7. Second Party Mate #2
My hand is now on the inside of his thigh.
Three inches from where I put it. Closer than the cover required.
Closer than I had planned. I leave it there one full second longer than is strictly necessary because the uncertainty of whether or not he is performing has made me willing to find out what happens if I do.
He leans toward my ear again. Warm breath. And his voice, lower than he has used it with me so far today, dry and rough and absolutely not on the cover sheet:
“That hand’s going to get you in trouble, sweetheart. I’m not going to stop you.”
I take my hand off his thigh, because I am not available to give an answer, and I am going to need a minimum of six seconds with my hand around the green drink to reassemble the part of my operational system he has just put in a drawer I did not know he had the key to.
Six seconds. I turn my head. I meet his eyes. The smirk is deeper than it has been since the airlock. He knows what the hand did. He knows what the second of delay did. He is not pretending otherwise.
“Noted,” I say. Over the rim of the glass.
“Rook.”
“Sweetheart.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“Define this.”
“Do not.”
“Noted.”
On the way up from the bench, he does something I am not prepared for.
His arm comes around my waist from my left side.
His hand finds the point of my hip on my right, fingers curling into the dip where the hip bone sits under my skin, and the cardigan has ridden up over forty minutes of bench-leaning and his fingers land on the inch of bare skin between the cardigan hem and the waistband of my pants.
Bare skin. His fingertips. His thumb, once slow, strokes across the strip.
The skin has been held by uniforms, and by medical personnel, and by sparring partners, and by no one, for five years, with intent. Tael’s intent is not subtle. The cover requires contact; it did not require this.
He pulls me half a step toward his side.
My hip meets his. My body is walking out of this bar pressed to his flank from ribcage to thigh, and his thumb is still on the bare strip of skin at my hip, and the whole configuration reads to anyone watching as a male taking his mate out of a public room.
The reading is correct. Whether the mate is performance or something else is the part I cannot currently resolve.
His mouth comes back to my ear. Warmer this time. My body goes through the same three-step prep it did at the bench; he is going to say something operational; he is going to say something operational; he is — “Let’s go, sweetheart.”
Not operational. I am, for two full steps out of the alcove, not breathing.
Four sweethearts. One mate. Every creature in that bar who remembers us is going to remember the courier who walked his mate out with his thumb on her skin.
The cover is taking up my spine and along several other lines of my anatomy the cover was not invoiced for. I am allowing it.
* * *
Service corridor off the main concourse. The C spur hatch at the end. Red maintenance indicator. Active lock.
We are alone. His arm comes off my waist the second we are out of the bar’s sight lines, and I register the absence of his thumb against my hip with an operational precision that is not operational.
“SENTRY. Log this. We are about to breach a sealed maintenance hatch without authorization. Vosk is authorized to cycle the lock via JINX. The authorization comes from me.”
“Logged.”
Tael looks at me. The smirk has gone. For the first time since we docked, his face is the face from the ship. The Vosk who works.
“Once I cycle that lock, my biometric signature is on the access record and your voice is on SENTRY’s log authorizing it. This is on both of us. Say it again, for the record.”
“The Head of Station Security at Junction One is authorizing a civilian contractor to breach a sealed maintenance hatch in an off-registry commercial relay for evidentiary access to a missing persons case. The breach is on me.”
“Logged,” SENTRY says. Crisp. With an edge, I do not hear from her often.
Tael nods once. JINX runs the code. The lock indicator goes green for forty seconds.
The hatch opens.
The C spur is lower-lit than the main concourse. Amber only. The acoustic dampening is heavier here; sound drops so hard that for the first five steps I am aware of my breathing and nothing else.
Tael takes my hand.
No warning. His palm slots into mine with the assumption that he has been given permission, and his fingers thread mine, and his grip is not a cover grip.
He grips his female’s hand in a corridor he knows is dangerous, and his thumb has found the inside of my wrist where my pulse runs, and my pulse is running high, and he knows.
There is no audience here and the absence does not make him let go.
I squeeze once. The signal of a Head of Station Security acknowledging operational receipt of a physical communication she has decided, for reasons she will examine at a later date, not to contest. The squeeze is also an answer. I leave it at that.
He squeezes back.
The corridor has seven chambers. Tael pauses at each door, head tilted, scenting. Six clean. At C-7 his head comes up and his shoulders do the quarter-inch drop, and his hand in mine goes still.
“Here.”
He lets my hand go. Slowly enough that my hand registers the release as a separate event from the opening of the door.
Four meters by three. Amber lighting. Acoustic dampening on every surface.
In the center of the deck plating, bolted through the composite into the structural spar below, is a steel restraint anchor.
Two mounts, one higher, one lower, positioned for someone tall standing and seated when compliant.
The paint around the bolts is unweathered.
This is not hardware a person puts in a relay node unless the person is in the business of holding living things in place for extended periods.
My stomach does a thing it has not done at a scene in years.
“SENTRY. Chamber C-7. Restraint assembly, deck-mounted. Beginning four-angle photography.”
“Logged.”
I kneel and photograph the anchor. I lean in for the side plate. The manufacturer’s stamp is in the shadow line, and I have to angle my light to read it, and I am kneeling on the tile with the cardigan bunched at my waist and the field kit open beside me.
Tael steps up behind me.