Page 241 of Red Scale Daddy
Dux’s eyes shine, though he would probably blame exhaustion, decompression, or atmospheric particulates if pressed. He stands, a little stiffly, and steps close enough that my knees bracket the space between us where I sit on the console edge.
“Roma,” he says, and his voice is rough enough to scrape sparks from me, “I don’t want to be something you survived.”
“You are not.”
“I don’t want this to be a story we tell later with all the soft parts edited out because they scare you.”
“I know.”
“I want mornings,” he says, and the words come faster now, like he has been holding them back with both hands and finally lets the door break. “Ugly, boring, real mornings. I want to know how you take your coffee when nobody’s shooting at us. I want to argue with you about repairs and sit beside you when you pretend you don’t need sleep. I want your father to insult me at family dinners while secretly liking me more than he admits.”
Dad’s voice cuts through the comm immediately. “I heard that.”
Dux closes his eyes. “Of course you did.”
“I neither confirm nor deny future approval, but continue. This is going well.”
“Mute,” I say, heat climbing my neck.
“I was muted. Emotionally.”
“Dad.”
The channel clicks off again, and Dux laughs under his breath. The sound breaks something open in me, not painfully, not like damage, but like pressure finally releasing from a sealed room.
He steps closer. “I want a future, Roma. Not just the next escape, not just surviving long enough to kiss you in corridors between disasters. I want the inconvenient, permanent, terrifying whole of it. With you. Specifically you. Gods help me, probably only you.”
The cockpit tilts slightly beneath my heart.
I reach up and touch his face with my uninjured hand. His stubble rasps against my palm, warm and real. He leans into it immediately, as if his body has been waiting for permission longer than either of us has admitted.
“You should know better,” I whisper.
“I do. That’s the problem.”
“I am not easy.”
“Good. Easy makes me suspicious.”
“I will control things when I am frightened.”
“I will call you on it.”
“I will hate that.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“I will need time to learn how not to turn every vulnerability into an exit strategy.”
His hand settles at my waist, not claiming, not trapping, simply there. “Then we learn. I’m not asking for perfect. I’m asking for present.”
Present.
The word enters me like light through damaged glass.
I have been many things. Useful. Dangerous. Efficient. Loyal under certain conditions. A blade in someone else’s grip. A woman who learned to leave before leaving could be done to her.I have been good at endings because endings have rules. You assess damage. You secure assets. You move on.
Beginning is the thing I have never trusted.
