19. In the Daylight
In the Daylight
Natalie
The word yes sits between us in the cockpit for some seconds.
The viewport. The drive vector. The stars at speed. JINX at quiet on the shared channel. SENTRY at quiet on mine. My hand at my ribs over the patch he set. His hand at the yoke at the configuration his hand has been at for nine years.
His silver eyes do not leave mine.
He said it. He did not soften it. He did not look away.
My body is doing ten thousand things at once, and the loudest of the ten thousand is want.
The want of a woman who has seen her male carry her two corridors and refuse her at the cost of his own body and clean another male’s chemistry off her in a tactical shower at the cost of his composure, and who is sitting four feet from him in a cockpit and has no operational protocol for what to do with the want.
The next-loudest is the fury.
The welt at my throat stings when I swallow. My own nails made it. I file that where it fits, which is nowhere.
My hands are steady on my knees. I have checked them four times since I woke up. The checking is new.
I let the fury speak first.
“You should have told me, Tael!”
“I know.”
“From day one!”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“Don’t sweetheart me.”
His mouth closes. His jaw goes to the configuration it goes to at the moment his discipline catches him doing the wrong thing. He nods.
“Copy. Natalie.”
“You have been dying since the morning you walked into my office and you decided I did not need to know?”
“Yes.”
“You decided what I could be told and what I could not be told. About your body. About your life. About what was riding on my decisions. You made my information environment for me. You made it without me. You have been making it for five days.”
“Yes.”
“I have been clocking the failing and not knowing what it really meant. That is what you have done to me, Tael. You made me an accomplice to my own deception. You made me complicit in not knowing what I was looking at. I have been falling in love with you and you are dying in front of me and you let me do it blind.”
The sentence is out before I hear what is in it.
Falling in love.
I said it in a cockpit, at speed, inside an indictment. I did not plan it. It is out. I leave it out.
Tael has gone very still.
The purr starts in his chest — involuntary, one second of it — and he kills it.
His hand at the yoke does not move. His eyes do not leave mine.
He will not claim a word I fired at him as evidence.
The discipline it is costing him to not reach for the first love I have ever said in his hearing is visible from four feet away.
He files it. The way I filed it.
“Yes, Natalie.”
“Do you understand what you took from me?”
“I understand.”
“Why?”
His hand comes off the yoke. He turns to me in the pilot’s seat.
His face is — I have not, in five days, seen the face he turns to me with now.
His composure is gone. The cocky is gone.
The half-grin is gone. What is left is the male who refused to mark me in the lab and who told me he loved me at the moment he was refusing me, and the male is looking at me with the look of a Draelith tracker who has, by his own reckoning, made the wrong choice and is owed his accounting.
“Because telling you would have weighted your choice. Because I have, for nine years, watched the bond chemistry pull females toward Draelith males the females did not, in the daylight, want. Because I knew, the morning I walked into your office, that you were the female whose pull I was going to spend the rest of my life under, and I knew that telling you the cost would put a thumb on your scale that you did not ask for. Because you did not have time to fall in love with me before the chemistry committed me, and because I was, by the math of my honor, willing to spend the eighteen months to give you the daylight to decide who you were, without my biology making the decision for you.”
He breathes.
“I was incorrect, Natalie.”
“Tael.”
“I was wrong. It was your decision and I deprived you of the information your decision was built on. I told myself it was honor. It was my discomfort with the asking. I did not want to ask you to choose me knowing the cost. I did not want to put the cost in front of you. I would rather have died than put the cost in front of you. That is not honor. That is the failure to trust you with the information you needed to be the female I am looking at.”
The breath stops in my chest.
He has not finished.
“You are a Head of Station. You are a former Military Police who took the discharge for punching a CO over trafficking. You are the female who packed silk on the morning of day one because your body was already, by some part of you that ran ahead of your brain, decided. You have been making the decisions in your life for forty years. I had no honest right to make this one for you, and I made it for you anyway. I am sorry, Natalie. I am sorry as deep as I have the language for. I will not do it again.”
The cockpit is silent.
The drive vector is very steady.
I look at him.
The fury holds but I set it down because it has been honestly answered.
