“I know.” She grins, markings flickering with absolutely zero subtlety. “I need the really long version tonight.”
He stares at her. She stares back. Some wordless negotiation passes between them—father and daughter, eight years of shared language compressed into a single look.
“Fine,” he says. “The long version.”
Tavia rounds the table and throws her arms around my waist. “Night, Dove. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, small person.”
She squeezes hard, then bolts for her room. At the doorway, she pauses just long enough to stage-whisper at the ceiling: “Pickles? Timer?”
“Fifteen-minute preparation window logged,” Pickles responds crisply. “All non-essential corridor access will be secured for overnight maintenance. I shall be conductingcomprehensive system diagnostics that require my full attention. I will be entirely unavailable for approximately eight hours.”
“You’re the best.”
“I am aware.”
The door seals behind her with a pneumatic hiss that sounds, in the charged silence that follows, like a starting pistol.
Cetus rises from his chair. His gaze finds mine across the table—hot and certain and loaded with every promise we haven’t kept yet.
“I won’t be long,” he says. Low. The harmonics turn the words into a physical thing that presses against my skin.
“Take your time.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I’ll clean up.”
He crosses toward Tavia’s room. At the corridor junction, he stops. Turns back. His markings flare once—bright gold, the claiming pattern—before he disappears around the corner.
I wash exactly one dish before my hands start shaking.
The guest quarters shower is barely big enough to turn around in. Hot water, station-standard soap, steam filling the cramped refresher. I scrub my skin and catalogue the evidence of the last few days: the fading bruise on my hip from the cargo bay collision on day one. The scratch on my forearm from scrambling through maintenance tunnels. And on my shoulder—faint now, almost gone—the shadow of his teeth from the corridor. From the kiss that turned into a claiming that turned into an interruption that turned into a promise.
I touch the mark. Press my fingers against the ghost of his bite.
Deserve this. Deserve to stay. Deserve to want something and not run from it.
The mirror fogs. I wipe it with my palm and look at myself—flushed, hair dripping, eyes lit with want. The woman who neverstays anywhere chose a place. A family. A man whose hands could shred metal but touch her like she’s made of spun glass.
My pulse hammers. The filing cabinet. His hands on my thighs. The ridge-line pressing against me through our clothes, and the broken noise he made when I touched his patterns. The way the whole room went gold.
My body clenches at the memory, hot and liquid, and I press my thighs together against the ache.
Days of tension. Days of almost. Tonight, we finish this.
I towel off. Pull on clean underwear and his shirt—the one with the misbuttoned collar that I stole and he never asked for back.
My bed is right there. My bag—the one that used to be packed and ready under the mattress, the one Cetus found and never mentioned again. My toothbrush. My safe, neutral territory where I could pretend I was still a visitor.
I walk past it without stopping.
His quarters. I’ve never been inside. Just a few days on this station and I’ve slept in the guest room every night like a woman keeping one foot out the door, which is exactly what I was. The panel reads STORM, C. — PRIVATE in bilingual text, and I stand in front of it with wet hair and shaking hands and the absolute certainty that if I step through this door, I’m not a guest anymore.
Guests sleep in guest rooms. People who stay sleep somewhere else.
The door opens at my touch—unlocked, because Pickles is a meddling romantic who probably unsealed it the moment Cetus left for Tavia’s room.
Smaller than I expected. Sparse. A wide bed with regulation sheets, a console cluttered with atmospheric data, a chair with a stack of Tavia’s drawings balanced on the arm. It smells like him everywhere—warm metal and ozone and that faintly sweetLividian musk that’s been driving me slowly insane via borrowed shirts for a week. But stronger here. Concentrated. His space, saturated with him.
No trace of me anywhere. Because I’ve never been brave enough to leave one.
