Chapter 13: The Meetings
The door read her palm and let her in.
Deck four, cabin twenty-two, and he had already turned the lights down to amber before she arrived. The desk was folded into the bulkhead to make room. A locker, a bunk, a vent humming, and the smell of hot metal and something like lanolin.
Hesh stood at the foot of the bunk with his boots off.
Tellarite, stout, a head shorter than her and twice as broad, grey bristles coming up through the open collar of his coverall. One knuckle on his right hand had split at some point and healed crooked, a pale seam across the joint.
"You're the captain," he said.
"Hesh." She let the door close and stayed on the mat. "You got the same name on your pad that I got on mine."
"I did." His snout worked at the air, pulling her in and sorting her. "Did you know it would be me?"
"No."
"That's a relief."
She almost smiled. "Is it?"
"You'd have picked a human," he said. "Or a taller Tellarite."
"I didn't pick. The computer sorted it, and I took the sort."
"Because it was fair."
"Because it was fair," she said. "You can tell me to go, and I'll go, and there's no report saying why. That's the whole protocol. If you think this is an order, I'm out that door."
He looked at her for a while. His eyes were small and dark under a thick ridge of brow, and he did not blink the way a human would.
"Nobody in that mess hall believed you," he said. "When you said you wouldn't order anyone. I watched the room. Nine of them signed up because they thought you wanted it."
"Fourteen signed up."
"Nine of them for the wrong reason," he said. "Not me."
"Then why?"
He scratched the back of his neck with the crooked knuckle. "That's the question, isn't it."
She unrolled her sleeves, then rolled them back down again, because she did not know what to do with her hands. The silence sat there. He didn't fill it, which surprised her, because every Tellarite she'd ever served with treated silence like an insult.
"What did touch mean where you grew up?" she asked.
His snout twitched. "Straight to it."
"You can answer or not."
"On the rim yards, we touched," he said slowly. "In the berths, in the dark, when the shift was over. Not in daylight. Daylight was for arguing, and the arguing was the point. You argue until you understand a person. Then you don't need to touch them."
"That sounds lonely."
"It's efficient." He shifted his weight. "What about you?"
She thought about the answer before she gave it. "On a freighter, you're in each other's way all day. You touch elbows, you squeeze past, you pull a boot off someone's ankle. But nobody puts a hand on you just because they want to. Not in years. Not since I was young enough that it didn't count."
"Since when?"
"Since I stopped being someone's daughter and started being someone's captain."
The vent hummed. He took one step off the bunk's edge, then stopped, as if the floor between them had a rule printed on it.
"May I put my hands on you?" he asked.
"Yes."
He came the rest of the way and put one broad palm flat on her sternum, over the tunic, and left it there. Warm, heavy, the blunted tips of his nails barely touching the fabric. She breathed, and felt the heel of his hand move with her ribs.
"That's all," he said. "That's all I'm doing."
"Keep doing it."
He worked the tunic up out of her waistband with both hands. His fingers were thick and there were only three that mattered, and they were careful. She pulled the tunic off over her head herself and dropped it. Grey at her temples, a burn scar like a comma on her forearm, small breasts, the undershirt still on until he tugged it up and she raised her arms and let him take it.
"You're cold," he said.
"I'm fine."
"You're cold, and the panels are behind you." He herded her two steps toward the bunk and the heat. Then he put his mouth on her shoulder, and Tellarite mouths were wider and wetter than human ones, and she made a sound she hadn't planned to make.
His coverall came off. Under it he was all muscle under padding, grey-brown hide, bristles everywhere except the pale creases where he bent. She put her hands on his chest and felt the coarse coat of it, the heat coming off him like a stove.
His cock stood out of the fold beneath his belly, slick and blunt and thicker than she expected, with a ridged band behind the head. She took it in her fist and he grunted.
"Not yet," he said. "Down."
He pushed her onto the bunk on her back and knelt between her knees with his snout against her thigh. Then lower. Tellarite tongues were broad and rough as a cat's, and he used the flat of it up the whole length of her cunt, slow, one long stroke, then again from the bottom. She got a fistful of the blanket and held on.
"Fuck," she said. "Don't stop that."
He didn't. He worked his snout against her clit while his tongue lapped at her opening, and the bristles on his jaw scraped the inside of her thighs raw. She came with her heels braced on his shoulders and her hand flat on the top of his head, holding him to it, and he stayed until she pushed him off because it was too much.
He wiped his snout on the sheet. "Well."
"Get up here."
He climbed over her and she pulled him down by the ears. Kissing a Tellarite was mostly wet and mostly teeth, and she liked it more than she'd admit in a report. His cock dragged along the inside of her thigh. She reached down and guided it, and he pushed in.
He was thicker than she was used to and the ridge behind the head caught on every stroke. She hooked a leg over his hip to take him deeper, and he found a rhythm that was slow and grinding, and the whole bunk frame ticked against the bulkhead.
"You're doing that on purpose," she said, breathless.
"What?"
"That noise. With your chest."
"It's involuntary."
"Bullshit."
He laughed, a low wet sound, and shifted his grip and drove harder. The amber panels shook. She had one hand on his shoulder, digging into the bristle, and the other flat against the bulkhead to stop her head hitting it, and she came again, clenching around the thick of him, and swore at him in two languages.
