7. Second Party Mate
Second Party: Mate
Natalie
As we walk down the corridor, I go over the cover one last time in my head.
I am Nat Reyes, two months on contract to Helia Mercantile, human, boring, the logistics liaison a dried-botanicals courier picks up on station layovers to handle his manifest reconciliation.
Forged paperwork in a hip bag. Sidearm at the small of my back, under a cardigan a size too big.
A manifest case over my shoulder that opens into a field forensic kit in three clicks, because Junction One security regulations do not leave a kit on a ship I am walking away from.
The courier is Rook Malvern. He picked Rook the way a male picks a name he would have used on a different life if someone had given him the chance to have one, and he said it to me in the last hour of transit with his boots on the console and a smirk I recognize as the smirk that appears when he has decided something and is letting me catch up.
“Rook Malvern, sweetheart. Try to look impressed.”
I did not look impressed.
Rook Malvern is standing behind me now with his hand not yet on me, and I am going to have to forgive myself later for believing, for even one hour of the transit, that he was going to stay on the script.
I had filed a dead node when I should have filed the place as a working waystation.
Six other ships are docked. Two Jixian freighters whose manifests the keeper is going to stamp regardless of content, a Draelith independent flying solo who takes one look at Tael and is somewhere else, two Xenari in open structural disagreement with the concept of law, a human hauler with the pinpoint pupils of someone four hours into station stims. Not a dead node.
A service station on a route that does not appear in any registry SENTRY has, and which has, per the traffic I am looking at, been on nobody’s registry for years.
The keeper is at a counter in the central concourse. Jixian. Gray-scaled, narrow face, milky nictitating membranes sliding sideways across yellow eyes. The flat uninterest of a being who has outlasted several owners and three re-flaggings by not asking questions and not remembering faces.
He does not look up when we walk in.
“Couriers.”
“Manifest pickup,” Tael says. Easy. The voice has done this run before. “Helia Mercantile. Box 47.”
“Ship name.”
“Helia’s Reach.”
“Operator.”
“Rook Malvern.”
“Second party.”
“Mate.”
Mate.
The word lands in the concourse with the flat weight of an off-script beat, and the Jixian does not flinch, and he writes it on the ledger because mate is a legal Draelith commercial designation for a bonded-business partner under Velarkis registry conventions, and the designation is ambiguous enough to sign across.
Tael did not say liaison. Rehearsed. Agreed on. He skipped it.
I narrow my eyes at him as heat climbs the back of my neck.
The slow heat of a woman whose face does not blush and whose neck, apparently, does, and whose courier has just, at the first opportunity of the cover, deployed a word SENTRY read me from a file two nights ago in a voice she uses when she is being helpful, and Tael is using it now on a manifest in front of an alien who cannot possibly know what the word is doing to my internal operational systems. I do not know if he chose it for the cover or because he wanted to hear how it sounded in this room. I will not ask.
Tael knows, and although he’s not looking at me, the corner of his mouth moves.
The Jixian stamps the ledger. “Name.”
“Nat Reyes.”
He slides Tael a chit. Tael takes it and then his hand goes to the small of my back.
Flat palm. Through the cardigan. Through the shirt. Warm the way a Draelith is warm which my nervous system is suddenly very interested in. I do not step away. The cover requires contact. That is what I tell myself while my pulse answers the weight of his hand.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” Tael says. Mild. Pitched for the keeper to hear under the casual roll someone does not raise his voice because he does not need to.
Sweetheart. Mate. Fine. Later, Torres.
“Berth options?”
“C spur’s sealed. Maintenance.” The keeper speaks without looking up. “Ten-through-twenty in the A spur. Nine’s got a leak. Eleven’s yours if you want it.”
“C spur,” Tael says, casual. “That’s the one with the quiet chambers, yeah?”
The Jixian nictitates. A slow lateral blink, the inner membrane sliding once and back. Nothing that would read on a species that didn’t have one. Tael’s shoulders drop a quarter-inch, and I have been clocking his body long enough to know the drop is a confirm.
“C spur’s sealed,” the keeper says. “Maintenance. Three weeks.”
“Shame. Best atmo on the route.”
“Take eleven.”
“Eleven, then.”
Tael’s hand has not come off my back. His thumb, for one half-second, moves.
A single stroke across the fabric at my lower back.
