11. Silk #2
“You are a— you are not even trying to look ashamed, you are standing there with the expression a male takes when he has been—“
“You packed silk.”
The sentence arrives without permission.
It arrives because it is true, and because my discipline has, in the last five minutes, taken a structural injury it will not recover from in the next thirty seconds.
Because I have just had my finger on the bow she packed for me and my cock is still hard from the image of her wearing it and I am not going to pretend I did not see what I saw.
She does not respond. I keep going.
“You packed matching silk, and under the silk you packed lace, and you packed it all the night before we launched, sweetheart, after one day of me. You went back to your quarters after the debrief and you packed for an op you had talked your way onto — you talked yourself into Xor’s seat, sweetheart — and you put that at the bottom, on the chance the contractor you’d spent the day being annoyed by was going to be a male you might want a story about.
And you have not unpacked it, because you were waiting to find out if I was going to be the male you wore it for. ”
The pause she takes is the pause of a woman whose brain has just been handed a timeline it did not permit. I can see the pulse at her throat climbing. I can smell the shift in her scent — heat under the soap, sharp and specific. My overlay logs it and I let it.
I let it sit. Then:
“Are you trying to seduce me, Natalie?”
Her name. The gravel. The question dropped into the galley like a small, precise device. The word seduce sitting between us with the silk still visible in the open duffel and my body still answering it.
The blush comes up under her skin from her sternum to her jaw in a sweep; my overlay catches it as a one-second pulse spike.
The breath she takes is the breath of a woman who has just decided to either kill me or kiss me and is picking the option that requires less paperwork.
The heat in her scent spikes with it. I want to put my mouth on the place the blush started.
“You—“
“Yes or no, Natalie.”
“You— out, Vosk. Bench. Off. Move.”
She crosses the galley in two strides, past me, past the counter, close enough that her scent hits me broadside, and closes the duffel with the efficiency of a woman who has, in four years of office, closed many things she did not wish her colleagues to have observed.
Zips it. Slings it. Turns. Her face, in profile, has gone the color my biology is mapping as the most attractive configuration a human female has ever deployed in front of me.
The color of a woman who packed silk for a male and just got caught doing it.
“You will not speak of this. On this ship. To Flossie. To Thane. To JINX. To SENTRY. To any species in the registry. For the rest of this case.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Vosk.”
“You packed it for me.”
The sound she makes is half-strangled, half-inhalation. She walks out of the galley. In the doorway, without turning:
“And bring me the coffee, Vosk. Strong.”
“Strong.”
I stand at the bench with the half-grin fully deployed and the purr at the highest register it has hit since the cockpit couch and my cock still hard against the front of my pants. I lift my hand and look at the fingertip. Cool silk. The shape of a small bow. The memory of her blush.
Sweetheart. That was the best four minutes of my operational career.
And underneath the smirk the cold thing comes up again, quick and quiet, the shape it takes when the wanting goes too high without somewhere to land. And if she walks. After this. After she packed for me, and I caught her at it and she still walks.
I push it back. Harder than I should have to. The smirk holds.
JINX, private channel, dry: “Logged.”
“Quietly, JINX.”
I make her coffee. Strong.
* * *
She is at the yoke. She does not look at me when I set the cup at her right hand. She drinks. Her pulse is at one hundred and four. Her sitting-still pulse is sixty-eight.
I take the co-pilot’s seat and strap in. A small chime sounds at her console. She reads it. Her face does the dry-amused thing for exactly half a second before she suppresses it.
“Vosk. SENTRY has filed a formal compliance objection regarding an unauthorized fabricated comm-signal alert. She has copied JINX on the filing. Inside JINX’s own folder.”
“…Has she.”
“She would like JINX to acknowledge receipt.”
A long silence on the private channel. Then JINX, in the smallest register I have heard from him: “Acknowledged.”
SENTRY, open channel, prim: “Receipt logged. The objection will remain on file for the duration of this transit.”
JINX, private, to me only: “She did not need to copy me on it, Tael. She did it on principle. This is a betrayal.”
“Quietly, JINX.”
Natalie picks up her coffee. Her face has gone from the cardiac-alarm flush to the small containment configuration that means she is working very hard not to laugh.
She does not laugh. She drinks. The half-grin on my mouth has gone from a recovery posture to something I am going to have to physically hold back from the corner of my mouth for the rest of the transit.
The silk is still in my fingertip memory. So is the blush.