The remaining thing is the tiredness.
I am tired in the way only a woman who has, in the last day, killed a male and learned her male was dying and been chemically violated and burned at 40.4 on his bunk while he counted my pulse out loud and been bathed by the male whose chemistry she now wants to choose can be tired.
Under the tired, when I blink, there are canines. Not his.
I know the canines are going to be there for a while. I file that too. The filing is how I stay. I am running this conversation like an incident review because an incident review is a room I know how to stand in, and every other room available to me right now has Kesh in it.
“Tael. I would have made the same decision.”
His face moves a quarter-inch.
“But I would have made it knowing. And the knowing matters. The knowing is the difference between a decision I made and a decision that happened to me. I have spent four years making sure no decision happens to me. I have built a station around it. I am not going to let the most important decision of my life happen to me because the male I am choosing decided I could not, in his read, be trusted with the information.”
“I know, Natalie.”
“You will not do it again.”
“No.”
“Anything. Ever. About your body. About your life. About what is riding on the things I am choosing. You will tell me. You will tell me bad. You will tell me without softening. You will tell me when I do not want to hear it. That is the only protocol I am accepting between us.”
My voice cracks on the last word. Neither of us pretends it did not.
“Copy, Natalie.”
“Say it back to me.”
“I will tell you everything. The bad. Without softening. Even when you do not want to hear it. That is the protocol.”
I breathe.
“Good.”
His silver eyes hold mine for three seconds. My chest does a small stutter when his silver eyes hold mine.
“Tael.”
“Sweetheart.”
“I am going to mark you.”
He breathes out. Relieved.
“I had hoped, Natalie.”
“I know you had.”
“I did not allow myself to expect.”
“I know.”
A pause.
“Not in transit. Not in the cockpit. Not in the next thirty minutes.”
“Copy, sweetheart.”
“In my own time. With the door closed. With no one’s chemistry on me. Because it is what I want.”
“Yes.”
“Because I love you.”
His silver eyes come to mine.
The first time I said the word, minutes ago, I fired it at him inside an indictment, and he had the discipline not to catch it. This time I hand it to him.
The purr starts.
He does not kill it.
His eyes close for one second. When they open, the silver is bright in the way Kesh’s had stopped being.
“Yes, Natalie.”
The same two words he filed the indictment. They do not mean the same thing. We both hear the difference.
A long pause.
His hand comes back to the yoke. His face, when he turns back to the viewport, has the half-grin at the corner — the one I have, in five days, come to read as the smallest possible Tael Vosk acknowledgment of a thing he is very pleased about.
“Stop smirking, Tael.”
“Copy.”
The smirk does not leave his face.
I close my eyes for a count of three.
The cockpit at quiet. The drive vector. The viewport. The stars at speed. My male four feet from me with his hand at the yoke and the half-grin at the corner of his mouth and the set of his shoulders telling me his discipline is, finally, allowed to soften by a degree.
He is going to live.
The thing my body has been carrying since the chamber, the thing I have not let myself name in the registers it has been demanding to be named — he is going to live, because I am going to mark him, and the mark is going to set the bond, and the bond is going to reset the cascade, and he is going to live.
I open my eyes.
His silver eyes are on me through the viewport reflection. He is, by the small set of his face, watching me realize.
“Tael?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“You are going to live.”
“Yes, Natalie.”
I close my eyes again.
I do not cry.
We dock at Junction One. From the cockpit’s side, it looks different. The station is the one I have run for four years. It is a place I am returning to with information I did not have when I left it.
The airlock cycles.
Flossie is at the inner hatch.
She is in her ops jacket, her hair pinned tight, her face holding three crises in the upper register of her brain. The face holds until after the hatch cycles. Then it cracks.
She crosses the threshold. Her arms around me. Hard. The hard of a woman who has, for a day and a half, been holding her people in the upper register of her brain and has, in the moment of seeing them alive, run out of the discipline to hold them up there.
“Natalie?”
“Flossie.”
“You are back.”
“I am back.”
“You are alive and you have a wound at your ribs and I am going to need you to let me hug you for ten before I do anything operational with you.”
“Copy.”