Page 229 of Every Almost

She got three steps down the corridor before she stopped, standing in the middle of the hall doing absolutely nothing. And she realized that a captain standing frozen in a hallway to avoidone particular member of her own crew was somehow worse than if she simply just walked into the room.

So, she did.

She was obviously late, walking into the middle of the whole crew doing something Reyna did not have words to describe.

It was Tavi who caught her. She had barely even asked what it was she was looking at before he turned to Charlie and said it.The Captain next.

She could have ended it right there. She had the leverage. She even threatened him with reassignment to waste reclamation. But he'd called her out, saying he'd take it without a single pause.

So, she walked to the center of the room and submitted herself to a lesson in moving like a corpse, which she found she was genuinely, comprehensively bad at doing. That part had almost saved her. She found it difficult to come apart over a woman while that woman is telling you that you dance too gracefully to be believably dead.

Then Charlie stepped in behind her to walk her through the last of the dance moves, putting a hand on Reyna's waist.

And Reyna's body responded before she could stop it.

Her breath caught and her back went flush against Charlie's chest. But it was that catch in her breath, the part she couldn't hide, that made it clear she was noticed.

She turned her head. It simply happened, the way the breath had caught, her body moving on some instinct she had not issued, nor control.

And Charlie was right there, her eyes tracing the woman's face.

Charlie was closer than Reyna had let anyone come in longer than she could remember. She was close enough that her own uneven breath reached Charlie's skin, close enough to feel the warmth coming off her, the steadiness of her, Charlie's warm hand still resting at Reyna's waist like it belonged there.

Reyna was looking at her, and she could not make herself stop.

Then Charlie's eyes lifted and found her gaze.

Caught. Charlie had caught her, and for a second, maybe two, Reyna did absolutely nothing about any of it.

All Reyna could do was stand there in the warmth of Charlie Wickett and let a second pass. And it frightened her, because none of this had been her decision. She lost the ability to stop Charlie from seeing anything Reyna was fighting against.

But then it came flooding back, like a deluge attached to a tsunami. Her walls and her stance as the captain as she stepped away from Charlie, picking up the armor she'd left on the floor where she'd briefly, stupidly, set it down.

Nothing showed after that.

She ran the graceless dance through clean on the next pass and let the crew applaud the wrong thing entirely. She said the easy thing to Charlie, about having had a good teacher, and she watched it do exactly what she'd meant it to do. It closed the door between them, pushing the last thirty seconds into just a lesson.

But then she hadn’t been able to simply walk away. She had held Charlie's eyes half a beat too long, searching them, looking back and forth between them for something she had no business looking for. She made decisions and spent all that effort making the last few minutes ordinary, only to succumb again. Her body reached for one more second of Charlie before her judgment could stop it.

She made herself smile, and nod, and cross to the edge of the room. She looked at Tavi, at Maren, at the wreck of the dance still going on in the center of the room. Reyna looked at every single thing in that library that was not Charlie Wickett.

She made sure of it.

Now she sat in the dark with the day behind her and did what she always did with a problem she couldn't solve.

She went looking for the piece she could cut loose.

But it wasn't Charlie. Charlie stayed. Reyna had promised her that, back when it became clear Charlie could never go home, and Reyna did not break promises. Charlie was not the problem.

What Charlie made her feel was the problem.

That was the piece she needed to cut loose. It was what had crossed her face in the office before she could stop it. It was the breath she hadn't been able to hold in the middle of a dance.

That, she would cut.

She could decide, here, in the dark, that it did not have to become anything at all.

It could stay exactly what it was. A private inconvenience. Something she noted and declined to act on.