"End of the bunk," she said. "Turn me."
He pulled out and turned her onto her hands and knees and pushed back in from behind without asking, because she'd already told him. His belly slapped against her ass. She was wet enough that it was loud, and she didn't care. He got a hand around to her clit with two rough fingertips and worked it while he fucked her, and his breathing went ragged behind her ear.
"I'm close," he said.
"Where do you want to put it?"
"Inside."
"Then put it inside." She pushed back onto him. "I'm covered. Come in me, Hesh."
He did, with a long grinding sound through his teeth, hips jerking, filling her in pulses that she felt all the way up her spine. Then he held there until he was done and eased out, and she felt the wet of it run down the inside of her thigh.
He didn't lie down. He went to the locker, came back with a warm wet cloth from the shower unit, and cleaned her up himself, careful, working around her cunt with small strokes because of the nails. Then he folded the cloth and set it on the corner of the bunk like a tool he intended to put away properly.
She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. Somewhere in the ship's spine a pump turned over.
"You said on the rim yards they touched in the dark," she said. "Did you?"
"Twice. Both times in the dark, both times I argued with him all shift first." He sat down on the edge of the bunk, sideways to her. "I don't know what it means to do it with the lights on."
"Neither do I."
"Then we're both bad at it."
"Speak for yourself," she said. "I was excellent."
His snout moved, which was as close as a Tellarite got to a grin. Then the grin went, and he looked at the deck instead of her.
"There's a thing I want to say, and you'll file it in a report."
"You don't have to say anything."
"I want to say it." He turned the crooked knuckle over and looked at it. "I signed up to be contrary. That's the truth. The commander stood up there and said the whole species used to be less afraid, and I thought, fine, I'll be the one Tellarite who proves her wrong. That was four hours ago, and I've been sitting in this room since, and I don't know what I am now."
She sat up and put her hand flat on his back, between the shoulder blades, where the bristles were thinnest.
"That's the first honest thing I've heard since we docked," she said.
"From me, or from anyone?"
"Anyone."
He was quiet. The pump turned over again. Then he reached back and put his hand over hers, holding it where it was, not moving it anywhere.
"Nineteen hundred tomorrow," he said. "Same cabin. I'll get the food in."
Mendes looked at the door, and at her tunic on the deck, and at the warm cloth folded on the corner of the bunk like a finished job. Then she took her hand back and stood, and pulled the tunic over her head.
"Eighteen hundred," she said. "I want to eat first. And I'm not your captain in this room, Hesh. Write that down if you want."
She pulled the tunic down over her head and sat on the edge of the bunk to pull her boots on, and Hesh stayed where he was, sideways on the mattress, watching her work the laces.
"Eighteen hundred," he said, like he was filing it.
"Eighteen hundred." She stood and looked at him once, the crooked knuckle and the bristled chest and the bunk frame that would need a bolt checked. Then she let herself out.
The corridor ran the spine of deck four, night strips low along the deck plate, the hum of the scrubbers in the walls. Two doors down, another cabin had its panel turned down to the same amber, and its palm lock was reading somebody else.
Senior Chief Dana Whitlock got there first. She was already on the bunk when the door opened, boots off and lined up under it, her braid grey down the middle and her jacket still on because the cabin was cold enough to see your own breath if you tried.
The Andorian came in with two ration packs in one hand and a folded blanket under his arm, and stopped in the doorway when he saw her.
"You're early," he said.
"So are you."
"Galley was open." He held up the packs. "Replicator's not much on this ship. I got the stew and the one that's orange."
"Orange is the stew."
"Then it's a good night." He put the packs on the desk and looked around the cabin, at the cold, at her jacket. "I set the temperature before. I should have asked."
"It's fine."
"You're blue at the fingers."
"I'm from Iowa. This is a spring day."
He almost laughed. Thren was twenty-two and looked younger than that, hair cropped to the scalp, antennae thin and pale above his brow, twitching at the door noise behind him. He had a coverall with the engineering patch and a mended seam at the knee.
He sat on the far end of the bunk, half a meter of mattress between them, and ate his stew out of the packet with a spork. She ate hers. For a while that was the whole conversation.
Whitlock finished first. She folded the packet flat and set it on the deck.
"What did touch mean on your world?" she said.
His antennae angled toward her.
"That's the question she asked in the mess hall."
"This one's from me."
He chewed. "Andor's cold," he said finally. "Not the cities. The cities are warm. The old places, the ranges, the outer holds. You slept four to a bed when you could, mostly for heat. Nobody wrote it down as anything. It was just what you did."
"And now?"
"Now there's heat in the walls and everyone has a door." He set his packet down. "They took the touching out with everything else. I've never slept four to a bed in my life. My mother said her mother did."
Whitlock looked at the strip of light under the door.
"My grandmother sang," she said. "That's all we kept. Everything else went in the war, and nobody in my family talked about it after. She sang four verses of a pre-bonding song, and the four verses are about asking."
"Asking what?"
"Asking first." She pulled her braid over her shoulder. "Verse one, you ask with your eyes. Verse two, you ask with your voice. Verse three, you ask with your hands. Verse four, you wait for the answer. That's where it stops. She died before she got past it, or she stopped on purpose, I don't know which."
