The door hissed open, and I stepped inside, still not quite certain I wasn’t making a gigantic mistake.
CHAPTER
FORTY-NINEDebriefing
Looking back, I’m not sure what I’d expected Locke’s cabin to look like. Like their office, probably. Austere, immaculate as they were themself. And I’d been half right. It was neatly appointed, with everything arranged just so and in its proper place. But the room had been designed for comfort, not for efficiency. By the one window, a polymer easy chair sat beside a reading light and a low table. And that was where the first mate was sitting, waiting for me to explain myself.
And like the room, they didn’t look the way I expected. Out of uniform, in shirtsleeves and bare feet, they looked unguarded. There was still a confidence to them, a no-nonsense attitude that was a big part of why I’d moved them up my list of crew members to sleep with, but it was tempered now by a sense that this was a private space and for the moment at least, their official duties were suspended.
I stood there, feeling out of place. In an effort to bring things back to more familiar ground I asked, “Where do you want me?”
They knew I’d meant it in a sex way, but they just gestured at the chair opposite. “Drink?”
From a mix of politeness and uncertainty, I sat where I’d been directed. It was another comfortable chair, set mirroring the mate’s, so we looked like two old friends sharing pleasantafter-dinner conversation. “You know you don’t have to go through the whole seduction thing.”
“Perhaps I wantyouto go through the whole seduction thing.”
I was fairly sure they were messing with me again. Besides, I didn’tdoseduction. I was the one people picked up when they’d struck out somewhere else, and I was comfortable with that. “Going to make me work for it, are you?”
“Making sure the crew work for things is rather my job. But mostly I wanted to get you out of the corridor. You seemed very close to making a scene.”
That made me laugh louder than I’d meant to. “We’ve got Marsh walking the decks spouting poetry about the bleak indifference of the sky, a pirate trying to get us all to rise up and overthrow our trade-state oppressors, and the captain—” I stopped dead. Whatever misgivings I might have had about the captain’s leadership, it felt like a betrayal to voice them.
But Locke finished for me. “And the captain taking us into uncharted storms in pursuit of a beast far more dangerous but no more valuable than any other Leviathan?”
I couldn’t even bring myself to nod.
“For what it’s worth,” they told me, a note of warning creeping into their voice, “I’ve sailed with the captain before, and I’ve seen this pattern. Even before her obsession with the Beast she drew people in.”
“That seems a good quality in a leader,” I replied, and I did believe it, then. I still do in a way.
“The woman is the sun,” replied Locke. “Get too close to her and you’ll fall into her well and it’ll take half your payload to burn your way out. If you get out at all.”
There were no two ways about it, this was the voice of experience. So I asked the question I’d been wanting to ask almost since the start of the voyage. “Were you in love with her?”
It had been a gambit, and it had—I’d sayworkedbut that implied way more forethought than I actually gave it. It had an effect. Locke grew very still and fixed me with their cold,unflinching gaze. “That’s an impertinent question to ask an officer.”
“More impertinent thanHey, wanna fuck me?”
“Substantially.”
I still wasn’t totally sure whether my plan here was to get myself laid or get myself flogged, and I also wasn’t sure which side of the line I was riding closest to right at that moment. With uncharacteristic caution, I stayed silent and waited to see if Locke would continue.
“Let’s just say,” they went on, after a long enough silence that I was beginning to think I’d fucked everything up irreparably and—worse—uninterestingly, “that I know what it’s like to have her attention, and to lose it, and to want it back.”
It was looking like we’d gotten drawn into a game of competitive nerve-touching. I sat a little stiffer in my chair. “Don’t assume you know me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Their tone was lighter now, and I read a challenge into that. Maybe I was wrong to, but I’ve been doing wrong things my whole life. “Although I do hope you’ll forgive me if I refrain from taking your bullshit at face value.”
If I’d had a leg to stand on I’d have been offended. But I’d buzzed their door at midnight and aggressively offered myself to them. It’s not like I could pretend I wasn’t acting out just a tiny bit. “You might want to start. Bullshit is all I’ve got.”
At that, Locke rose from their chair and crossed the few feet towards me. Then they crouched down and brought their face a respectful but enticing distance from mine. “You know, I honestly can’t tell if you’re far more interesting than you pretend to be or far, far less.”
“I’m an open book,” I replied.
“But a long one, I think.” A half a smile crossed Locke’s lips and then, after a moment’s consideration, they leaned in and kissed me.
As you might have worked out by now, I’m a neurotic, chaotic slut with so many issues I could write an allegorical novel about them, so I’ve been kissed by a whole lot of people. No two havebeen exactly alike. Actually, that’s not true. Most have blended into each other in a mess of self-loathing and whatever I was on at the time. But out of the minority whose names I remember, no two have been alike. Q kissed like fire and A kissed like hate but Locke, Locke kissed like a puzzle box. All they gave up front was the promise of secrets, and each one I unlocked gave me a new question.
