“Very what?”
The hazel eyes come back to mine. Bright. Brave. The flush is still going.
“Tall,” she says. “You are very tall.”
“That’s the word you went with?”
“That is the word I am going with.”
“I’ll take it.”
We work. She does the manifest. I do the report. Tea cooling between us. Pod feed running on the display. The warm galley humming around us and the domestic impossibility of it — two people working across a table after nearly dying together, bare-armed, bare-shouldered, pretending the temperature in the room is the climate control.
She has organized the damaged cargo into categories. Color-coded. In fifteen minutes. With a bruised hip and a head wound. She is good at this and she doesn’t know it and the fact that she doesn’t know it is doing something to me that competence should not be able to do but is doing, anyway.
Her top shifts when she leans forward. The neckline dips. The freckle disappears and reappears. I track it with the focus of a man whose brain has decided a single freckle is critical intelligence.
She catches me. Again. The eyebrow goes up.
“You’re staring.”
“You have a —” I gesture vaguely at my throat. “Something. There.”
She touches her throat. Finds nothing. Looks at me. The eyebrow stays up. The corner of her mouth twitches.
“Liar,” she says. Soft. Almost fond.
The word goes through me like her hands on the ridges. The fondness in it. The ease. Three hours into an acquaintance and she is already comfortable calling me a liar. I want to lean across this table and put my thumb on that freckle and watch her eyes go dark.
Instead, I lean back. Hold her gaze. Let the almost-smile become the real one.
“Caught,” I say.
Something flickers in her expression. Quick. There and gone. The flush comes back, creeping up from the collar of the top. She looks down at the datapad.
I look at the report. I typestructural damage to the port bulkheadand think about pinning her against it. I typecontainment field re-engagedand think about the sound she’d make with her back against cold metal and my mouth on her neck. I typeincident duration: ongoingand think about twenty-two hours and all the ways I want to spend them and the specific order I would spend them in and the patience it would take and I have patience. I have the patience of fourteen years. I have the patience of a long-haul courier who has run the same route for a decade and a half, and I would use every second of that patience on her.
Slow. Thorough. Until she came apart and then I would start again.
I delete a sentence I’ve typed twice. HORATIO makes a sound from the ceiling that is not quite a cough.
The galley is warm. She is warm. The air between us tastes like her, and the report is not getting written, and the twenty-two hours are ticking, and I am in more trouble than I have ever been in my life, and I have been in a lot of trouble.
She sets the datapad down. Stretches — arms above her head, the top riding up, the strip of skin at her waist appearing, and my jaw locks, and she catches the lock because she catches everything — and she looks at me with those hazel eyes and says:
“Do you have any games on this ship?”
Games. She wants to play a game. She is sitting in my galley with her arms above her head and her skin warm and her eyes bright, and she wants to play a game.
The instinct — the old, deep, Skiveth part of me that has been awake for an hour and has the patience of a hull breach — hears the wordgameand translates it into something that has nothing to do with cards. The chase. The hunt. The oldest game. The one where she runs and I follow, and we both know how it ends.
She doesn’t know what she just asked. She has no idea. She is thinking of something with a screen and a scoreboard, and I am thinking about the corridor between the galley and the cabin and the exact number of strides it would take me to catch her if she ran.
Three. It would take three strides. I would give her a head start.
“Games,” I say. My voice is level. My ridges are not. “Yeah. I think I can find something.”
She smiles. Full smile. First one. It hits me in the chest like the Vrennak hit the rod — all the force in the world behind it.