"Did she sing the whole thing, or just the four?"
"That's what I've been asking myself for thirty years."
He was quiet. Then he turned on the bunk to face her, cross-legged, hands on his knees like a man at a hearing.
"May I?"
"May you what?"
"Ask."
She looked at him, at the pale antennae standing off that blue scalp, and did the arithmetic she'd been doing since the mess hall. She was forty-seven and he was somebody's grandson.
"You can ask," she said.
He reached out and put two fingers on the back of her hand where it lay on the blanket. Not holding it. Just there. His skin was warmer than a human's and dry, and she watched his fingertips and felt something in her chest go loose that had been clenched since before he was born.
"I want to take your jacket off," he said. "Is that the voice part or the hands part?"
"Hands."
"Then this is the voice part." He pulled the blanket up over the end of the bunk and held it open. "Come here."
She came. He got the jacket off her, and the shirt, and she got cold fast, and he rolled her under the blanket and lay alongside her with his arm across her ribs. Kissing him was strange. Andorians ran hot and their mouths were broad, and under the blanket his hand came up her belly to her breast and stayed there, palm flat, not moving, the way you'd hold something you didn't want to spill.
"Your turn," he said.
She got his coverall open. Andorian cocks were blue at the shaft and ridged along the underside, and he made a low sound when she took him in her fist and worked the foreskin back.
"Do you want my mouth?" she said.
"Gods, yes."
"Do you say gods?"
"Sometimes." He was already breathing hard. "Go, go, please."
She went down on him. He tasted clean and salt-bitter, and he was thick enough that she had to go slow, one hand around the base and her tongue flat to the ridge, and by the fourth stroke his hips were lifting off the mattress and his antennae had gone stiff and angled right at her.
She came up off him and wiped her mouth with her thumb.
"Those," she said. "The antennae. Do people touch them?"
"Nobody touches them."
"On Andor, or nobody period?"
"Anywhere. Not in public. Not with clothes on. It's what you do with someone you mean to keep." His chest was heaving. "I've never let anyone."
"Then don't let me."
He caught her wrist before she could move. He held it a second, thinking, and then he brought her hand up himself and laid her fingertips against the left one.
It was warm as a fingertip held over a candle. Soft, the fine hairs on it standing up, and it flexed against her touch like a muscle. Thren made a noise she felt in her own spine, and his whole body twitched, and his hand over hers was squeezing hard enough to hurt.
"That's a lot," he said.
"Do you want me to stop?"
"No."
She stroked it the way she'd stroke a cock, base to tip, and he went to pieces under her. He got his hand between her legs and found her soaked, and went at her with three fingers while she worked his antennae, and neither of them was careful, and the bunk slid a handspan along the wall.
"Inside," he said. "Can I?"
"How?"
"Like this." He rolled her onto her side with her back against his chest. She lifted her top leg and he pushed in behind her, slow, and the ridge dragged on the way in and she said his name into the pillow.
He fucked her from there with one arm under her head and the other hand on her breast, deep, grinding, not fast. His mouth was at the back of her neck. She got a hand down to her clit and rubbed it and came with her heel braced on his shin, hard, her whole body curling.
"Where do you want it?" she said.
"On you. Under the blanket's too hot."
"Then pull out."
He pulled out and finished across her ass and her lower back, hot and pale and thinner than a human's, four spurts of it before his hips stopped jerking. He sagged against her shoulder and lay there breathing.
Then he got up and came back from the shower unit with a warm cloth, and wiped her down himself, careful, and spread the blanket over her again before he got under it.
"You're still cold," he said.
"I'm still from Iowa."
His antennae curled slowly back toward her and lay against her hair. She thought about the heat in the old holds, four to a bed, and about her grandmother stopping at the fourth verse, and how the four verses were only about asking and never about what came after.
"There's a fifth," she said.
"What?"
"She didn't stop at four. She just wouldn't sing the rest to a child." Whitlock turned her face into the pillow and sang it low, half a tune, half a mumble, one line at a time, and it was about staying afterward and about the fire and about the person who asked first owing the answer. When she finished, the scrubbers had cycled twice.
Thren didn't say anything for a long time.
"Sing it again," he said. "Slower."
She sang it again, slower, and he lay with his ear against her shoulder and his breathing going long. By the fourth line his hand had gone slack on her ribs. By the last, the one about the person who asked first owing the answer, he was asleep. Whitlock lay awake a while longer, listening to the scrubbers cycle, then slept too.
He was gone before the night strips came up, but the blanket was tucked under her chin and her boots had been straightened against the bulkhead, laces coiled and stowed. She lay there working that out, and did not work it out.
Four doors down and one deck up, the same amber panels were lit in cabin nine. The one who got there first had taken the mattress apart from the frame and stacked the parts in the corner, because there was more floor that way and she preferred the floor.
T'Mir had set the temperature at two hundred and ninety-six Kelvin and had told the computer so twice, using the voice she used for instruments. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the deck in a grey undersuit with her hair down out of its clasp, and she did not stand when the door opened.
Dov Hale came in with two ration packs against his chest and stopped on the mat.
"Nobody's here," he said.
"You are."
"I mean, you're the Vulcan from the mess hall. The one who answered the question."
"I am." She looked at the packs. "You brought food to a Vulcan."
