20. Mine
Mine
Tael
Seventeen months and twenty-four days.
The number was twenty-five yesterday, in a chamber on Iris-Nine, standing over a monster who died with his hand at his own empty throat. It has gone down by one while I sat on this bunk with my elbows on my knees and did not sleep, and it will go down by one again tomorrow.
Her field jacket is on the pillow beside me.
It has been there since I pulled it over her shoulder on my ship this morning so that anything approaching that bunk would smell me first. She never took it back.
I carried it off Helia’s Reach under my arm like a male carrying evidence, and I put it on the pillow, and I have not moved it, and there is no operational justification for any part of that sequence.
Level six is one floor up. She is in it, or asleep in it, and either way the arithmetic is the same: she said in my own time, and my time is not the time under discussion.
So I sit.
The quarters are the temporary contractor issue Florence processed at 0900 on day one.
A bunk. A washroom. A shelf. Nothing on it.
Nine years at SRS and three years freelance and I have never once put anything on a shelf, and it has never once, until this evening, read to me as information about myself.
I should prepare for both outcomes.
That is the discipline. If she comes, my biology gets its stay, and I get the rest of a life I had already spent.
If she does not come, or comes tomorrow and says the daylight showed her something else, then I have seventeen months and twenty-four days of being useful to her, and I will spend every one of them without once making the not-coming her burden to carry.
She will never know the number from me again.
She has it now, and having it is enough, and the male who handed his mate a countdown twice is not offering information. He is applying pressure.
The chime goes.
Every rosette on my body comes up at once.
Her scent arrives through the seal a half-second ahead of the cycle, and my nose has been calibrated to that scent since Bay Seven, and what it brings me now is not the arrangement I have been reading for five days.
Soap. Skin. The iron-and-warm under it. And a register my biology identifies before my brain gets a vote, that a female walked to a male’s door with her body already answering the question.
Discipline. She has not said anything yet. I get up.
The door cycles.
Natalie Torres in the corridor light. Her hair down. The soft clothes, not the kit. Boots she put back on to make a one-floor walk, which means she took them off somewhere and had to decide, and the deciding happened in a room I was not in.
The welt is still angry on her throat.
My mouth opens. Nothing arrives in it. She could be here to tell me she is going to sleep on it and wanted to say so to my face, which is precisely the courtesy she would extend and precisely the courtesy that would take me apart. Or she could be here for the other thing.
I do not know which.
Nine years of reading bodies across rooms, and I cannot read hers. Not this time.
So I stand in my own doorway and I wait, and I have no face on, there is nothing available to put there.
“I have decided. I want to do it now. On the bunk.”
My eyes close.
What happens within my core is not an emotion.
It is mechanical. My lungs have been running eleven percent short for five days; the shallow overhead a Draelith body carries when its chemistry has committed and its committing has not been answered, and at the sentence the eleven percent comes back.
One breath. My ribs go where ribs are supposed to go.
The count stops.
Not falls. Stops. Seventeen months and twenty-four days sit in my head with nothing under it, the way a load sits after the cable is cut, and my body has no protocol for the sudden absence of a weight it had organized itself around carrying.
Something is happening to my eyes. I let it. She is going to see it, and she has earned the seeing.
“Sweetheart.”
“Tael.”
Five days I have not let myself run this scene, because running it would have made every hour without it a loss instead of a fact.
And under that discipline, in the place a male keeps the things he does not examine, I have been hoping since the morning she walked through my airlock in a cardigan a size too big.
She does not need me to say that. She said the thing that made it unnecessary.
My hand comes up.
It comes up slowly, as my hand is not a part of my body I currently trust with a decision. It stops in the air between us.
She takes it. She puts it on her jaw.
Her skin under my palm. My thumb finds the corner of her mouth, and she opens for it without being asked, and the pad of my thumb drags her lower lip down, and the sound that comes out of me is not one I have ever made in front of another person.
Low. Not filed. The sound of a male whose leash has been handed back to him with the buckle already open.
“Natalie.”
“Yes.”
“You are sure?”
“I am sure.”
“Then come here.”
She closes the distance and pulls my face down to hers.
