I look like someone the night happened to.
I also look, and this is embarrassing to notice, like someone who’s about to sleep in Reef Ryder's bed.
I go back out. He's sitting on the edge of the desk with his arms crossed, still in the cut, and he looks up when I come in and something moves across his face and then doesn't.
"Bed," he says. He pushes off the desk and reaches up to pull the cut from his shoulders, hanging it on the hook in one practiced motion. Then the jeans. He doesn't make anything of it, just strips down to a black t-shirt and dark boxers the way you do when you've shared space with people your whole life and stopped thinking about it.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
I get into bed. The sheets are cool and tight and smell like the rest of the room, like him, and I pull them up to my chest and look at the ceiling while he turns off the overhead light and leaves the small lamp on the desk burning low.
He stretches out on top of the covers beside me. His body takes up most of the bed and all of my awareness. Heat comes off him in waves.
We lie there. The compound settles around us. Distant voices. An engine somewhere. The creak of the building doing what old buildings do at night.
I stare at the ceiling and try to make my brain slow down and fail completely.
"Hey," I say quietly.
"Yeah."
"I'm not going to be able to sleep."
"You will."
"You don't know that."
"You've been running on adrenaline. Your body knows what it needs."
I consider that. He's probably right, which is annoying. "Can I ask you something?"
A pause. "Depends."
"The prospect who signed the maintenance log. Finn." I keep my voice careful. "You texted Ghost and he left. What does that mean? What happens to him?”
The silence that follows is a different kind than the ones before it. He's not deciding whether to answer. He's deciding how much of the answer is mine to have.
"It means we find him," Kraken says finally. "And we get what he knows."
"And then?”
"And then it's handled."
I absorb that. The ceiling has a crack running from the light fixture toward the window, branching twice before it reaches the wall. I trace it with my eyes. "Okay," I say. Same word I used when he said Finn wasn't going to be okay. Meaning: I understand, and I'm not going to pretend I don't, and I'm also not going to make you explain what you are to me.
He shifts beside me. Not closer, just shifting, and then his hand finds my hip through the covers. Not gripping. Just resting there. The weight of it is steady and deliberate and I feel it everywhere.
"The data work tonight," he says. "The maintenance logs. That was good thinking."
"You already said that."
"I'm saying it again."
I turn my head to look at him. He's looking at the ceiling too, jaw set, the lamp catching the edge of his profile. The kraken tattoo peeks out of the collar of his shirt and I think about how the whole thing wraps around his ribs and what it would be like to trace it with one finger and then I think about something else aggressively.
"You dismissed me twice before you listened," I say. "I just want that on the record."
"It's on the record."
