Page 99 of Red Scale Daddy
She closes the distance between us so fast I almost laugh. Almost. The cockpit lights paint green fire in her eyes. She has to look up to meet my face, but she does it with such intensity that height feels irrelevant.
“You are not here to fix me,” Roma says, each word precise and heated. “You are not here to interpret me. You are not here to drag me into some crude emotional revelation because you mistake discomfort for progress.”
I lean down slightly. “Then why am I here?”
“Because you are useful.”
“That all?”
“Yes.”
Her answer comes too fast.
I feel my smile fade. “Try again.”
She inhales through her nose, and the breath catches at the end. Not much. Enough. Her hands are at her sides, fingers flexing once against the gloves as though she wants a tool, a weapon, or a control surface between us.
“You are useful,” she repeats, quieter but harder.
“That all?” I ask again.
Roma’s eyes search mine, angry and unsettled, and for one strange second I think she might answer honestly. The air between us holds heat despite the cold filtration. I can smell the metal dust on her suit, the faint antiseptic from the medkit, the warm human scent of her beneath fear and focus. My side aches. Her ship groans. Outside, monsters crawl over the hull, and stillthe most dangerous thing in the room is the way she refuses to step back.
“You are disruptive,” she says.
“That’s closer.”
“You are insubordinate.”
“True.”
“You are arrogant, reckless, intrusive, and pathologically incapable of respecting boundaries.”
“I respect some.”
“No, you study them for weaknesses.”
“Sometimes that’s how you find the door.”
“I did not invite you through mine.”
The words land close, too close to something neither of us has named.
I should make a joke.
I do not.
Instead, I look down at her, at the bruise I did not prevent, the exhaustion she refuses to claim, the mouth that can cut a man open with grammar, and the eyes that nearly broke when her father’s signal touched the ship. I wanted to get a reaction out of her. I did. Now that it is here, bright and breathing and too near, the idea of pushing harder feels suddenly wrong.
I have broken enough things.
I do not want to break her.
That realization moves through me slowly, with the unpleasant weight of truth arriving late to a fight it should have prevented.
Roma’s voice drops. “What?”
I blink. “What?”
