9. The Cache #2
She has felt the purr deepen. She has been kneeling between my knees for ninety seconds, and she has felt my body do things, and she is putting together that the things are happening because of a specific image in my head right now.
She cleans the wound and wraps it the way it should have been wrapped, and her pulse climbs another two and settles there, and she moves to the shoulder, and she has not looked at my face once, because she knows what looking at my face will do to her hands, and her hands have to finish.
I count the rosettes on my forearm, because those are not the rosettes my brain aspires to be looking at.
She finishes the shoulder. She sits back on her heels. Her knees crack, and she winces, and she looks at me, and the look is the thing.
“You said we’d talk.”
“At the cache.”
“We’re at the cache. I’m washing up. Then we talk.”
She takes the cubicle. The door closes. The spigot runs. I sit on the bunk and I breathe.
I strip out of the pants and pull on the soft gray sleep pair from the crate. I do not put on a shirt; the crate has one, folded, unworn, three years old, and I leave it folded. The bandages need air. My skin runs hot.
The cubicle door clicks open behind me, and I do not turn around. I am at the crate putting the ruined pants into the waste bag. The rosettes across my shoulder blades and down the spine. The bandage at the left shoulder. The line of muscle along the lat to the waistband.
The room goes quiet. She is not moving. I can feel the weight of her attention on my skin the way I feel temperature.
I tie the bag. I straighten. I turn.
Cotton tank, institutional gray. Soft pants. Hair down, the strand at her temple finally behind her ear. Barefoot. Her bandaged forearm catching the amber. She is not looking at the bandages.
The half-grin lands on my mouth before I authorize it.
“Bunk’s yours.”
“It’s both of ours.”
“Yes.”
“Inside or outside.”
“You take inside. The wall is colder than I am.”
She lies down and turns her face to the wall leaving me the outside edge. I take it.
My back to her back. A hand’s breadth of air. The bunk fits two only just, and within two minutes it has warmed through, and her shoulders, hunched against the rock, drop a quarter-inch, and the shiver she has been running since the corridor and refusing to acknowledge stops.
The purr starts again. I do not suppress it. There is no point in pretending.
Ninety seconds. Then, without turning over:
“Vosk.”
“Torres.”
“Mate.”
I had prepared for Kesh. For Severin. For the cup. Natalie Torres opens with operational; she has opened with the word I said at a Jixian’s counter.
“What do you want to know.”
“What it means. To your species. Plain language.”
Her breath is on the bandage on my left shoulder. Her warmth runs along my spine. My body is the warmest it has been in years, and the proximity is doing exactly what my biology wants it to do.
“A female my biology has identified as compatible for pair-bonding. It happens at first contact. Mine confirmed in your office. I did not authorize it. The biology runs ahead of the brain and does not, after, ask permission.”
“What does pair-bonding involve.”
“Pheromone exchange. Skin contact. A specific sequence over a specific period. The two cardiovascular systems become aware of each other. The two scent registers carry each other. Once formed it does not unform. The two lives become the lives of two people who are, in a way you would have to be Draelith to fully feel, not without each other.”
A silence.
“Like Xor and Flossie.”
“Cousin biologies. Maren is dying because Torek has been out of her bond’s range for four months and the link cannot hold at distance. That is what your case is in.”
“And your biology has identified me as a candidate for that.”
“Yes.”
“The smirks. The cardigan in the airlock. The kasa. The reading light on low. The hand on my back at the counter.”
“All of it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me in my office.”
“Because in your office you did not want to hear it, and I had no business saying it. You are the Head of Station Security at Junction One and I am a Tier 2 tracker you had been told to coordinate with, and mate was a word I had no right to put in your mouth. Two days has not been long enough for the right to exist. Tonight you watched me put my body between you and a blade, and you put your hands on me, and my biology decided it was done managing, and you asked me directly.”
She does not answer. I wait her out.
There is a second thing.
It sits behind my sternum at the same frequency the first thing did, and I know the frequency because my body has been running it since her office and does not negotiate.
I will not say it. Not tonight. Not from a bunk.
Not to a woman who deserves the answer she asked for and not the one that would make her choose.
She is going to choose in her own time, on her own terms, and not on what my biology is costing me to hold.
The cost is mine. I keep it.
When she speaks, it is quieter.
“On the couch. And just now, when I was kneeling. You were having thoughts.”
I do not breathe, so she continues.
“About what Vosk?”
I have not lied to her tonight, and I will not start.
“About you. On the bunk. About my mouth on your throat. About what your body would do if my hands were the ones under your tank top.”
Her pulse, which I hear through the thin mattress because her cardiovascular system is louder to me than the snore through the wall, climbs eight beats.
“I am not apologizing for it.”
“I am not asking you to.” A pause. Her breath is uneven against my shoulder blade. “You can keep having them.”
“Torres.”
“I am not consenting to anything else. I am not in a position to. But you don’t have to manage those for me.”
“You are going to ruin my discipline.”
“Your discipline is already ruined. I am giving you permission to stop pretending it isn’t.”
I close my eyes. The purr is involuntary. The permission she has just given me is not one I am allowed to use yet.
She turns over slowly, the half-roll of a woman who is half-asleep and is choosing, before she goes the rest of the way, to put the choice on record.
Her front to my back. Her face against my shoulder blade through the bandage.
Her hand comes to rest on the mattress between us, and after a count of three, on the small of my back.
Bare skin. Her palm flat against the rosettes that run from my spine to the waistband. The loudest thing my nervous system has registered this evening, and she does not move it. The contact goes through me in a single, clean line.
“Tael.”
The name. Not Vosk. The first time it has been in her mouth, and she has put it there in the dark, against my back, at the register she has been keeping for Vosk.
“Natalie.”
“I’m going to sleep now. I need to know what this would cost me. I am not going to decide tonight. I am not going to decide for a long time.”
“Whatever you decide.”
Her breathing changes. The lengthening. The surrender of a soldier who has been refusing sleep and has, somewhere in the last sixty seconds, lost the refusal. She falls asleep with her hand on the small of my back, and I do not breathe for one full count, and then I breathe, and I do not move.
I lie still in the dark and I do not sleep.
The cache hums at low power. Thane snores through the hatch. Her hand on the small of my back is the warmest contact I have had in years, and somewhere in the second hour I close my eyes against the bulkhead and count breaths instead of seconds.
The realization arrives late.
I have not been trusted like this since SRS. Not by the contracts I ran after. Not by Flossie, who hired me and watches me the way she watches everyone, with affection and the specific awareness of a woman who has seen what I can do.
Natalie has seen what I can do. Natalie has put her hand on the small of my back in her sleep anyway.
The trust is not negotiated. It is given. I lie in the dark and let the realization do what it is going to do, and I have done nothing yet to deserve it.
I will. I will work the rest of my operational life to deserve it.
For now, her breathing against my shoulder blade. Her hand on my back. Her name for me in the dark.
I keep watch.