19. In the Daylight #3
She looks at me. The look of a Morcrestian female who has been doing medical screens for some decades and who has, by her species’ particular gift at reading bonded chemistry across the room, registered the configuration of a patient who is in love with the male who patched her up.
“Copy. Get some sleep, Officer. Come back in forty-eight hours for a follow-up.”
She leaves the screen room.
Tael comes in behind her.
He has been at the door for the duration. Not in the room.
“Sweetheart.”
“Tael.”
“Quarters.”
“Quarters.”
Junction One staff quarters are, by the standard layout I helped design four years ago, two-room configurations.
A small living space. A bunk room. A washroom. Standard issue for officer-grade staff. My quarters are on level six. Tael’s quarters — assigned at 0900 on day one when Flossie processed his temporary docking credentials — are at level five. One floor down. Direct lift.
We walk to the lift.
He does not take my hand.
I do not take his.
He heard me. He is honoring the I will come to you when I am ready. He is honoring it without performance and without pressure.
The lift opens at level six.
I step out. He stays in the lift.
“Nat.”
“Tael.”
“Sleep.”
“You too.”
“Yes.”
The lift doors close.
SENTRY, on my private channel, before I have taken three steps: “Officer Torres. For the record: JINX has transmitted a data packet addressed to me. Subject: pulse-sync analysis, annotated. I have received it.”
“Received.”
Not “refused.” Received.
The distinction is doing a great deal of work, and both of us know it.
“Noted, SENTRY.”
I walk to my quarters.
The door cycles. The lights come up at low.
My quarters are the quarters I have lived in for four years.
The bookshelf at the wall. The small print of my mother’s garden at the kitchen counter.
The throw on the couch that I have not refolded since I left for the breach forty-some hours ago.
The tactical kit by the door from the morning I left, which is not the kit I am wearing — that one is at the medical bay being chain-of-custody-logged for the case file.
The quarters smell like my quarters.
They do not smell like Tael.
The thing I am about to do is the thing I am about to do in this room. In these walls. With the throw on the couch and the print at the counter and the bunk through the door at the back wall. I am going to sit in this room and decide.
I sit on the couch.
I take my boots off.
I close my eyes.
I think about what Kesh said.
About the chemistry and the choice. About what biology makes you do and what you make biology do.
About Kesh in the chamber and his canines at my throat and the compound in my body and the want that was not mine.
I think about Tael’s no. I think about the registers of his face when he said I love you in a lab while he was refusing me.
I think about the disc in Kesh’s pocket and the four years he carried it.
I think about him.
About what he has been doing to my body since the morning he caught me at the cache.
The pull he has been exerting on my chemistry.
The pull I have, for five days, been in and choosing to hold against and choosing to give to and choosing, in every configuration of choosing my body has been allowed to make.
The chemistry is real.
The chemistry is my chemistry.
The choice is mine.
Three women went into a cargo hold and did not come out of it. The evidence was mine. The filing was correct. The chain of command ran exactly as far as a man with warm coffee in his hand who told me that pursuing it would compromise operational priorities.
They stopped being recoverable while I was still filing.
Four years of running this station by the rulebook, and I built the rulebook so that nobody would ever again get to make that decision over a cup of coffee. It has not occurred to me until this second that I also built it so that nothing could happen to me I had not authorised in advance.
Tael has not once asked me to authorise anything. He has asked me to decide.
I think about my mother’s garden in the print at the counter. I think about the female she was. The female she would want me to be. What she would want me to choose.
She would want me to choose what I want.
I want him.
The wanting is not the chemistry. The wanting has been in my body since the moment he caught me at the cache and held me upright in his arm without asking permission, and which has been every configuration of yes my body knows how to make.
My brain tells me this is too fast for a human woman; I should be sure.
But my heart wants him because he was going to die for me without telling me, and because when I asked he told me, and because he refused me at the cost of his own body and held the line for both of us, and because he washed another male’s chemistry off my skin while his own biology was screaming, and because he held me up when my body was breaking against his chest, and because his chest made a sound I had never heard a male’s chest make, and because his hand at the yoke when he said I am sorry as deep as I have the language for and meant every word.
I want him because he is the one.
I have decided. So I open my eyes. I stand up and I walk to the lift.