10. Mate Priority
Mate: Priority
Natalie
Warmth.
The first thing I know, before the room or the bunk or the hour, is that I am warm in a way I am not accustomed. My left side is against rock I can feel through the blanket as cold; the cache runs at low power, and on any other morning I would be shivering.
I am not. The warmth is weight, an arm across my waist. The purr registers next, because my nervous system has an order of operations that overrides my training.
Low. Steady. Running through his chest at my back and into the mattress and up my spine to where my heart is beating, and disagreeing with it.
His hand is at my hipbone, flat, the heat of his palm through the cotton tank a thing I stopped being able to pretend not to notice somewhere in the night.
His breath at the back of my neck is slow and even. Asleep.
I lie very still. My body has already decided it likes the weight.
Mate, my brain says, as if I signed paperwork. I have not signed the paperwork.
His thumb, in sleep, makes one slight adjustment against the jut of my hipbone, his purr deepens half a register, and my ribcage takes the next breath visibly, and his palm rides it.
His arm tightens a quarter-inch. He is coming back in the slow Draelith way, no startle, no transition, awareness settling into a body that was absent a half-second ago.
He does not move his arm.
“Torres.”
“Vosk.”
“How long have you been awake.”
“Six minutes.”
“You did not wake me.”
“You were asleep.”
The silence after is longer than it needs to be. The purr drops a quarter-register. Gratitude he will not put into a sentence.
“I need to move my arm.”
“Okay.”
His hand presses once at my hip, the waking version, letting me feel the decision before he executes it, and then he moves it, and I sit up on the edge of the bunk with my back to him.
The absence of weight is immediate. I hear him sit up.
I hear his feet on the deck plating. I hear, and he intends me to hear it, his hand run once through his own hair.
I am going to carry that sound for the rest of my career.
I turn because he is sitting in the position a patient takes, and I have been his field medic twice, and my training requires I check the wound before the day gets away from us. My training.
He is shirtless. Both bandages are in place. The rosettes across his chest catching the amber in the pattern that was, last night, under my hands. His right hand flat on the mattress with the claws retracted, and the rest of him working at full capacity a meter from me.
I reach for the rib bandage to check the seal, and his hand comes up and catches my wrist.
Light. His grip is not stopping me, only getting my attention, and the retracted claws make it warm and blunt in a way I do not have a vocabulary for. The contact travels up my arm before I can file it.
“What are you doing, sweetheart.”
“Checking the bandage.”
“Before coffee.”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you are checking the bandage, Natalie.”
The gravel drops half a register on my name, and my sternum goes warm before my ears register the drop, and my eyes, which had been on the bandage in a professional way, flick to his abdomen before I can redirect.
The line of muscle under the bandage. The way the rosettes shift with his breath. I redirect too late.
He sees the flick. Of course he does. The half-grin comes out of storage.
“Are you trying to look at my abs.”
“I am checking the bandage, Vosk.”
“The wound is closed. I checked while you were asleep. The skin has knit. The bandage is decorative. Would you like me to take it off so you can verify, or would you like me to keep it on so you can pretend that was your reason for touching me?”
My face does the thing it has not done in a professional setting in four years. The thing is a blush. The heat settles under my collarbone.
SENTRY, in my ear, at the register of an AI who is logging: “Natalie. Pulse at ninety-two.”
“SENTRY.”
Noted. Quietly.
“Put a shirt on, Vosk.”
“I was going to. You were the one who turned around.”
“I am going to the head.”
“Go. I’ll be in the galley. Your coffee will be ready.”
I leave the bunk to rinse my face for thirty full seconds before I can face a galley with a Korrhai in it. The heat under my collarbone does not rinse off.
Thane is in the galley, dressed, a clean black shirt from the crate with the sleeves rolled, the rock ceiling four inches from his head and his posture the not-quite-ducking of a tracker who has learned to live in rooms not built for him.
There is a squat metal pot on the burner plate behind him, throwing cardamom into a room the size of a corridor.
He is objectively handsome. The observation files under neutral aesthetic, a category running at reduced capacity because a Draelith tracker has corrupted my ability to look at large attractive males blindly about which specific one is putting a shirt on in the next room.
Tael has ruined my taxonomy. I will bill him for the repairs.
