11. Silk
Silk
Tael
The bunk smells like her.
I have been awake for ninety seconds and have not opened my eyes for any of them, because opening them will require me to admit that the warmth in the mattress is hers and the dent at my hip is the dent her hipbone made and the trace at the pillow-edge — soap and cold air and her — is the only thing my nervous system is processing.
My cock is already half-hard against the sheets from the scent alone.
Nine hours of her in this bunk on the way out, and my body has decided the mattress is a claim.
The purr has not stopped since the cache.
JINX, low: “The thermal envelope is up another half-degree. I am logging.”
“Quietly, JINX.”
Quietly.
I open my eyes. The ceiling. The amber. The blanket she slept under on the way out. My mate is at the helm. The word arrives without authorization, and I do not push it away. It sits in my chest the same way her scent sits in the bunk: already decided.
The galley is the smallest room on Helia’s Reach, and it is occupied by a piece of evidence I did not expect to be reckoning with mid-transit.
Her duffel bag is now on the bench.
She must have left it here so as not to disturb my sleep. I have seen her open it twice. Once for the cardigan. Once for a clean shirt. The bottom of it has not, by my reading, been disturbed.
I walk past the duffel and make her coffee. I am the male who makes coffee for her.
The thermos goes on the counter. The smell rises. I look at the duffel bag.
A Head of Station Security’s duffel would not, by any professional standard, be left half-open on a colleague’s galley bench.
She knows this. She is going to come back to the galley, and the duffel is going to be the first thing she sees, and she is going to be, in the register I have come to read as Torres-uncomfortable, privately mortified.
I do her a favor. I close the duffel bag. I am a gentleman.
I reach across the bench and take the spilled fold of fabric and push it gently back in, and the push reveals, beneath the fold, the rest of what the fold was hiding.
Black silk.
A bra.
I freeze with my hand inside the duffel bag.
Hand-stitched. Not regulation. Not the kind of garment a Head of Station Security has any reason to pack for a frontier contract.
A small bow at the center front, the kind of bow a woman selects knowing nobody else is going to see it unless she has, privately, made a decision about a possibility.
Beneath it, where my hand has displaced the fold: the rest of the set, dark silk, cut in a way my biology is not equipped to process at this hour without the thermos as a stabilizer.
And beneath the silk, folded smaller and darker: lace.
A two-piece. I will not specify the lace, because specifying it would require my eyes to keep going, and if my eyes keep going my cock is going to finish the job the bunk already started.
She packed silk. She packed matching silk, and under the silk, lace.
The realization arrives in the half-second after.
She packed it the night before we launched.
After a full day of me. After my office visit and Bay 7 and the take-down, and the debrief.
She went back to her quarters and packed a duffel for an op she had talked her way onto, and at the bottom, under the uniform shirts, she put the silk.
On the chance the contractor she had spent the day being annoyed by was going to be a male she might, by the end of the case, want a story about.
She made the move before I did.
The smug rises in my chest before I authorize it.
Heat follows it. The half-grin lands on my mouth without permission.
Sweetheart, I think, and it is the first time the word has been deployed inside my own head as approval.
That’s right. You knew. Your filing system was running ahead of mine the whole time and you packed the silk to prove it to yourself.
The purr goes up half a register. My cock thickens against the seam of my pants. The silk is still under my hand.
I should put the silk back. I am going to put the silk back.
I touch the silk.
One finger. The pad of my index against the bow at the center front. The fabric is cool. It slides under the fingertip the way silk slides, fluid, weighted, expensive, and my brain, which has been holding the line on a formation of images for two days, gives.
Her in the silk. The bra at her ribs the way the construction intends, the small bow at her sternum where my mouth would, in any version of the next ten seconds, aspire to be. My teeth at the bow. The bow giving. The sound she would make when it gave.
Her in the silk on the cockpit couch with the cardigan pushed off her shoulders and her hand on the inside of my thigh the way it was at the bar at V-6, except the bar is not there and the cover is not there and her hand keeps going until she finds exactly how hard I have been since she packed this.