"They said you don't eat."
"I eat. I don't eat that." She tilted her head at his hands. "You're bleeding."
He looked down. Both knuckles on his left hand were skinned raw, dark red and wet at the joint. Pod work, probably; the repair pod's hatches bit. "It's nothing."
"Put the food down and come here." He did. She took his hand in both of hers and turned it under the lamp. Her fingers were cool and dry and very strong through the wrist. She pressed the pad of her thumb against the raw edge and he sucked air through his teeth.
"That's a torn dermis," she said. "You'll lose the use of it tomorrow if you sleep on it."
"I've slept on worse."
"Have you." She let go. "Sit."
There was one chair. He sat in it, and she opened a case on the desk and worked a sealant over the knuckles with a swab, unhurried, no wasted motion. The room smelled of tea and the sealant's sharp tang. Up close her eyes were grey-brown, and the pulse in her throat moved at a rate he counted and didn't like.
"Is that how Vulcan heart rates run?" he said.
"No."
"Then what."
"I am deciding something." She wiped the swab, capped it, put the case away. "Why did you sign up?"
The question caught him with his mouth open. He got the answer ready the way he'd been getting it ready all day, the funny one, the one for the pod crew. Then he looked at her hands and the floor she'd cleared on purpose, and it went out of him.
"Mate of mine took one of the pads and put my name on it," he said. "Wrote Dov, then drew a shape. It was a dare. I wasn't going to come, and then I got the notification, and the notification had your name on it, and I thought, well. Now I have to."
"Why?"
"So he'd know I didn't." He laughed at himself, once. "That's it. That's the reason. You can put that in whatever you people put things in."
"I am not a recorder." T'Mir stood, and the undersuit pulled across her shoulders. "Do you want to be here?"
"I don't know."
"That is the correct answer." She crossed to the bunk frame, which was in pieces in the corner, and came back with the mattress pad and laid it flat on the deck, then sat down on the edge of it. "The protocol permits you to leave with no reason given, and no entry that you ever arrived. I will enter nothing. Say the word and the door opens."
Hale looked at the door. He looked at her, sitting on the floor of a cold room with her hair down and her hands still.
"Why'd you sign up?" he said.
"Because I wanted to know what it is like when no one is measuring." She said it without any particular emotion, which somehow made it worse. "That is not a reason. It is a hypothesis. I am aware."
"So we're both lying."
"We are both early," she said. "Take your boots off."
He got them off. He got his coverall off too, and then stood there in his shorts feeling the cold bite at his back because the panels were behind him and she hadn't turned around. She looked at him then, from the pad on the floor, all the way from his ankles up, the way she'd looked at his hand.
"You're tall," she said.
"I'm average."
"For a human." She reached up and pulled him down by the wrist, and kissed him. Vulcan mouths were cooler than his and careful, no hurry, and she held the back of his neck with one hand and the point of his hipbone with the other. When she broke it her respirations had gone audible in the quiet room.
"What did touch mean where you grew up?" she said.
Hale blinked at the floorboards. "Not much. Shoulder when you did well. Doctor's glove. My mother went eight years without putting a hand on me and I never noticed until right now, saying it."
"I see."
"What about Vulcan?"
"We are touch telepaths." She said it flatly. "Contact is not incidental. When a hand is laid on you with intent, you feel the other mind at the border of your own. So we do not touch idly. We do not touch to be polite. Every hand is a sentence."
He swallowed. "Then what was that, just now."
"A sentence." She took his hand, the bandaged one, and laid it flat on her sternum through the undersuit. Her skin was warm here, warmer than his own, and under it her heart was going faster than a Vulcan's had any business going. "There is a practice. Meditative touch. The hands travel, and the mind stays at the border, and it does not cross. I have done it in a temple. I have never done it on a human."
"Does it work?"
"Trace." She let go of his wrist. "Start at the shoulder."
He traced. Down the outside of her arm with two fingers, slow because the sealant pulled at his knuckles, then back up the inside where the skin was thin. At the collarbone she drew a breath through her nose. When he got to the curve of her breast through the fabric she caught his hand and held it there and said, "Yes," which he hadn't asked for and understood anyway.
The undersuit came off. She was lean and pale with a green undertone at the throat and inner arms where the blood ran close, small breasts and dark nipples already tight, a long scar under the left ribs that he didn't ask about. He put his mouth on one nipple and she made a sound like something being set down carefully.
Her hand found his cock through the shorts and measured it, and this time she did not laugh. She worked it out of the fabric and stroked it once, base to head, and her thumb smeared the slick at the tip across the glans.
"I want to know what that tastes like," she said, which is not a thing people say, and then she went down on the floor pad and put her mouth around him anyway, one hand around the base, her tongue flat.
He got a hand in her hair and tried to be gentle with the bandages and mostly failed. She took him deep enough to make his knees lock and stayed there, and the noise she made in her throat was nothing like a performance. When he said her name she came off him with her lips wet and her face flushed green along the cheekbones and said, "Lie down."
He lay down. She straddled his thigh and took his hand and put it between her legs, and she was wet enough that his two fingers slid in without any work at all, hot and gripping. She watched his face while he did it. She watched the whole time. When he got his thumb on her clit she closed her eyes and her hips moved, and she came like that, riding his hand, her fingers dug into his shoulder hard enough to leave marks.
