“You are certain?” I ask carefully. “Sharing sleeping quarters is quite intimate, even with professional intentions.”
“Crash, we’re bonded. We can feel each other’s emotional states and get separation sickness if we’re more than ten feet apart. I think we’re past worrying about sleeping arrangements being too intimate.”
She has a point.
“Additionally,” she continues with the kind of clinical precision that suggests she’s thought this through carefully, “attempting to maintain separate quarters while bonded would likely result in poor sleep quality for both of us, which would compromise our ability to handle crisis situations effectively. From a safety perspective, shared quarters with proper rest is significantly preferable to exhausted decision-making.”
“You are approaching this from a risk management perspective.”
“I’m approaching this from a survival perspective,” she corrects. “We have three days to get to Kallos Station while being hunted by Thek-Ka, with unstable bonding that might destabilize further if we don’t maintain proximity, in a ship that’s designed for solo operations but now has to support two people plus a Junglix who makes coffee with his body.”
When she puts it that way, shared sleeping quarters seem like a remarkably minor concern.
“Very well,” I agree. “We share the bunk.”
“Thank you for being reasonable about this.”
“I am being practical about situations beyond my control while trying not to think about how sharing a bunk with you is going to make the next three days extremely challenging for my biology.”
The words escape before I can filter them, and I see her expression shift to something that might be awareness.
“Your biology?”
“My biology believes you are my mate and responds accordingly to your proximity. Sharing sleeping quarters will make those responses more... pronounced.” I force myself to meet her eyes despite the heat flooding my face. “I will control myself. You have my word on that. But I cannot control my body’s automatic reactions to your presence.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I can see her processing the implications.
“What kind of automatic reactions are we talking about?”
“Enhanced pheromone production. Elevated body temperature. Increased protective instincts. And...” I trail off, struggling to find diplomatic phrasing.
“And physical arousal,” she finishes.
“Yes.”
“That you can’t control.”
“That I can choose not to act on,” I correct. “But cannot prevent from occurring.”
She nods slowly, still processing. “And you’ll experience this every time we’re in close contact?”
“The bond creates constant low-level arousal as part of the mate recognition response,” I admit, because she deserves complete honesty about what she’s agreeing to. “Prolonged proximity intensifies it. Skin contact...” I stop, because describing how skin contact affects me would require words I don’t possess.
“Makes it worse,” she finishes.
“Makes it more apparent,” I correct quietly. “It is always there. Physical contact simply makes it impossible to ignore.”
She looks at me with those analytical eyes, and I brace myself for her to rescind the shared quarters offer. To decidethat dealing with separation discomfort is preferable to sharing sleeping space with someone whose biology is constantly responding to her presence.
Instead, she surprises me.
“Then I guess we’re both going to have to get very good at ignoring biology,” she says pragmatically. “Because I refuse to let pheromones and biochemical bonding dictate how I live my life.”
The words should feel like rejection. Instead, they feel like challenge—like she’s acknowledging the difficulty but choosing to face it anyway rather than retreating to false distance.
“You are remarkably brave,” I tell her.
“I’m remarkably stubborn,” she corrects. “There’s a difference.”
