14. Before We Go #2
The tenderness although she has no energy left for anything other than kissing knuckles. She kisses the pad of each finger. She turns my hand over and kisses the scar at my thumb.
She does not ask about the scar.
She kisses it.
“I didn’t think it could be like that.”
A pause.
“I know, Natalie.”
“Is that — is that always how it is for you—“
“No.”
“No?”
“That was with you. That is how it is with you. No one else. Ever.”
She is quiet, processing a sentence she was not prepared to receive.
I find the slight bruise at her hip where my thumb was ninety minutes ago. I bring my mouth to it. I kiss it — gentle, the apology without the word.
She makes a small sound. Her hand in my hair.
“I am going to have marks in the morning.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
A pause.
“Good?”
“I want the marks, Tael. I want to see them. I want to know where you were. I want to feel you when I walk.”
I kiss her shoulder again. Slower this time.
“Good girl.”
Said into her skin at the hipbone where the bruise is.
She shivers at it.
I pull her closer. I kiss the back of her shoulder. I kiss the side of her neck where my mouth was an hour ago. I kiss her temple. I wrap the thermal blanket around both of us.
“What was the scar?”
Ah. She did catch it.
“Tyrre belt. A cargo operation that went sideways. I put my hand in the wrong piece of machinery trying to catch a falling container.”
“The child?”
The question is from someone who read a redacted termination file before she ever let me on her station, and has been waiting to ask.
“Yes?”
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“I am glad you caught the container.”
I close my eyes.
“So am I, Natalie.”
A silence. Her thumb moves on my knuckles. Then, in the register she marks things in:
“You said later. On the ship.” She does not lift her head. “Kesh. What happens to a male whose regulation fails?”
The quiet hour. She marked it in the lift and she has come back for it, on her side of the afterglow, with her lips still at my knuckles. I give her the true general answer because she has earned it, and because the specific answer is not hers to carry tonight.
“An unbonded Draelith male runs on discipline where a bonded male runs on chemistry. When the regulation starts to fail, the body compensates. Then it stops compensating. He loses thermoregulation first. Then fine motor. Then the nose. Then it finishes.”
“How long.”
“Months. Sometimes less.”
She is quiet. Filing.
“That is what is hunting us?”
“That is what is hunting us.”
She does not ask the question underneath. I do not offer it, which is the most expensive discipline I have deployed tonight.
She turns in my arms. Her hand on my chest, at the rosette.
Her cheek at my collarbone. Settling. She drifts.
Not asleep yet. The intermediate state — breathing even, pulse settling, the body processing the new calibration.
Her hand on my sternum. Her thumb at the edge of the rosette, tracing slowly.
Her thumb stops at the rosette. Her breathing deepens.
Remember this.
I do not let the thought finish. For now, the back of my brain says, the truer version.
For now.
She sleeps.
I do not.
I lie under her with her hair across my chest and the purr at the ambient register and the pulse-sync at eighty-eight, and I watch the bulkhead amber strip-light move across the ceiling in the slow cycle Helia’s Reach’s cabin lights run every eleven minutes.
Her hand on my sternum. Her breath at my collarbone. Her thigh across my hip.
I am memorizing her.
The weight of her head at my collarbone.
The rhythm of her breath when her pulse is at eighty-eight.
The small sound she makes when she turns her face further into my throat in the specific way she does when she is settling deeper into sleep.
The shape of her hand on my sternum — thumb on the rosette, fingers spread across my ribs.
The pattern of fingernail indents at my back from the third round.
The bruise at her hip I kissed. The spot that is not marked.
The smell of sex still in the bunk. The taste of her still in my mouth.
I am memorizing her because this is what I have, and this might be all I have, and I am going to have had it fully.
The cold thing presses up under my sternum. Slower this time. You knew the price. You paid it.
I do not push it back.
JINX, on the private channel, in the quietest register he has ever used: “Tael.”
“Mm.”
“Ten-minute warning in fourteen.”
“Copy.”
“Tael.”
“What?”
She chose you.
A pause.
“For now, JINX.”
A longer pause. I can feel JINX registering the correction. He does not push.
“Tael?”
“Yes.”
“I will remain available at the ambient register. You do not have to think about it.”
“Copy. Thank you, JINX.”
“Let her sleep, Tael.”
“Quietly.”
The ten-minute warning sounds at the low chime JINX has set it to, gentle enough not to wake her fully, firm enough to signal.
She stirs against me.
Her dark eyes open, waking up in an arrangement that is new. Sore. Marked. Mine for now.
“We have to go.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
A silence.
Then she lifts her face. Her mouth finds mine.
Slow. The kiss of a female who has been made love to for the better part of two hours and is kissing her male one more time because she is not ready to stop kissing him.
I can still taste her on my own tongue. She can taste herself too. Neither of us comments.
I kiss her back.
Both my hands at her face. The thumbs at her jaw. My mouth open for her. The purr at the ambient register. Her hand at the back of my neck.
She pulls back an inch.
Her forehead on mine.
“Let’s go find Torek.”
“Copy, sweetheart.”
One more kiss. Softer. Quick.
Then she sits up.