I am not scared; I am alive. I am more alive than I have been in years — maybe ever — alive in the way you are alive when you have nearly died and the world has not ended and the male sitting across from you can taste you in the air and his ridges go dark when you talk and he askedmay Ibefore he touched you and he caught a Vrennak with his bare hands because you were behind him.
I look at him. He looks at me and he knows I’ve been reading. He can probably taste the exact moment the information landed.
The flush starts at my neck. He watches it travel.
His ridges darken.
“So,” I say. My voice is doing something new. Steadier than it should be. Lower. “I’ve been reading about Skiveth biology.”
“Have you?”
“Interesting stuff. The tongue thing — I had that mostly figured out already. The thermoregulation — fascinating. The ridges — you weren’t entirely honest about those, by the way.”
“I was — partially honest.”
“Partially.” I hold his gaze. “There was a section on courtship behaviors.”
His spoon stops. His whole body goes still. Not the dangerous still. Theoh no,still.
“Courtship behaviors,” he says. Flat.
“Something about a chase? A pursuit response? The male chases, the female — what was it — initiates or accepts.”
“You read the courtship section.”
“I skimmed it.” This is true. I skimmed it. I skimmed right past the bonding and claiming sections because they were long and clinical, and the chase section was right there and much more relevant to my immediate interests. “It sounded — fun.”
“Fun.” His voice has gone very controlled. “You think Skiveth courtship pursuit sounds fun.”
“I think,” I say, and the words come from the place in my chest that held a Vrennak’s gaze and didn’t blink, the place that has been growing all evening, fed by his laugh and his hands and the sauce on my top and the way he went dark-ridged and furious when I told him about the hiding, “that I have been hiding my entire life. And I am very, very good at it.” I lean forward. Just an inch. “And I think you said earlier you were trying to be civilized. I asked how that was going, and you saidbadly.”
He is looking at me with an expression I am going to remember for the rest of my life. The blue eyes and the wide pupils and the dark ridges and the jaw and the barely held restraint cracking at the edges.
“Lorri,” he says. Low. “Do you understand what you’re asking for?”
“I’m asking for a game.” I hold his gaze. “Hide and seek. Your ship. I hide. You find me. I’m told I’m very difficult to find.”
The galley hums. HORATIO is silent. The air between us — and I know now what it tastes like to him, I know what he’s reading from across this table, I know the chemical composition of what my bodyjust broadcast — the air between us is thick with me. With wanting. With a signal I could not hide if I tried, and I am not trying.
His tongue flicks. Quick. Tasting. His eyes close for a fraction of a second. When they open, the blue is dark.
“You should stay away from the cargo hold,” he says.
“Everywhere else is fair game?”
A beat. Two. Three. His ridges are so dark they look black.
“Everywhere else is fair game,” he says.
I smile. A real one. A full one. The one from the place underneath the anxiety and the self-doubt, from the place that calmed a Vrennak and didn’t flinch.
“How much of a head start do I get?”
“How much do you want?”
“Sixty seconds.”
“I’ll still find you.”
