Page 9 of Jarran

He was quiet every day. But Left was observant, and maybe today’s quiet had a different quality to it. Jarran didn’t have the words to explain what had happened in the bay. He didn’t have the words for any of it. A female had touched his head and his body had caught fire and she’d left without taking the fruit he grew for her, and now the corridor felt too bright and too long.

“Tired,” he said.

Left nodded and didn’t push. Baylans understood the value of leaving things alone.

In his quarters, he ate his meal standing up. Protein cubes, grain mash, sliced vegetables. He chewed without tasting. He showered, changed, and lay on his bed in the dark. His tail curled around his ankle. The ceiling was invisible in the dark above him, but he stared at it anyway.

He thought about her hands. They were small compared to his. Precise. She held the tablet and the scanner with a steady competence. When she talked, she gestured with her left hand, making different movements to punctuate her words. When she’d touched his temple, her fingertips had been cool and firm and careful.

Careful. That was the word for her. She was careful with him. She moved slowly around him, spoke clearly, gave him time to find his words. She was the only person on this ship who treated him like his responses mattered. The guards were decent. The researchers were…mostly decent. But Evie was careful, and the difference between decent and careful was enormous.

He wanted her to come back tomorrow, and for the first time, he was worried she wouldn’t. He wanted her to take the fruit. He wanted her to smile at him and say “no wrong answers” and make that small, bright sound she made when the grain clusters were sweet.

He wanted her to touch his temple again, even though the last time had short-circuited something inside him that he still couldn’t name. The wanting confused him. He didn’t want the researchers to touch him. He didn’t want the guards to touch him. He wanted Evie to touch him, and he wanted it with a certainty that felt older and deeper than his broken memory. As if his body yearned for something his mind had lost the context for.

He pressed his palms flat against the mattress and stared at the dark ceiling.

A memory surfaced. Sudden, unprompted, rising from the dark.

A female hand gently brushed hair from his forehead. He was lying down. He was small. A child. The hand moved slowly, pushing dark hair away from his eyes. There was warmth around him. Safety. Love. A female voice that was familiar and forgotten murmured something he couldn’t hear clearly, and the hand smoothed his hair again and again.

Then it was gone.

He lay in the dark with his fists pressed against his sternum and his eyes wet. The ache was enormous. It filled his chest and his throat and pressed behind his eyes. He knew that hand. He knew it the way he’d known the laughing boy on Evie’s screen. Deep, wordless, locked behind walls he couldn’t climb.

He didn’t know whose hand it was. A mother’s, maybe. Probably. He didn’t know if he’d had one. Everyone had one, at some point. He strained his thoughts to try and remember her, but he could only pull up gentle touch on his forehead, and the safety of being small and cared for.

Evie’s hands were careful. That mother’s hand had been gentle. He didn’t know if the two things were connected, but they lived in the same place in his chest, side by side. It had been an impossibly long time since he’d been touched gently. Surely that was why he’d had such a strong reaction to Evie.

He closed his eyes. Tomorrow she would come back. She said she would—twice. She would bring her scanner and her tablet and her steady voice. She might smile. She might not. Either way, she would be there, and that was enough.

It had to be enough.

FIVE

The data didn’t lie.

Evie sat cross-legged on her bed with the tablet propped against her knees, scrolling through Jarran’s neural readings from that afternoon’s session. She’d been staring at the same graphs for twenty minutes. She didn’t need twenty minutes. She’d known what the spike meant the second it appeared on her screen, sitting in the dirt beside him with her fingers on his temple and his whole body going rigid.

Limbic system activation. Autonomic nervous system surge. Elevated heart rate, increased blood flow to the extremities, pupil dilation, involuntary motor response. Textbook arousal. Every marker, clear as day, firing in perfect sequence the moment her skin touched his.

She’d pretended she didn’t recognize it. She’d said “cold hands” and pulled away and moved on, because that was the professional thing to do. The correct thing. The thing a doctor should do when her brain-damaged patient has a physiological response to physical contact.

Except she hadn’t been professional at all. She’d been a coward. She’d seen the readings and felt her own face flush and known, in that horrible, clear moment, that the flush wasn’t embarrassment. It was response. Her body had answered his before her brain had a chance to intervene.

And then he’d touched her wrist.

Evie put the tablet down and pressed her palms over her eyes. She could still feel it. His fingertips against the back of her wrist, light and careful, barely there. He’d reached for her because she was flustered and he wanted to help. That was all. He didn’t have the context for anything else. His shattered mind saw a person in distress and tried to fix it with a gentle touch, and her stupid pulse had kicked up, and her foolish breath had caught. She’d found herself staring into his dark green eyes, and all appropriate thoughts switched to inappropriate ones.

Fuck.

She was his doctor. He was her patient. He couldn’t consent to a conversation about the weather, let alone whatever her limbic system was suggesting. The power imbalance alone was enough to make her stomach turn. He depended on her. He trusted her. He saved fruit for her and said her name carefully, pulling each syllable off a limited shelf, and she was sitting here with her heart going sideways because he’d put his fingers on her wrist.

She closed the neural data file. She didn’t need to look at it again. She needed to walk into that bay tomorrow, do her job, and keep her hands steady and her face neutral and her stupid, inconvenient feelings locked in a box where they couldn’t compromise her patient’s care.

She slept badly. Chaotic dreams—yes, some of them steamy and involving Jarran—kept waking her up. It was too hot. Then, it was too cold. Finally she got annoyed and gave up on sleep altogether. She watched vids by some guy who grew space fungi on some remote space station until it was technically time to get up.

The bay doors opened the next morning and the warm, humid air hit her face. She walked down the central aisle with her shoulders tight and her professional mask firmly in place, prepared for awkwardness, for tension, for some residual strangeness hanging in the air between them.