The kiss is the one with nothing in it. No cover.
No compound off a ceiling manifold. No male standing between us with his hand in her hair, and no eighteen months standing between us with mine.
Her mouth opens under my mouth and her tongue finds my tongue and takes, and my hand goes into her hair at the back of her neck and angles her the way I have wanted her angled since a briefing table on day one, and my other hand goes to her hip and then lower and I take the curve of her and drag her against me, and there is nothing left in the configuration that lets either of us pretend she cannot feel what I am carrying for her.
She makes a sound in my mouth. Not composed. Not the Head of Station. My canines want to drop, and I hold them because they are going to be needed shortly and needed properly, and if I let them go now, the next part goes badly.
The kiss goes filthy anyway. Her teeth at my lower lip. Her tongue at a canine that has not dropped and would very much like to. The sound I make into her is undignified, and I do not care about my dignity, and this is a new position for me, and I am adjusting to it at speed.
I break it. My forehead against hers. Breathing like I have run down a corridor.
“Tell me again.”
“I have decided. I want to do it now.”
“On the bunk?”
“On the bunk. I want your mouth. I want your teeth. I want you inside me when it sets. I want it to be messy and I want it to be ours.”
“Sweetheart.”
It comes out scraped.
“Take your shirt off.”
I take my shirt off.
Her eyes go over me and I stand and let them, and the rosettes flush under the looking without being asked to, saturating at the sternum and the shoulders in the pattern my species runs when it is being appraised by the one appraisal that matters.
Her pupils widen. Her pulse goes to ninety-four.
The scent registered at her throat opens up two full notches, and my whole nervous system leans toward it like a compass needle.
She puts her hand on my chest.
Palm flat at the sternum rosette. Skin to skin. The rosette releases at the contact, a small warm delivery of chemistry into her, and her hand stays where it is, as my heart tries to get out through it.
Her palm drags down. Slow. Over the stomach. To the buckle, where her knuckles rest and open nothing, and I kick against her wrist through the fabric like an untrained animal.
“Are you ready?” she says.
The half-grin arrives late, and I let it arrive, because it is mine and it is the honest one.
“I have been ready since you went pink above your collar in the briefing on day one, when I stretched the SRS shirt and your eyes dropped to my forearms for exactly half a second and snapped back to my eyes as though you had not, in that half-second, done anything.”
Her hand on my chest does not move.
Her mouth does.
“You clocked that?”
“Mm.”
“You put it in your file.”
“I put it in my permanent memory. I have, since then, taken it out and looked at it some number of times I am not going to count for you. I have thought about putting you on that briefing table. I have thought about your mouth. I have thought about what you sound like when you stop being an officer.”
She slaps my shoulder.
It does not meet the operational threshold for a slap.
It is the strike of a female whose composure has just been removed from her by four sentences and who has to put the removal somewhere.
My hand catches her wrist and puts her palm back on the rosette and holds it there, so that whatever she has decided to feel about it she can feel it against the evidence.
“You are the most annoying male I have ever loved.”
“Yes.”
“And the only.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
She pulls me down and kisses me harder and bites my lower lip the way she is shortly going to bite my throat, and the growl that comes out of me is not a decision I participated in.
I get us to the bunk.
Her back to the mattress and my weight over her at the angle of my body. My mouth at her jaw. My hand at her hip. My thigh between hers, because she needs something and I will not make her ask for it, and she is riding it inside four seconds and neither of us remarks on that.
My tail comes up.
It has been at my waist since the corridor in the configuration a Draelith tail is held in when its male has been pair-identified and not answered.
There is no reason to hold it now. It wraps around her ankle.
Then her calf. Then the back of her knee, a slow claiming slide, and then the taper of it finds the inside of her thigh, and finds what is waiting there through the cotton, and my whole spine goes rigid.
She is soaked.
She walked down one floor and stood in my corridor and touched my chime like that.
“Tael.”
“Mm.”
“Tell me how this works.”
“The marking?”
“Yes. Before I forget how to ask. Before you put your mouth on me and I stop being a person who asks questions.”
My head comes up off her throat.