Twoweekssincetheclaiming bite. Two weeks since my nervous system rewrote itself around her cardiac rhythm and I lost the ability to concentrate on atmospheric data for more than eleven consecutive minutes.
Not that I’m measuring.
(I’m measuring. Pickles has a graph.)
Dove returned from her first OOPS run three days ago. Forty-one hours off-station—a supply loop through the Veridian corridor and back, routine cargo, no complications—and by hour six I was checking the long-range sensors with a frequency Pickles described as “statistically indistinguishable from compulsive behaviour.”
She’d barely cleared the docking bay before I had her pressed against the Rolling Pin’s hull, my face buried in her neck, breathing her in. Forty-one hours had diluted my scent on her skin. Unacceptable. My body knew it before my mind caught up—the claiming instinct flaring hot and immediate, demanding I mark her again, layer my pheromone signature back over every centimetre of skin until no living being within sensor range could mistake her for unclaimed.
“Missed you too,” she’d said, laughing into my shoulder while my hands mapped her like a navigation chart I’d temporarily misplaced. “You want to let me get my boots off first, or—”
I had not wanted her to get her boots off first. What I’d wanted was to carry her to our quarters and spend the next several hours rectifying the pheromone deficit. What I’d done was kiss her until Tavia appeared at a dead sprint and launched herself at Dove’s knees like a guided projectile.
We’d sorted out the boots eventually.
Now Dove is cross-legged on the operations centre floor, surrounded by data pads and supply manifests, building a logistics framework for the colonist families arriving next week. Her hair is clipped up with a stylus she’s forgotten about. She’swearing my shirt—the grey one, two sizes too large, sleeves rolled to the elbows. The claiming mark on her shoulder glows faintly where bonding enzymes have permanently altered the pigmentation: a purple-gold scar in the exact shape of my bite, broadcasting to every biological scanner in the sector that this woman is taken.
She catches me watching. Tilts her head.
“You’ve got that look again.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You absolutely have a look. It’s somewhere between ‘I want to solve a complex equation’ and ‘I want to bend you over the nearest console.’ Pickles calls it your optimization face.”
“I have never once used that expression.”
“I certainly have,” Pickles says from the overhead speakers. “And I stand by the classification.”
Dove grins. Goes back to her manifests. My gaze tracks the movement of her hands—quick, capable, reorganising a supply chain with the same ruthless competence she once used to outrun debt collectors—and the heat that’s been simmering at the base of my spine since she walked into the ops centre this morning tightens another notch.
Two weeks of bonded proximity has not diminished the response. If anything, the bond has amplified it. I now experience her elevated heart rate as a phantom echo in my own pulse. When she’s aroused—when she catches me watching her, or when our bodies brush in corridors, or when I speak in low harmonics and her breath catches—I feel it. A warmth that ghosts across my chest, settles in my groin, makes the ridges along my cock stir with a sensitivity that borders on painful.
She knows this. She exploits it.
“Hey, Cetus?” She doesn’t look up. “When you checked this morning’s atmospheric data, did you notice the pressure gradient in sector nine?”
“What about it?”
“It’s trending twelve percent above your seasonal models.” She shifts her weight. The shirt rides up her thigh. She’s wearing shorts underneath so brief they may as well be hypothetical. “I flagged it in the shared log.”
“I’ll review it.”
“You should probably come look at this display.” She stretches one leg out. The shorts ride higher. “The anomaly is right here.”
“The anomaly is nowhere near your legs.”
“Isn’t it?” She finally looks up. Her eyes are dark and knowing and her pulse—which I can feel through the bond like a second heartbeat—has accelerated by precisely twelve beats per minute. Deliberate. She is deliberately elevating her heart rate to trigger my biological response.
My markings flare. Gold light pulses across my forearms, visible even through my shirt sleeves.
“That,” I say, with significantly less composure than I intend, “is manipulation.”
“It’s positive reinforcement. I read about it in a Lividian bonding study Pickles loaded to my data pad.”
“Pickles.”
“I provided educational materials,” Pickles says. “The Captain’s implementation of the research is her own initiative. I am merely a resource.”