Then she took him inside her, slow, sitting down on him on the floor pad with both hands on his chest. He was bigger than she was built for and it took her three tries to take all of it, and on the third she stopped and shuddered and stayed there with him buried to the hilt.
"Does it hurt?" he said.
"Yes." She ground down. "Don't stop."
She rode him with her eyes open and her mouth a flat line and her hair stuck to her neck, and it went on long enough that his thighs shook. He got his thumb back on her and she came a second time mid-stroke, clenching and bowing, and then he grabbed her hips and fucked up into her from the floor, hard, fast, her breasts moving with it, and she said his name twice and the second time it was a curse, and he came inside her because she locked her hand around his wrist when he tried to pull out.
Afterward she lay on his chest and would not move off him. The ship hummed. A pump turned over somewhere.
"Your hands shook," he said.
"They do that." She lifted one up for him to see. It was trembling, fine and fast, and she looked at it like it belonged to someone else. "That has not happened before."
"So we're both bad at it."
"That," said T'Mir, "is not the word I would use."
She got up, went to the locker, came back with a towel and dried between her legs with no ceremony, then lay down beside him and had him turn onto his front, and she did the practice again on his back, both hands, shoulder blades to the base of his spine, slow. Halfway through, he stopped being able to keep his breathing even.
"How long do you have," she said.
"Pod shift at 23:00."
"Then you have two hours." She folded the towel and put it under his cheek, and pulled the blanket off the bunk frame's rung and dragged it over the both of them, and lay her arm across his back. "Do you want the truth?"
"Yeah."
"I asked for a human," she said. "I asked the computer for the hardest case in the file, so I could watch it fail. That was an hour and forty minutes ago, and I no longer want that."
Hale turned his head on the towel and looked at her, and at the mattress frame in pieces in the corner, and at the amber panel over the door. "Come back tomorrow," he said. "I'll bring the orange one."
Reilly had taken the last cabin on the corridor, the one with a desk that folded into the bulkhead and a card taped over the wall panel reading OUT OF SERVICE, TURBOLIFT RELAY. It was her idea of discretion.
She came aboard at 18:40 with her own name already in the pool. She'd put it there the morning she pitched the research, because she wasn't going to ask sixty people to do a thing she wouldn't do herself.
The amber came up when she touched the panel. She left her boots on.
He knocked at 19:00 exactly.
The Selay filled the doorway and then some. Tall, lean, scaled dark green-black with a paler band down the throat, no ears to speak of, just a smooth sweep of skull. Slit pupils in flat gold eyes. Sable Finch engineering patch, seam mended at the thigh.
He had a paper sack with him. He set it on the folded desk.
"Ginger," he said. "The captain said you people can't eat the stew."
"Your captain's thorough." She looked at the sack, then at him. "Sserin."
"That's the name the ship gave me." His tongue flicked out once, thin and forked and quick, tasting the air between them. "You're the one with the research."
"I'm the research."
He considered that. "Then I'm on time."
Reilly pulled the desk chair around and sat, and gestured at the bunk. He folded down onto it, which took a while, because Selay didn't bend like humans did at the hip and had to arrange themselves in stages.
"You read the protocol," she said.
"I read it twice." He set his hands on his knees. "No recordings. I can walk out with no reason. Nobody gets told why."
"Correct."
"Then ask me your questions." His tongue flicked again. "I've been sat here two days watching people get things wrong about each other."
"All right." She leaned forward, elbows on her thighs. "What did touch mean on Selay?"
He went very still, the way a person does when the question is better than they expected.
"Do you want the polite answer?"
"I want yours."
"Then it was a duty and a pleasure and neither, depending which hold you were born in." He blinked, slow, the nictitating film sliding across gold. "In my grandmother's hold, four families shared one heat-shaft. You slept in a pile. You didn't call it anything because calling it something means you might lose it."
"And your hold?"
"Bright lights and a door that locked." He looked at the amber panel behind her. "The war came through my grandmother's hold and took everything but the stories. So I grew up in a place where touch was scheduled, like a ration."
"That's the answer nobody gives in the mess hall."
He made a sound that might have been a Selay laugh. "You ask better questions than the ones you asked down there."
"I asked the ones I had permission to ask." She sat back. "What did it mean for you?"
"I don't know yet. That's why I put my name down." His tongue slid out again and this time it stayed a second longer, tasting, testing. "You're not afraid of me."
"Should I be?"
"No." He tilted his head. "But most people sit further away."
Reilly stood and crossed the deck and sat down on the bunk beside him, close enough that the warmth came off him like a banked heater. Selay ran hot. His hide was dry and finely scaled under her palm when she touched his forearm.
"May I show you something?" he said.
"Yes."
He opened his mouth. The tongue came out over his lower lip, forked, pale at the tips, and flicked once at her wrist. Wet and warmer than she expected. Then he closed his mouth and sat there.
"That's the thing everyone stares at," he said. "That's all they ever see."
"Show me the rest."
He did it slowly, and she watched it happen. The fork drew back together along the seam, the two tips folding into one blunt head. The whole length of it thickened and lifted and stiffened until it stood out of his mouth like a cock, hard, glistening, longer than his hand was wide. The base of it swelled under his jaw and the tendon in his throat stood out.
