Then she stepped forward and kissed him, and it was not brief — she had told herself it would be brief, had planned for brief, had understood that brief was the responsible choice given the circumstances and the timeline and the six Fraluma presumably already sealed in their pods six feet away.
Brief lasted approximately two seconds.
His hands found her face, her waist, pulled her in with a certainty that suggested he had also planned for brief and had also abandoned the plan.
She went and didn't argue and stopped thinking about the Barrens and her father and the six months. Instead she focused on the warmth of him, the way his hands felt in her hair, the quality of his attention turned on her with nothing managed and nothing held back.
She got her hands under his jacket.
He made a low sound and guided her until her back met the cargo hold wall between two of the dark stasis chambers.
She pulled him with her because she was not interested in distance. The need to feel him, to be against him, filled her.
To know him, in all the ways she could, now, just in case.
She needed this.
He needed this.
"We have time," she said against his mouth. Not a question. An accounting.
"Yes," he said. His voice was already not entirely his usual voice. She found she liked that.
She pulled back enough to look at him — just for a moment, just to see the face that had been the first clear thing in a freezing dark and had not stopped being clear since.
The careful management and professional distance had disappeared. Just him, entirely unguarded, watching her the way he had been watching her since the dock whether he meant to or not.
And she saw it there.
The emotions that he’d kept so deeply locked up, they were there, behind his eyes.
She reached up and started on the fasteners of his jacket.
He let her. He watched her do it with that focused attention that he gave everything that mattered, which was, she was discovering, extraordinarily effective as a point of concentration.
When the jacket came open he shrugged it off without being asked and she pressed her palms flat against his chest and felt the reality of him — the warmth, the solidity, the heartbeat that was faster than his usual stillness suggested.
"You're nervous," she said, with some surprise.
"Yes," he said. Simply. Without apology.
She found that the honesty of it did something to her that the confidence hadn't. She kissed him again, softer this time, and felt him exhale.
His hands moved to the hem of her shirt. The question in them was different from last time — last time had been possibility, the edge of something.
This was arrival. The agreement. The actual understanding of what they were doing, and the consent.
She answered it by pulling the shirt over her head herself, which saved time and communicated something she didn't need words for.
His intake of breath was quiet. His eyes moved over her slowly, with the specific thoroughness she had come to expect from him.
His intensity was far more arousing than she would have expected, just his gaze.
When he started to touch her, his hand gliding up her sides, just grazing her skin, it felt like fire.
The fires of everything. Emotion. Desire. Need. All of it wrapped into an intensity that she hadn’t expected.
She should have, though.
