“HORATIO made food,” I say. Like he can’t see the food. Like I am narrating the galley to a male who lives in it.Great, Lorri. Excellent contribution. Really earning that interview.
“He does that.” Jazil sits across from me. Takes the plate. “He’s been waiting for a guest.”
“I have been waiting for a guest,” HORATIO confirms. “For nine years. Nine years of single-portion meals, Captain. Nine years of one mug on the drying rack. Tonight, I am setting two places, and I would like the emotional significance of that noted in the ship’s log.”
“HORATIO.”
“Noted in the log, Captain.”
Two plates. Two cups of tea. Two sets of utensils. For a table that has never had a second setting. Something catches in my throat that has nothing to do with food.
We eat. The grain bowl is warm and slightly spiced; the first bite is doing things to my brain that adrenaline was not doing. The second bite is better, and the third involves a small involuntary sound that I did not intend and cannot take back.
Jazil’s spoon stops. He is looking at my mouth.
“Good?” he says. Careful.
“Very good.”
We eat. The galley is warm. I take a spoonful of the sauce — the good one, the rich one — and the spoon tilts, and the sauce goes sideways, and it doesn’t stop going sideways. It pours down the front of the lucky top from the neckline to the hem like the sauce has decided the top is its new home and it is moving in immediately.
“OH —”
I grab the napkin. Dabbing. The dabbing makes it worse. The sauce is spreading, and the top is — the top is the top. My mother’s top. The one she pressed into my hands the day I left the colony.You wear it the first day of every new thing, baby. Every single first day.The top that has survived six years of first days and a station laundromat that shrank it by three inches, and I have worn it anyway, every time, because it was the first thing my mother ever gave me that saidgoinstead ofstay.
And I have dumped grain sauce all over it. In front of the hottest male I have ever sat across from in my life. On the first day, it actually mattered.
Typical. Absolutely typical. This is what I do. This is what Lorri Vance does — she walks into the good thing and spills on it. She gets the interview and trips on the ramp. She gets the cargo bay and triggers the quarantine. She gets the male with the jaw and the hands and the ridges and she DUMPS SAUCE ON HERSELF like a toddler at a birthday party.
“Ms. Vance.” HORATIO. Gentle. “I have a stain treatment protocol. The top can be cleaned.”
“It’s fine, it’s just a top.”
It is not just a top. It is the last thing my mother touched before I stepped onto the transport. But I will not cry about a stained shirt in a galley in front of a Skiveth male who killed a predator with his bare hands.
“Hey.”
His voice. Soft. Not the business voice. Not the galley banter. The voice from the hold, from the floor, from the moment he kneeled beside me and saidlet me see.
I look up. He is looking at me and his face has gone open in a way that has nothing to do with the sauce and everything to do with whatever just crossed my face that I did not hide in time.
“It’s from my mother,” I say. Because apparently my mouth is committed to honesty tonight. “She gave it to me when I left the colony. I wear it every first day. It’s — lucky.”
“Lucky.”
“Lucky in the sense that every time I wear it something goes catastrophically wrong and then something unexpectedly good happens. The laundromat shrank it by three sizes. It survived. My luggage got lost. The top was in my carry bag. I wore it to the interview. I got the job. I wore it today. I met —”
Stop. Stop stop stop!The sentence was going to end withyouand I cannot sayyoulike that in a galley with sauce on my chest while his pupils are doing the thing.
“— a Vrennak,” I finish. Weakly.
The almost-smile. He is not fooled.
“Lucky top,” he says. “Still working.”
“Still working.” I look down at the sauce stain. At the straining neckline and the hem that rides too high and the fabric that is doing its absolute best, which is a LOT, and its absolute best is currently decorated with grain sauce and the galley light is on it and he is looking and I am looking at him looking and —
Oh.