Reilly didn't say anything for a moment. Then: "How does that work?"
"It's muscle and blood, same as anything." He spoke around it and the sound was thick. "It fills when I want someone. Can't hide it. That's why we keep our mouths shut in daylight."
"How long has it been since you let anyone see that?"
"Never." The tongue flexed, and the tips tried to separate and couldn't. "Not off-world. Not since the war put it in the books as a mark of the unclean."
She reached up and touched the underside of it with one fingertip. He shuddered hard enough that the bunk frame flexed.
"You're warm," she said.
"You're cold. You're always cold." His hand came up and closed on her wrist, and the grip was dry and careful. "Say the word and I'll put it away."
"Don't you dare."
He got her tunic off between them and she got out of her undershirt while he was still working the seal on his own coverall. He had to leave it half down his arms because of the shoulders. Under it he was smooth and banded, a lighter belly, the sheathe between his legs where his own cock rode folded away.
"Lie down," he said.
She lay back. He went down over her on his elbows and put his mouth between her legs, and the tongue came soft first, forked, one tip up along each lip and flickering, quick little licks that never settled anywhere. She got one hand in the blanket and one on his smooth skull.
It stiffened inside her. That was the part she wasn't ready for. One moment it was licking, the next the whole length of it was hard and sliding up into her, thick as two fingers, pushing and curling, and she said his name and it came out broken.
"Does it hurt?" he said, muffled, into her.
"No. Fuck. More."
He fucked her with it. Slow at first, the blunt head working in and out, the fork trying to spread and dragging along her walls when it couldn't. Then faster, and he put a thumb on her clit and kept his mouth sealed against her skin, and the tongue went deep enough that she felt the base of it working under his jaw. She came with her heels dug into the mattress and her hand fisted in his band down the throat, and he didn't stop.
He worked her up one more time before he lifted his head. His mouth was wet to the jaw and the tongue was still out, still hard, hanging.
"Can you come like that?" she said.
"I already did. Twice." He wiped his jaw with the back of his wrist, which didn't help. "That's the other thing nobody writes down."
"Get up here."
He climbed over her and she got a hand between his legs, into the sheathe, and found him slick and hard there too. He was shorter than a human and thick at the base and ridged, and she worked him out of it and jacked him slow with her fist while he shook over her.
"Inside me," she said. "The tongue or the cock, I don't care which."
He put the cock in her. He'd been hard long enough that it took him six strokes to finish, and he did it with his tongue out and pressed flat against the side of her neck, wet and flexing, while his hips stuttered. She held him through it.
Afterward he fetched the sack and they ate cold ginger root in the dark, back against the bulkhead, and he told her about the hold his grandmother came from. Somewhere in the ship a pump turned over.
"Do you want the report filed with your name on it?" she said.
He stopped chewing.
"You don't have to," she said. "Anonymous is the default. Nobody would know."
Sserin looked at the OUT OF SERVICE card on the panel and then at her, and he put the ginger down.
"Put my name on it," he said. "All of it. Sserin, engineering, Sable Finch."
Reilly left at twenty past nine with the ginger root still in her fist and the taste of it in her teeth, and when she filed the log two decks down she typed Sserin, Engineering, Sable Finch into the header field and sealed it, and the drawer stayed shut.
Jeff Smith had put his own name in the pool the same morning she had and had more or less forgotten about it. His pad lit at 19:10 with deck three, cabin eleven, and the code under it good for one entry.
Cabin eleven was half the size of his quarters back on the outpost. A folded bunk, a stool bolted to the deck, a sink hinged out of the wall. The amber was up, but she'd left every light on over it, bright enough to do surgery.
She stood with her hands behind her back when he came in. Blue from the crown of her bare scalp to her collarbones, the ridge running up her forehead and over her skull like a seam in a shell, small, maybe twenty-three, in a life-support coverall with the sleeves rolled twice because the sleeves were too long.
"You're the ensign," she said.
"Jeff." He let the door shut. "And you're Crewman Soola, life support, gamma."
"You looked me up."
"I looked up who I was meeting. That's all it was."
Her hands came out from behind her back and clasped in front, then went behind her again. She looked at the stool, then at the bunk, then at him.
"I don't know how this is supposed to start," she said.
"There's no supposed to."
"There is, though." She said it fast. "There's a way people do it and I don't know it. Nobody taught me. I learned the whole thing out of the ship's medical index when I was nineteen and it was three lines long. Fluid exchange. Vectors. Nothing about what you do with your hands."
Jeff took off his jacket and hung it on the hook, which bought him a second to think about how far to walk into this.
"Then ask me," he said. "That's what I'm for."
She sat on the edge of the bunk, knees together, and he took the stool. Close enough to talk at, far enough that she could breathe.
"Does it hurt?" she said.
"Does what hurt?"
"When it goes stiff like that." She pointed at his lap, and then immediately pulled the hand back. "I've seen it happen to men on shift and they walk like it's broken."
Jeff laughed, and stopped when her face closed.
"It doesn't hurt," he said. "It aches. Like a muscle that wants to be used. Everything swells and stays swelled, and if nothing happens it goes down on its own after a while."
"On its own."
"On its own."
She chewed on that. The vent above the sink pushed warm air down onto them both.
