“You get in your own head on the ice. Sometimes. When the sector-one chirps get loud, or the conditions slip, or you are running on no sleep. The focus falters. The first two we can drill. The third one is the one we cannot drill away, because it is upstream of the ice. So we are, the three of us, currently engineering the conditions in the house in which the third flaw stops being a flaw.”
Oh.
Oh, Captain.
“For an additional example,” he adds, mildly, “I have noticed, in the past six weeks, that you have a tendency to look away during direct eye contact in any conversation that requires you to be read. You break the line of sight. You look at the floor. You look at the wall. You look at the third thing in the room. You used to do it constantly. You are, slowly, doing it less. Your confidence lies in the gaze, O’Shea. Hold it.”
I am, in the passenger seat of his car with a strawberry milkshake in my hand, doing it right now. I am looking at the gear stick. I lift my eyes back to his.
He nods. Small.
“There we go.”
“I am,” I admit, quietly, “surprised you noticed that.”
“O’Shea.” Soft. “I have noticed approximately everything.”
The small private chamber of my chest does the small honest collapse it has been doing intermittently for two weeks.
“I —” My voice gives out, briefly. I clear my throat. I try again. “This is, ah. The first time. That somebody has, on the record, actually defended me. Or treated me as if I were cherishable. I have been on this campus for six weeks, and you three have,between you, defended me more times than the rest of my life combined.”
Jude’s eyes do not leave mine.
“I have been in,” I continue, carefully, “relationships. I will not lie about that. Situationships, mostly. The occasional bad three-month decision. The classic young-Omega tour of regrettable line items. The slow build of an actual packship, the kind where the men involved start, of their own accord, building actual structures into your life — that is, candidly, frightening for me, because it feels real. And I think I have been operating, somewhere on the inside, on the small unexamined assumption that I was not, in fact, deserving of that. So this is, ah. New. The new is harder than the bullshit.”
“Iris.” Jude’s voice has gone low.
“Mm.”
“You are,” he tells me, with the precise unhurried captain finality of a man putting a sentence on the record, “more than worthy of being cherished. The fact that you have not, until now, been cherished is the operational failure of the people upstream of you. It is not, structurally, your fault. And, for the record, the three of us are correcting that failure as of approximately six weeks ago. With intention.”
I smile.
Not the giddy traitor smile. The small careful one a person does when something has, on the inside, been quietly received and is going to require sitting with later, in private, with a closed door and possibly a glass of wine.
“So,” I venture, after a beat. “How do you actually like your relationships, Captain.”
“Slow.” Immediate. “Steady. Built. The way I like my coffee, my carpentry, and my grandfather’s stew. I do not see the point of the alternative. Maybe that reads as odd for a man in a country where everyone seems to be in a hurry to jumpon each other at the first available opportunity. I am not, in fact, anti-jumping. I am, however, fully against jumping without intention.”
“So — to be clear — you do, in fact, like to.”
“Fuck. Yes.”
Oh.
“On the record,” he adds, mild, eyes back on the side mirror, “I fuck with the same approach I do most things. Slow. With intention. Thoroughly. And, when warranted, the captain delivers a sustained performance.”
Captain. Captain. You absolute son of a bitch.
Filing. Filing. The file is going to need its own subfolder.
“Okay,” I manage, around the rim of my milkshake, “that is going to live in my head, sir. I just want to flag that. That is going to be there, undisturbed, until I die.”
He smirks.
“I like,” I add, after a beat, more honestly than I planned to, “that I do not feel pressured. With any of you. The three of you are very different from each other, and the difference is, on the inside, the most settled I have ever felt. I am not, at any point in the past two weeks, being asked to be more than I am.”
“Good,” he says, simply.