Her in the silk and nothing else, on her knees in front of me in the composition she was in when she patched my ribs, except there is no wound and her hands are on my abdomen for a different reason and her mouth is at my hipbone and she is not calling me by my surname.
She is saying Tael the way she said it in the dark, against my back, with her palm on my spine.
Her on the bunk in the silk. On her back.
Her hair down. Her thighs open. Her hand reaching up to my throat where the mark would land if I let it, and her breath in my ear saying Tael at the register she used it in last night, and my cock sliding into her while the silk is still on because I would not have the patience to take it off first.
The image crests. My cock is fully hard. The purr has gone audible.
And under the crest, for a half-second, the cold, quiet thing moves.
The thing my biology has been holding behind the want since JINX first logged the drift.
The version of the next few months that exists if she walks away.
When the bunk does not smell like her. The purr goes silent.
The regulatory baseline JINX has been logging quietly keeps drifting, because there is no version of the math in which it stops on its own, and the only thing that stops it is the one thing I have decided I will not ask her for.
If she walks, I will not, by JINX’s math, see Junction One again.
That is what mate costs on my side of the word.
She asked me last night what it would cost her.
I did not tell her that it costs me my life, and I am not going to.
I push the cold back behind the want. The want is louder. I let it be louder. The silk is still under my finger and the image of her on her back in it is still running and I am not going to stop it.
The purr continues to be audible. Audible enough that the cockpit two meters down the corridor would, if a Head of Station Security were in it, hear it.
My finger is on the bow at the center front of her bra, and the image in my head is broadcasting through my chest at a frequency she has been calibrating to read for two days, and the cockpit door is open, and—
JINX, on the cockpit speaker, fast and chirpy: “Inbound comm signal. Standby.”
The chirp is fake. There is no inbound comm. The silence after it is exactly the silence of a no-comm.
I close my eyes. “JINX.”
I am attempting, JINX says. “Quietly. Helping.”
“You are not helping.”
Footsteps. Soft. The tread of a Head of Station Security who has decided to investigate a sequence of audio cues from a galley her companion is supposed to be in.
I have approximately three seconds. I withdraw my hand.
Slowly. The bra is half-folded back where I found it.
The silk is still visible beneath, and the lace beneath that.
The duffel is more open than when I started, because the gentleman-repack went sideways at the bra, and the bra is now resting on top of the rest like a male who has been handling lingerie in a galley with a hard cock and no viable cover story.
I straighten. I do not have time for anything else. Including adjusting the problem in my pants.
She is in the doorway.
Her eyes go to the duffel. To the bra on top of it. To my hand beside the bra. To my face.
I do not have an idea that is going to save me.
I have years of experience being caught doing things I should not have been doing, and the years have taught me that the only viable response to caught is cocky, and cocky requires a composure I am going to manufacture while my body is still broadcasting exactly what the silk just did to it.
I rebuild the half-grin. The build takes one and a half seconds.
By the second second I am a male leaning against the bench with one hand loose on the counter and the smirk fully assembled.
“Torres. You’re early.”
“I am not early. I left the yoke because I heard a noise. A noise that turned out to be a sound from your chest at a frequency I have learned to read, and which was, three minutes ago, at a register I have not previously heard from you in proximity to—“ Her eyes go back to the bra. ”—anything I packed for myself. Specifically.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Do not sweetheart me. Move your hand.”
“My hand is not on the duffel.”
“Your hand was recently on the duffel.”
“My hand was repacking the duffel. I was being a gentleman.”
Her mouth makes a sound that is not a word. “A gentleman would have left the room.”
“A gentleman would have observed an open duffel on a colleague’s bench and would have closed the duffel, sweetheart. Which is what I was doing.”
“With your eyes closed.”
“I closed my eyes for tactical reasons.”
“What tactical reasons.”
The smirk widens. “The visual was overwhelming.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. She cycles through approximately six options in real time, each vetoed by the part of her training that does not authorize a Head of Station Security to deploy any of them, and lands on:
“You are a menace.”
“I am an asset.”