Page 227 of Every Almost

It was a perfectly ordinary thing to say. In fact, Charlie almost missed what it meant. Reyna was telling her not to wait up, not to expect her at 0300 in the Observation Room. Tonight, the bench would be empty on purpose. But by the time Charlie understood it, Reyna was already gone.

And Charlie's first thought, her reflex that couldn't head off before it arrived, was that she'd done this. She'd stood too close in the office, and looked, and Reyna had felt it.

This was the correction. A captain putting a respectful meter back between herself and the crew member who'd started looking at her... differently.

It was the sensible read. But Charlie knew it was also the read she always reached for first, the one where she was the problem that needed managing.

She'd been reaching for that one since she was thirteen.

And Charlie's first thought, her reflex that couldn't head off before it arrived, was that she'd done this. She'd stood too close in the office and let her face do whatever it had done, and Reyna had felt it.

This was the correction. A captain putting a respectful meter back between herself and the crew member who'd started looking at her... differently.

It was the sensible read. But Charlie knew it was also the read she always reached for first, the one where she was the problem that needed managing.

She'd been reaching for that one since she was thirteen.

Charlie made herself turn to the music equipment. It gave her hands something to do, and it gave her somewhere to look that wasn't the door. She stayed there, starting the next song cycle, and allowed the room to engulf her again.

But Charlie's hands wouldn't stop tingling with the warmth and curve of her. And she highly doubted it would fade by morning.

That night,after Earth Night ended, and after the entire crew had danced the 'Thriller' dance more times than Charlie had done it in her whole life, she found herself alone in her quarters, unable to cool down.

She hadn't come down since the dance, since her palm had found the curve of Reyna's waist and Reyna's breath had hitched against her chest. The whole room had dropped away, and it hadn't faded on her walk to her quarters the way she'd hoped it would.

It was still there.

Charlie could still feel the exact shape of her in her hands if she thought about it. So, Charlie was doing her level best not to think about it and having her usual amount of luck with that.

She dropped onto her bed and lay her head on her pillow, closing her eyes. She took a few moments to focus on her breathing before her eyes popped open again, reaching for her datapad. Going right into the music library, Charlie didn't have to search for anything because she already knew what she was looking for.

She tapped the play button on a song. "I'm on Fire" by Bruce Springsteen began, the synth and the drum tick driving up front, her heart beating faster than the tempo. She closed her eyes again, letting the datapad fall against her torso.

And then the voice, two and a half minutes of a man singing over almost nothing, staying down in his chest the whole way through, never once lifting. She added it to the playlist.

It had been a long day, and she'd been standing too close to a lot of things. A body ran warm after a day like that. She lay back in the dark while the song played itself out.

But the thing was, she didn't cool down. No matter how many times she played the song, no matter how many deep breaths she took, Reyna stayed in her hands.

What she wanted, lying there, was for morning to put it back. For the alarm to go off and the day to start and this whole thing to shrink back down to a size she could carry to work and set on a shelf and ignore. She wanted the version of herself from a week ago, the one who still had this handled, who knew exactly how far the feeling went and exactly how to keep it there.

She noticed she was not hoping for the other option. The one where morning came and Reyna had felt it too and meant it. She wouldn't reach for that one. It wasn't even disappointment. It was just what she'd come to expect. A variable, not to be chosen.

So she lay there with her hands open at her sides, waiting on a morning she wasn't sure would fix a damn thing.

THIRTY

FULL EFFORT

Reyna satat the desk in her quarters, a report she had opened forty minutes ago on the screen. At this point, she'd not absorbed a single data point from the report. Frustrated, she gave up the pretense of reading it.

It was this day. Today had been packed full of events. Events Reyna couldn't seem to clear from her mind.

So, instead of trying yet again to read a line of data for the thirtieth time, she decided to let her brain account for everything the las few days had brought before her.

She began where the trouble had started. The ridiculous argument with Charlie over the Niblet habitat. Beginning frustrated and overwhelmed should have been an insight into what was ahead, but she had been naïve.

She had called Charlie stubborn, arrogant, and a pain in her ass, and she had meant every word. A captain was permitted to lose her patience with an engineer who would not let a temperature differential go. That was ordinary. That was the sort of thing that happened on a working ship between two people who both cared a great deal about the work. There wasnothing more to it. Nothing more to the way Charlie looked at her after they'd stopped yelling at one another. Nothing in the sound of Charlie's laughter that followed.