She lets go of my hand. The absence of her warmth is immediate and total and the hum-sense saysthere, still there, right there,and I hold onto thetherelike a heading on the nav screen.
She walks toward the domestic wing. My shirt on her shoulders. The ring star in her hair.
I watch her go. She looks back. The full smile. Over her shoulder.
I am going to survive nine days.
Probably.
The ship is on the dock. The route is waiting. The copilot’s seat is going to smell like her.
“Captain.” HORATIO. From my datapad speaker. Very quiet. “Shall I queue the music for the return trip?”
“Yeah, HORATIO. Queue the music.”
“Captain. For what it is worth, the copilot’s seat suits her.”
“Yeah.” I watch her walk. My shirt. Her shoulders. The light. “It does.”
I turn toward the ship. Nine days. One run. Then home.
Home is wherever she is.
13
Claimed
Lorri
Ihavebeenstandingon the dock in a dress for an hour and fourteen minutes.
A DRESS. On a dock. On Junction One. Where people wear cargo boots and coveralls and the fashion consensus is functional and stain-resistant, and I am standing here in a deep green dress from the Finder’s Market because the color reminds me of someone and the neckline is doing something the vendor described as “evening appropriate” and that I would describe as “structurally ambitious” and the underwear underneath it is a DECISION. Black. Lace. More credits than I have ever spent on something I intend to havedestroyed.
I have read the manual. Nine days. Every page. Every footnote. The pair-bonding section. The venom. The hum-sense. Page forty-seven. I memorized it.
Nine days of sitting withpermanentanddoes not breakfor the rest of his life.Nine days of the old voice — the colony voice, the small voice, the one that saysyou are not the kind of person things like this happen to— running its usual loop. What if he changed his mind about the route? What if the instinct recalibrated? What if he docks and his pupils don’t slit, and the tongue doesn’t flick, and the whole thing was just a lockdown and a Vrennak and the kind of proximity that tricks the body into thinking it’s found something permanent when really it just found something nearby?
The voice ran for about four days. Loud. Persuasive. Deeply committed to the idea that I am not the kind of woman a male waits forty-one years for.
On day five I told it to shut up. Not politely. I told it to shut up the way I told the Vrennak to sit down — in the voice that comes from somewhere underneath the apologizing, from the part of me that held a predator’s gaze and did not flinch. The voice shut up. It has not come back. It is sulking somewhere in the back of my brain, making a list of things to worry about later, and I am going to let it make that list because the list is how it copes, and I am done fighting the parts of me that cope.
I am ready.
The dock officer’s comm pings. “Bay Fourteen. Cleared for berthing.”
My heart lunges.
I walk. Fast. The dress moves against my thighs. I go to the OOPS cargo office where he files his routing paperwork. He always comes here first.
I wait by the door.
His footsteps. The weight I know. The stride I know.
He rounds the corner.
He sees me.
He stops.
