Page 78 of Fought and Found

“Go, Florence.” She picks up the coffee mug. Holds it with both hands. Sits behind the desk. The posture of a woman rebuilding her architecture one load-bearing wall at a time. “And tell your Xarthian that if he doesn’t keep you alive I will find him and the conversation will not require an allied services contract.”

“That’s almost a blessing.”

“That is a threat. Get out of my office.”

I get out of her office.

The door closes behind me and he is there.

Exactly where I left him. Tail wound around his own ankle. Purring. The sound fills the corridor — low, steady, the bonding frequency that I feel in my teeth and my sternum and the bite mark at my collar. Sprout hovering at his shoulder like a small amber moon. Gold eyes fixed on the door, fixed on me the moment it opens, the pupils dilating.

“She patted me.” My voice is wrecked. Shaking. Radiant. “Two pats, Xor. On the back. She put one arm around me, and she patted me twice.”

“I know.”

Xarthian hearing. He heard the shapes of it through the wall — the sharp voices, the silences, the two soft impacts of a hand on a back.

“Morrison doesn’t touch people. In twelve years she has never —“ I press my hand over my mouth. The tears won’t stop, and I don’t want them to stop. “Two pats. That’s basically an ‘I love you.’”

“I believe you.”

He wraps me. Tail first — the same reflex as the first day, three and a half feet of prehensile muscle around my waist. Then arms. Both. I disappear inside him. My face against his chest, my hands gripping the fabric at his ribs, the purr vibrating through my skull and the sternum that was Morrison’s first and is both of theirs now.

I cry. Not sadness. Overflow. The cost of leaving, and the certainty that it’s right, and the two pats that said everything, and the male holding me in a corridor who doesn’t fully understand human crying but understands I need holding. His chin on my head. The size of him around the smallness of me.

“Morrison’s heart rate reached 94 BPM during the embrace,” Sprout says from his shoulder. Quiet. “Highest reading in twelve years of monitoring. I am filing it under ‘significant.’” A pause. “She cried for four seconds after the door closed. I am not telling you this. I have not said it. Move along.”

I laugh against his chest. A wet, broken, brilliant sound.

“Where you go, I go,” Sprout says. The orb glows steady amber. “Someone has to keep you alive. And someone has to keep logging.”

I pull back. Wipe my eyes. Look up at him — seven feet of crimson predator who stood in a corridor purring for twenty-five minutes, who heard everything, who came anyway. Who chose me.

“Right.” I straighten his collar. “The container’s still on the Petal. We’ve got a delivery to make.”

“The Petal is sealed, for the record,” Sprout says from his shoulder. “The Xarthian re-keyed both airlocks to SRS standard, and I remain resident in the ship’s systems — the orb is merely where I keep my opinions. Anything that touches those docking clamps will be loudly, publicly logged.”

“Together?”

“Together.”

I take his hand. My fingers lace through his — small, callused, fitting between his broad knuckles like they were always going to end up there. We walk through Junction One. His tail around my waist. The purr filling the corridor. People stare.

Let them.

21

Interrupted

Flossie

Wetaketheservicecorridor toward the docking ring — Sprout's route, quieter, half-lit between pressure doors, the market noise fading to a hum in the deck plating.

I am still glowing. Two pats. An allied services contract. A floor plan with Unit 7 on it. And the male beside me has not stopped purring since the office door opened, and the purr is doing what it always does now — settling into the bite mark, into my sternum, lower.

He feels the shift. Of course he feels it. Chemoreceptors.

"Your scent has changed." Conversational. Smug. His tail tightens at my waist.