He does it and he takes his hand off. The stroke was too slow for pure cover.
Or exactly the right speed for someone who knows he is being watched and wants the watching to include this.
We move toward the bar.
The bar is an eight-table operation in a low-lit alcove off the central concourse. Three tables occupied. Tael walks us to an empty one in the corner and pulls out the chair for me, a move a male performing ownership of his mate in public would make, and which my body registers as new.
He does not sit across from me. He sits beside me. Bench seating. His thigh along mine. His right arm across the back of my chair. The smirk a quarter-inch deeper than it was at the counter. Close enough that the cover is no longer the only thing explaining the proximity.
“What are we drinking, sweetheart.”
Quieter. I am not arguing with any of the liberties he has taken so far, and is testing the next one. The test is working.
“Surprise me. Don’t make it green.”
“I’ll make it green.”
“Vosk.”
“Rook,” he corrects. Low. Right at the edge of my ear. “Come on, sweetheart. Stay with me.”
He orders in Trade. His is kasa. Mine is green, because he is a functioning adult with free will and he used it to make mine green. It tastes like licorice married a diagnostic fluid.
“I will remember the green.”
“Note it, sweetheart.”
His arm moves from the back of my chair to the back of my shoulder.
His thumb starts a small circle on the fabric at the top of my shoulder blade.
Easy. Not obvious. The absentminded circle a male draws on a female who is his, in a public space, when his attention is elsewhere and his hand is on its own.
My body is negotiating between the necessity of the cover and the physiological specificity of having a Draelith’s thumb drawing a slow, repeated circle on my shoulder blade for the first time in my adult life.
The circle is steady. Patient. The touch that assumes it will still be there in ten minutes. I let it stay.
Tael is watching the bar. His eyes run a slow circuit of the three occupied tables, his ear cocked toward the Jixian freighter table at our left, and his jaw does the small tightening it does when his overlay has registered something.
His thumb does not stop.
He leans in. His jaw grazes the strand of hair at my temple and his mouth finds the space just below my ear, and his breath is warmer than the ambient air by five degrees, and my entire nervous system lights up like a male has just said something I am not currently cleared to receive in a low-lit bar at the edge of Velarkis, and my body, in the half-second before I hear the actual words, braces for something that is not on the cover sheet.
“Cameras in the ceiling. Three.”
Operational.
My body registers the disappointment in my sternum before my brain is prepared to file it. Disappointment. Fine. Noted.
“SENTRY saw two,” I say. Pitched for his ear, murmuring something soft to her mate over a green drink. The cover requires soft. I am not entirely sure the softness is only for the cover.
“SENTRY did not have the angle for the third. Service hatch behind the counter. Cycles every ninety seconds.”
“Somebody watching from somewhere else.”
“Keeper reports to somebody. Yeah.”
His mouth is still at my ear. He has been on the operational sentence for two beats longer than the operational sentence required, and who is, let the record show, enjoying the notice. The notice makes me bolder than the cover strictly requires.
He leans back. His thumb resumes its circle.
I take a sip of the green drink. I put my hand on his thigh.
His thigh is warm through the dark fabric, and it is not a surface, it is a muscle, long and dense and laid like rope over bone, and the fabric is thin enough that the muscle moves under my hand when he shifts his weight toward the bar.
It is a cover move. It is also, for the first time in my career, a hand on a male’s thigh in public. The cover gives me permission.
His purr activates.
Low. Deep. The frequency starts in his chest and rolls out through the bench seat and up through my palm where it is flat on his thigh, and it is, I register this with a two-step delay because my ears were not prepared for it, audible.
Quiet. A low thrumming, a patron of this bar might categorize as the ventilation being eccentric.
A patron of this bar would be wrong.
I hear it through my palm and through the bench and through the two inches of air between his chest and my shoulder, and the frequency is in my jaw and my sternum and the bones of my inner ear, and my hand does not move, and neither does his.
The purr is not cover. Cover does not vibrate through a male’s body into a female’s palm like that.
He shifts, one minor adjustment of his weight against the bench, and the shift moves my hand with it. Three inches. My palm slides from the top of his thigh inward, along the inside of the muscle, his purr deepens through his skin into mine and then, in the same second, cuts.
He kills it. Fast. Controlled. The clean frequency out of his chest and he will not let it finish its sentence in a public bar.