.
Soft. A single loose pass. Not a wrap; a touch.
The lightest possible claim a male can make on a female’s body through cloth, and my tail has made it without asking me, and I am not retracting it.
The claim is made. She can feel it. I can feel her feel it.
Her pulse spikes.
She leans back.
A quarter-inch. A quarter-inch of her weight shifting from her feet onto me, and her head tips a fraction, and her throat offers two inches of skin my mouth could be on in one movement, and the noise that tries to climb up out of my chest is the noise my species makes when a female gives ground and every instinct I have is telling me to close the gap before she takes it back.
The sound is raw and hungry, and I swallow it by force.
She takes it back.
Half a breath. A minute correction of her spine, and her weight goes back onto her own feet, and the moment she chose is gone, and I am still not breathing, and she is not looking at me. Losing the quarter-inch is physical and my body protests it.
Her voice, when it comes, is thick.
“Vosk. Your tail.”
“I know.”
“Is on my leg.”
“I know.”
“Your hand is on the wall beside my head.”
“I know.”
A pause. Her breathing is shallow. The quarter-inch she took is still in the room. The heat of her against me is still in the room. The hardness of my cock against her back is still in the room, and neither of us is pretending it isn’t.
“I need to use the head.”
I count three seconds in which I do not move, and I do not want to regret any of this. The three seconds are deliberate.
My tail uncoils from her calf. My right hand drops. My left hand comes off the bulkhead. I step back, the only step the corridor will allow, and she reaches for the door handle without turning around, and the door catches this time, and she pauses on the threshold.
Over her shoulder, flat, the voice she uses to close out a shift report: “Fix that door, Vosk.”
“I’ll fix it.”
“Before Velarkis.”
“Before Velarkis.”
The door closes, and the lock engages.
The pump does not engage for a full eight seconds, which is longer than any physiologically plausible delay for a woman who actually needed to use a head, and I stand in my galley corridor and let myself have the eight seconds.
Eight seconds of knowing she is on the other side of that door with the memory of my cock against her back and my tail on her leg and my hand caging her against the bulkhead.
Eight seconds of knowing her body is still processing what just happened. The knowledge is pure possession.
Then I walk back to the cockpit and put both hands on the yoke of an autopilot-flown ship and wait for my body to rejoin the rest of the morning.
SENTRY, crisp, into the quiet: “I am logging.”
“Mute.”
“Muted.”
Ninth hour. Velarkis.
The scope shows the node. Dark. Powered down. A commercial relay seventy kilometers off the main transit lane, quiet in the specific way a node is quiet when it has been unplugged from every registry it was supposed to appear on.
Torres sits up. Her hands go to the forensic kit. Her spine squares. The Head of Station Security comes back into the co-pilot’s chair, and the woman who leaned a quarter-inch into my chest two hours ago folds herself back into a place in her body I am not, today, invited to.
“Brief me.”
The cover: Helia Mercantile, dried botanicals, four-year-old shell, courier-and-liaison on a routine pickup.
The service station is three hundred meters off the main corridor.
The rooms at the service station. That a male courier and a female liaison who do not share a room get flagged by any handler with a pulse inside six hours, and Torek’s trail is dead by Tuesday if we flag.
“We share a room.” I add.
A four-second pause.
“When did you add me to the manifest.”
“0430. Before you walked through my airlock.”
She looks at me for a long time, not the Head of Station Security and not the woman against my chest in the galley corridor.
Natalie Torres is running a calculation across the male who decided how a day was going to go hours before she agreed to it and is, right now, waiting to find out whether she’s going with him.
The calculation is visible in her eyes. So is the fact that she already knows the answer.
“It’s the cover,” I say.
“I know.”
“Is it the best cover.”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
“I won’t.”
“We dock. Courier and liaison. We take the room.”
We dock.
The hatch releases.
The air coming through the seal is wrong.
A scrubbed facility smells like industrial cleanser and purge gas.
This smells like cleanser and purge gas and a compound I recognize.
Not the Harkin compound. Medical-grade. The sharp-sweet register of a sedation agent used to stabilize a biological organism during transport, the kind a field clinic uses when it needs to move a body that is technically alive but not cooperating.
Torres’s scanner is up. My overlay paints the compound across my visual field in pale-green threads, trailing down the corridor, concentrated in a smear on the bulkhead twelve meters in.
“Torres. This wasn’t a wiped node. It was a handoff. A medical handoff.”
She looks at the smear. She looks down the corridor. She looks at me. In the emergency amber her dark eyes are almost gold.
She raises her sidearm. I extend my claws. My left claw flickers. Retract halfway. Extend again.
The claws settle into the working configuration and stay there.
She does not comment on the flicker.
We go inside.