Page 24 of Fought and Found

The chair is not going to work tonight.

“I suggest you both rest,” Sprout says. “Your cortisol levels are inadvisable, and the Petal’s insurance does not cover pilot error due to exhaustion. I will wake you if any signature re-enters range.”

“You’ll wake us,” I repeat.

“Flossie. I have kept you alive for twelve years. I can manage a scanner sweep. Go to sleep before I adjust the ambient temperature to make the cockpit uninhabitable.”

Fair point. Also, credible threat.

“The cargo bunk,” I say, and I’m already standing, already moving toward the corridor before the thinking part of my brain can lodge a formal objection. The chair is eighteen hours of ache stored in my lower back and a crick in my neck I’ll feel for days, and I am forty-two years old, and there is a mattress twelve feet away, and I am not sleeping folded into a cockpit seat like luggage when I have a perfectly good bunk.

My bunk. The only one the Petal has — I gave it to him the first night and took the chair, and neither of us has said a word about it since.

Then I stop.

The cargo bunk is narrow. Built for one. Xor is seven feet of crimson muscle with horns and a tail that is three and a half feet long and has opinions about where it wants to be.

“I will take the floor,” he says.

I look at his frame. I look at the floor space—two feet of corridor with cables and cargo straps.

“Don’t be stupid, lovey. There’s room.”

There is no room. I know this as I’m saying it, and the knowing doesn’t stop me, because the alternative is watching him fold himself onto my ship’s floor like he doesn’t deserve a mattress, and something in my chest—something with teeth—will not allow it.

“The berth is designed for a single human occupant.”

“The berth is designed for me, and I’m small.” I’m walking past him as I say it, not looking back, because if I look back I’ll see him calculating and I’ll lose my nerve. “Unless you’d rather sleep on cable conduits.”

The berth is exactly as small as I remember. Narrow platform, thin mattress, the blue blanket from the Tessaro market. I kick off my boots. Unholster Betsy, set her on the shelf within reach. “Evening, Bets.”

Tessaro. The manifest surfaces the way it does at odd hours: advance treatment, degenerative neural conditions, three species. Somewhere there are wards full of people losing their hands’ memory of buttons and their mouths’ memory of names, and the thing that might stop it is in my hold, wrapped in shock-foam, riding through the dark with the fairy lights on. I think about the kind of person who would kill a courier over a cure. Then I stop thinking about it, becausetonight is already carrying enough, and thinking it too loudly feels like inviting it in.

I unbutton the fox cardigan. Fold it. Set it beside the pillow. The tactical vest goes next—velcro strips loud in the quiet bunk—and beneath it I’m in a shirt that is thinner than I’d like, worn soft from a hundred washes, and I am aware of this in a way I have not been aware of my clothing in a decade.

He is standing in the doorway. His silhouette fills it—shoulders, horns, the breadth of him blocking the corridor light—and he is watching me undress with an expression that is trying very hard to be clinical and is failing at every level.

“You’re staring, lovey.”

“I am assessing the available space.” His voice is flat. Professional. His pupils are so wide the gold is a thin ring. “The dimensions are insufficient.”

“The dimensions are fine. In you get.”

He doesn’t move. His gaze has dropped to my collarbone, where the shirt falls open at the neckline, and his nostrils flare once—a sharp involuntary expansion—and his jaw locks, and I can see the war playing out across his face. The asshole operating system fighting the man who purrs. The training that saysdo notagainst the body that is already leaning forward, already pulled toward the narrow bunk and the woman in the thin shirt who is patting the mattress like this is normal.

“This is inadvisable,” he says. But he’s already ducking inside.

“Most things worth doing are. Boots off. I’m not sharing with boots.”

He removes his boots. The domesticity of it lands somewhere I’m not prepared for—this man, this weapon, sitting on my bunkunlacing boots because I told him to. His bare feet are crimson, the fuzz trailing fine down his ankles, and the urge to touch is immediate and specific and I contain it because there is a sequence to this, and I am not going to rush it.

He lies down. The bunk objects. Audibly. The frame groans, the mattress compresses, and then he’s on his back, and I’m on my side and the eight inches between us have become four, and I can feel his heat along the entire length of my body—a wall of warmth, 103 degrees of Xarthian thermal output radiating through the air like a banked fire.

I press back against the wall. He angles toward the edge. We are two adults performing the fiction of adequate space, and we are both losing.

“Roll toward the wall,” I say. “You run hot. I run cold. Thermodynamics.”

He rolls. The bunk protests. And then his back is to me—the broad expanse of his shoulders, the dark fuzz trailing down his spine between the geometric lines, the sheer heat of him—and I fit myself against him before the thinking part of my brain can object.