“Tell me,” said Q.
And I did. I told her everything.
It took a long time, so long that I was still speaking when we left the common room and went back to our quarters, and even then I left a fair bit out. There’s too much of a person to share it all in one evening. But I told her a lot. Certainly I told her more than I’m telling you. And if you resent that, I’m not sorry. What a woman shares with a companion, even a new companion, in the dark of a tiny room in a cheap inn on Europa and what she shares with the entire system in a published memoir are different things.
I told her the parts that mattered. That I had been born in a faith I had mostly abandoned and in a body I had mostly reshaped. That I’d been wandering the stars for more than half of my adult life and that I had always assumed I would knowwhat I was looking for when I found it but that I’d been dead fucking wrong every single time so far.
Then, as if testing that theory, I told her she was beautiful.
I hadn’t been drinking, but ithadbeen late. We’d gone to bed by that point and were lying face-to-face in the night, only the faint glow of Q’s markings letting us see one another. And I never meant to say it. It just fell out of my mouth like a baby tooth.
Her face scrunched up like she was trying to say about three things at once and couldn’t quite get any of them to fit. “Quare dici?” she managed eventually, and she sounded suspicious. I would have too.
I rolled onto my back, or at least as far onto my back as I could in a bed that had definitely been designed for a single occupant. “Forget it,” I told her.
“Quare?”
“I just…” I covered my face with my hands. This probably wasn’t a conversation I wanted to be having. “Sometimes I get in my head and I say things that don’t mean anythingand— Fuck, I don’t even know how much of this you understand.”
With my face covered, I couldn’t see her, but I felt her fingertips brush my wrist. “Satis,” she said. “Enough.”
Carefully taking my hands away, I turned my head to look at her. “If I said”—this was a bad idea—“that I wanted you to kiss me.”
She didn’t reply. At least not verbally. But if she’d understood nothing else, she definitely understood that.
With a tenderness that I’d hoped for but not dared to expect, she pressed her lips to mine. I kept as still as I possibly could, barely daring to breathe in case I broke the moment. In the cold, it was the warmth of her I noticed the most, the heat of her breath, her hands as she cupped my face as if she feared to break me.
Which was, in so many ways, the opposite of what I wanted.
“Good?” she asked, possibly because in my stillness I was giving her precisely zero signals.
I just about managed a softyesin reply.
So she kissed me again, tentative, almost like she was exploring me. And I wanted so badly to be explored. Her tongue touched just a moment against mine and the rush of it was so sudden and so welcome that I nearly bit the inside of my own mouth.
“Good?” she asked again.
Again I just about managed ayes. And the part of me that was lost to wanting, that had been lost to wanting since I came to Europa… since I left Deimos… since I was born… that part of me whispered that if I’d embraced a bad idea, I might as well embrace a worse one.
“Would you”—it was harder to get words out now, because when she wasn’t kissing me I was swallowing my own tongue with needing her to kiss me—“would you understand if I said I wanted you to fuck me?”
We were too close for me to see her lips, but I thought I saw her smile. Then she leaned very close and said, softly into my ear, “Intellego.”
What with only having two sets of clothes apart from the environment suit, and what with Europa being incredibly freezing all the damned time, I’d gone to bed in the same loose-smock and polymer pants combo I’d been walking around in for the past few days. I was suddenly very aware that I was a mess and probably stank. Then again, Q hadalsobeen reduced to sharing a bed with a stranger in the worst inn in Cthonius Linea, so she probably had low standards.
Either way, she eased my top over my head. I was equal parts comforted by the care she was taking and frustrated that she wasn’t being just a touch more forceful. After all, I’d saidfuck me, notmake love to me.
She traced kisses down my neck and nipped, just a little, at my collarbone with her teeth.
“Good?” she asked. “Bad?”
“Good,” I replied, and she bit me again, a little harder this time. I stifled a gasp.
“Passer, deliciae meae puellae,” she whispered. Her lips were passing between my breasts now, her fingertips tracing the arcs of my hips. “Quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere.”
I wanted, very badly—I can’t really describehowbadly—to reach up and touch her, but I kept my hands firmly by my sides. It’s a game I play with myself sometimes. I’m not sure what the rules are meant to be, or what the prize is. Deep down, I think maybe I’m trying to stick it to all the people who told me I didn’t have any discipline. Because trying to placate old men you knew a decade ago is a really healthy thing to do during sex.
“Cui primum digitum dare appetenti.” Her tongue darted lightly around my navel and she began slipping my pants down far, far more slowly than I wanted her to. “Et acris solet incitare morsus.” She bit me again, just over the hip bone, and I dug my nails into my palms with anticipation.
