He is looking at where the sauce hit. The neckline. The fabric pulled tight. The curve of what the top is doing what it always does, which is everything, excessively, and he is not looking at the sauce. He is not looking at the stain. He is looking at what the stain is on and his pupils have gone wide. The slit-to-wide shift.
I should be embarrassed. I should be mortified.
I am not embarrassed.
Something shifts in me. I like it. I like being looked at like that. I like that a male who caught a Vrennak with his bare hands is losing composure over a spilled sauce and I did that. Me. Without trying.
What would happen if I tried?
The thought is new. Reckless. Entirely out of character for a woman who apologized to a door panel two hours ago.
I dab the sauce. Slowly. Slower than necessary. At the neckline. Where his eyes are.
He picks up his spoon. Very deliberately. Returns to his plate. His jaw is set. I watch a muscle in it flex.
“You can borrow a shirt,” he says. Controlled. “There are clean ones in the cabin locker.”
“Your shirts will be enormous on me.”
“Yeah.” The almost-smile. Strained at the edges. “They will.”
I do not think about wearing his shirt. I do not think about fabric that has been against his skin being against mine. I do not think about the scent of him — clean, mineral, river stones — in the collar.
Lies. I am thinking about all of it.
“I’ll manage with the top,” I say. Because putting on his shirt right now would be a decision, I am not ready to make in front of his face. “The sauce adds character.”
An hour passes. Then another. The conversation starts with the food and moves the way conversations move when two people are sealed ina small warm space with nothing to do except talk and carefully not talk about the thing they’re not talking about.
He tells me about the route. Fourteen years. The belt loop. Sixteen stops, thirty-eight days round trip. The same run, over and over, and when I ask him if he gets bored, he actually thinks about it — considers it the way you consider a question when the person asking deserves a proper answer.
“No,” he says. “The route changes and the stations drift, but the cargo is different every run.” He turns the mug in his hands. The ridges catch the light. “There’s a stretch between Marker 11 and 12 where the belt opens up and you can see the Anvari Nebula from the starboard window. Every run. Same window. It’s different every time.”
“Different how?”
“Color. Density. The ionization shifts. There’s a registration system — OOPS calls it the Courier’s Atlas — where runners log the nebula’s state at each pass. I’ve been logging for fourteen years.”
“You’ve been watching the same nebula for fourteen years?”
“I’ve been watching the same nebula look different for fourteen years. There’s a difference.”
There is a difference. Between watching and seeing, a route and a life. Between a male who runs the same loop for a decade and a half and one who notices the way the light changes every time.
I tell him about the colony. Vestari-4. The gravity differential — everything weighed more; you developed muscles you didn’t know you had just from walking. The three brothers. The evacuation drills. The food — terrible, everything reconstituted, except on holidays when my mother performed miracles.
“And the cat,” he says. Recalling what I told him about why I spoke to the Vrennak like I did. “The one behind the heating unit.”
“Betty. The cat’s name was Betty. Betty was ancient and neurotic and hated everyone except my mother. My mother could talk Betty out of anything.” A pause. “That’s where I got it. The voice. The Vrennak voice. It’s Betty’s voice.”
He looks at me. Not amused. Something deeper. “You calmed a Vrennak with a cat trick.”
“I calmed a Vrennak with Betty’s cat trick. Betty was very specific.”
The laugh again. Low and real, and it hits me in the sternum and stays.
The conversation spirals. Station politics. HORATIO’s worst moments — the time he locked the cargo bay doors during a dock inspection because the inspector was “unforgivably rude about the ventilation.” The time my brother Kev got his arm stuck in a mining vent and the fire brigade had to be called, and my mother made them all tea while Kev screamed.
We are laughing. Both of us. Simultaneously. The laughter overlaps, and the overlapping feels like recognition. The feeling of finding someone whose brain works the same way yours does.