"Can I see it?" she said.
"Yeah."
He got his boots off and stood up and unfastened his trousers, and she watched the whole way down without a flicker, cataloguing it the way she probably catalogued filters and valves. He stepped out of them and stood there with his shorts still on and his cock half-hard against the fabric, and waited.
"Both," she said.
He took the shorts off too. She leaned in with her hands flat on her thighs and looked at him like a component she hadn't been trained on.
"It's darker than the rest of you," she said.
"That's normal."
"The skin moves." She reached out, thought better of it, put the hand back down. "Sorry."
"You can touch it. That's the point of the cabin."
She touched it with one fingertip, on the side, like testing a burner. Her skin was cool. He got harder under her hand in about two seconds and she pulled away again.
"That," she said. "That's the stiffening."
"That's it."
"It's fast."
"You have that effect."
She didn't smile, but her throat moved. She put her whole hand on him then, fingers closed loose around the shaft, and held it. Nothing else. Just holding, like she was afraid it would break off.
"Am I doing it right?" she said.
"You're not doing anything yet."
"I know. That's why I'm asking."
"Then do what you'd do if it was yours."
Her face did something complicated.
"I'm not supposed to do anything to mine," she said. "That's the part they were clear about. The index had a section. Three lines, and two of them were a warning."
Jeff put his hand over hers, over the top, and moved it once. Slow, base to tip, thumb dragging.
"That's the motion," he said. "You don't have to learn it, you already know it, you've been doing it to yourself since you were fourteen like everybody else."
"I haven't."
He looked at her.
"Not once?"
"I put my hand there and I stopped." She said it without shame, flat, the way you'd report a fault. "Every time. Twice a year maybe. And then I'd go and check the scrubbers."
His hand was still over hers. He took it off and put it on his own thigh and left the whole thing to her, and it was quiet for a second except for the vent.
"Show me how you do it," she said. "On yourself. And I'll watch, and then I'll try."
He did. He took himself in his fist and worked it slow, four or five strokes, and she sat forward with her elbows on her knees and watched the head come in and out of his fingers. When he stopped, the tip was wet and a thin thread of it strung down to his knuckle.
"What's that," she said.
"Pre-ejaculate." He wiped it on his thumb. "It's slick. It's what makes it work."
"Then why did you stop."
"Because it's your turn."
She got up and stood in front of him and spat in her palm without being told, which surprised him, and closed her hand around him wet. The first two strokes were too gentle, barely contact, and he didn't say anything, and she felt the difference herself and tried again.
"Like that?" she said.
"Harder."
She tightened up and pulled all the way from the base to the head and the breath went out of him. She heard it. She did it again, exactly the same, watching his face for the response, and found the rhythm in about a minute and a half the way she'd find the rhythm in a pump.
"Does it feel like anything like this for you?" she said. "When I hold you."
"Like a fist but warm." His hips lifted a little off the stool and he made himself stop. "And the grip's on the wrong side. The nerves are all underneath, near the head, right there."
She shifted her thumb underneath and rubbed it across the spot and he grunted and got a hand on the edge of the desk.
"Sorry. Did that hurt?"
"No. That's the spot."
"Do I go faster?"
"Not yet. Keep it there for a bit."
She kept it there. She worked him slow and steady with her wrist turning a quarter at the top of every stroke, and her other hand came up onto his shoulder for balance, and she stopped asking questions and just looked, close, her breath crossing his chest.
"How long does it take," she said finally.
"Three minutes if I'm worked up. Ten if I'm trying to make it last. I'm not trying."
"Where does it go?"
"Depends."
"Where do you want it to go?"
"On your hand's fine. Or your chest."
She looked down at her own collar and thought it through and then pulled the coverall zip down to her sternum and peeled the front open, skin blue and smooth across her small tits, and put his hand back on the stroke.
"Then there," she said.
She worked him faster, both hands now, one at the base and one twisting over the head, sloppy with spit and slick and losing some of the rhythm but gaining intent. He told her he was close. She didn't answer, just kept the pace, and her jaw was set with the same concentration she'd give a failing valve, and he came with a whole-body jerk that nearly took him off the stool.
It hit her chest in four spurts, up across the ridge of her sternum and one across the top of her right tit, thick and white on the blue, and the last two fell onto her knuckles and stayed strung between her fingers.
Neither of them moved for a second. She looked down at herself.
"That's a lot," she said.
"Sorry."
"Don't be sorry. It's data." She lifted her hand and turned it under the lamp and watched the stuff run toward her wrist. Then she wiped the hand on the inside of her coverall, took the cloth off the sink bracket, and cleaned her chest without hurrying.
Jeff got his shorts back on and sat down and watched her do it, and the whole thing had taken maybe twenty minutes, and he found he didn't want it to be over, which was a strange thing to feel about twenty minutes.
"You didn't come," she said.
"That's not the rule. It's not a trade."
"It should be." She folded the cloth and set it on the sill. Her zip was still open. "I want to do it again."
"All right."
"Tomorrow." She said it like a shift handover, firm, no question in it. "Same time. And you'd have to show me something else, something past this, because I don't want to be nineteen and reading three lines for the rest of my life."
Jeff looked at her standing there with her coverall half open and one hand still wet and the lights still too bright, and he said yes.