“Officer.” He pushes a cup across the counter. “You take it.”
I take a sip. Kasa. A wall of cardamom and something green and bitter my species has not evolved for, and my face, before my training catches it, does a thing. Thane’s gold pupils widen the one notch his species reserves for registering an emotional event.
“Ah,” he says. Mild. “You dislike kasa.”
“I am being polite.”
“You are being polite to a Korrhai you met last night over a cup of kasa that is objectively terrible. I respect the attempt, Officer. I do not require it.”
Tael walks in with a clean shirt on and the sleeves already rolled and takes in the last ten seconds without breaking stride. “She’s a coffee human, Thane. Don’t take it personally.”
“I take nothing personally. I accept the respect. I rescind the kasa.” He removes the cup from my hand with the careful economy of a very large male handling a very small object, empties it into the reclaim, pours from his own thermos, black coffee, the smell hitting the back of my sinuses before the cup reaches the counter, and pushes it back.
“I travel with both. I have had occasion, in my work, to be mistaken about what my hosts drink. I have corrected.”
The coffee is properly made. Dark roast, fresh-ground, the preparation of developed standards. I file the standards under Thane is operationally a menace.
He caps the coffee thermos and looks at the kasa one, which is empty, and at the pot on the burner, which is not.
“I will want the second brew in the flask before I go. Twenty minutes on the low plate, and it is not twenty minutes if it is hurried.” He thumbs the burner down to its lowest setting and sets a tin and a stone pestle on the counter in front of me.
“Officer. The pods want crushing, not grinding, and they want it done by something with less enthusiasm than a Korrhai. Vosk watches the pot and does not lift the lid. I am going to be unsociable at the end of the counter.”
“You are assigning tasks in someone else’s galley.”
“I am assigning tasks in Vosk’s galley, which is a separate offense and one he has earned.”
He takes his datapad to the crate at the far end of the counter, sits with his back against the rock, and stops being in the room in the way only a male trained to surveil can stop being in a room.
Tael takes the pot. I take the pestle. Twenty minutes is a long time in a galley wall, a meter wide.
He has the expression he is enjoying himself more than his face is supposed to advertise.
His shoulder brushes mine as he reaches across me for the kasa flask.
He could have asked me to pass it. His forearm, bare where the sleeve is pushed up, passes two inches from my collarbone, and the heat of him moves across my skin, and he does not move faster than the reach requires.
“Sorry, sweetheart.”
“Mm.”
I crush pods. He watches a pot. Every third minute the galley requires one of us to be where the other one is, and neither of us routes around it.
The cardamom gets into everything, my hands, the counter, the collar of a shirt I am going to be wearing for another two days, and I am, for twenty minutes, doing manual labor in a rock kitchen with a male whose hand was on my hip at dawn, and I am not unhappy.
Thane, at the end of the counter, does not look up from the datapad. The corner of his mouth moves once.
The kasa comes off the plate at twenty minutes. He fills the flask, caps it, and does not say a word about whatever has been on the screen.
Thane leaves before the hour is out.
He packs in nine minutes. Rifle checked and slung. Kasa flask in the duffel. The coffee thermos stays on the counter because, he says without turning around; he has a case to get back to and a case is faster than making coffee.
Tael walks him to the airlock. I follow.
“Thane. Flossie has room.” Thane’s hand is on the cycle.
He does not turn. “Two-person outfit. Two agents so far. SPROUT runs the office. Xor runs intake. Flossie runs the heart of it. The pay is not SRS.” Tael glances sideways at me; the half-grin flickers.
“The company, though, is not bad. They could do with some muscle.”
“I have heard.”
“I was serious about Xor. He carries a thing he does not talk about. His is older than yours. He would not, on first acquaintance, advertise that he liked you. On fourth acquaintance he would hand you a cup of tea and you would know the answer.”
Thane pauses, “I will think about it. One thing before I go.” His hand stays on the cycle.
“Your SRS cleanup on the Velarkis circuit. The node wipes, the bonded-mate cargo, the sanitation profile. SRS runs one operator on this whole corridor. Rethlor. Tier 3, human. I have had eyes on him for three months because my Korrhai case brushes his trail. He is docked at Parr’s Anchor on a routine layover. You find him there if you move.”
Tael’s whole face changes. “How long have you been sitting on him.”