She nodded once like a job signed off, and then, quieter, because it was the first thing all night she hadn't been able to ask straight:
"Would you touch me too? While I do it. I want to know what that's like when it's another person's hand and not mine."
The corridor outside cabin eleven was empty, and Jeff walked it back the way he'd come, past the hatch to the repair pod, past a rating asleep on a bench with her boots on the deck. His hands still smelled of her, and he kept them at his sides.
The door to his quarters was already unlocked. That was the first thing.
Reilly was on his bunk with her boots off and her legs crossed at the ankle, a bulb of wine balanced on her knee and a robe he'd never seen her wear, dark red, open at the throat. His desk lamp was on at the low setting. She'd found it.
"Where've you been?" she said.
"Deck three. You?"
"Cabin fourteen." She tilted the bulb and drank. "Long day."
"You won the pool."
"I didn't win anything. I did what I said I'd do." She held the bulb out to him. "Sit down. No. Don't sit down. Take your jacket off first."
He took it off and hung it, and she watched him do it with her head tipped back against the bulkhead.
"Did you sign up?" she said.
"Same morning you did."
"I know. I read the whole sorted list." She swirled the wine. "You got cabin eleven. Life support."
"Soola."
"The one who couldn't look at a man's lap in the mess hall."
"She looked at it plenty in the cabin." He took the bulb from her and drank. The wine was thin and cold and tasted like the bulb it came in. "It went fine."
"It went fine." Reilly took the bulb back. "I want to unwind, Jeff. I've been on my feet since five and I've had a knot in my shoulders since the second question in that hall. So I'm going to ask you for something and you're going to say yes or no and it won't be a problem either way."
"Ask."
"Strip for me."
He pulled his tunic over his head and dropped it on the chair. Then his undershirt. Then he got his boots off and stood on the cold deck in his socks and undid his trousers and stepped out of them and out of his shorts, and Reilly watched all of it without hurrying him, one elbow on the pillow.
"Turn around," she said.
He turned. The lamp threw his shadow long across the panel.
"All the way around. Slowly."
He came around slow and stopped facing her with his cock already half up and his hands at his sides. She looked at his chest, then lower, then back up to his face.
"Better," she said.
She set the bulb on the deck and got up. The robe fell open at the front, and he was still looking at her face when he heard the clasp come off the belt, and she let the whole thing slide off her shoulders onto the deck.
That was when he saw it. Black harness, high on her hips, cinched tight over the crest of her pelvis. Shaft riding out of the front plate, taller than his hand was long, dark and thick at the base and slightly curved. The base of the harness sat down on her mound with a curved pad pressed flat against her clit.
She let him look.
"That's why you didn't sign up for a cabin," he said.
"I signed up. I got fourteen." She walked past him to the swing, which was still hanging from the ceiling beam the way he'd left it, chains drawn up short and the seat at waist height. "Have you ever used this?"
"Once. On the outpost. With you talking me through it by comm."
"Then you know how it goes." She patted the seat. "Sit. Legs through the straps."
He backed onto it and got his legs through, and she pulled the chains down two links so the seat took his weight across the ass and let his feet come up off the deck. The straps bit behind his knees. When he rocked, the whole thing turned a quarter inch on its swivel and he had to catch the chains to stop it.
"Comfortable?"
"Not really."
"Good." She came around in front of him and went down on her knees on the deck between his ankles, and the harness jutted up past her navel. "Something happened tonight I wasn't expecting."
"Tell me."
"I had a Selay in cabin fourteen." She put both hands on his thighs and ran them up to the crease of his hips. "Sserin. Engineering. He put his tongue inside me, Jeff. That whole long thing, stiff, all the way up. I've been thinking about it for four hours and I still can't put a word on it."
"Did you file it?"
"With his name on it. He asked me to." She leaned in and took the head of his cock into her mouth without any more warning than that.
He got a hand in her hair. She went down on him slow, all the way to the back of her throat and then a little past it, holding him there long enough that he felt the swallow work around him. Then she came off, breathing, and licked the underside from base to tip in one long stripe.
"Say something," she said.
"You're very good at that."
"I've had four years of practice." She took him back in and worked him with her hand around the base, steady, her tongue flat under the ridge. His hips started to come off the seat and the chains knocked against the beam.
"Reilly."
She came off him wet to the chin. "Don't come yet. I want this for something else."
She worked the head against him and pressed. The first push went nowhere and she took it off and put her thumb there instead, slow circles, until the muscle gave and the tip seated.
"Breathe out," she said.
He breathed out and she slid half of it in. It burned in a bright line all the way up into his gut, and his arms went tight on the chains, and the swing creaked at the ring in the beam.
"All right?"
"Give me a second."
She gave him a second. She stayed exactly where she was with her hands flat on both his hips, and the whole cabin was the vent and the creak and his own breathing.
"Now," he said.
She drove the rest in slow, and he felt every scaled, hair of it. Then she pulled back almost all the way out and put it back in harder, and something behind his balls went warm and loose.
She fucked him. She set a long rhythm with her hands on his waist, and the swing took the thrust and swung it, so every stroke went deeper than the last one. He dropped his head between his arms and let it happen. His cock swung heavy and untouched between his legs and leaked a thin line down onto the deck.
"How's that," she said.
"Harder."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.