Page 230 of Every Almost

And it would pass, because that's what these things did when you refused to sustain them. And when it passed, Reyna would still be here, holding the ship and filling the role left behind by her best friend, the way she'd always been.

There was also no reason to believe any of it ran both ways. Whatever had slipped out of Reyna in that office, whatever her body had done in the middle of a dance, none of it was proof of anything on the other side. Warmth was warmth. It was often handed to the entire crew freely, and it would be the height of foolishness for her to mistake being treated like everyone else for being... different. Reyna had no evidence that it lived anywhere but in her own chest. So, there. Nothing to act on, nothing to risk, nothing that asked anything of her except to let it go quiet.

Something in her chest eased because she'd found the piece to cut. She had argued herself all the way back to the ground she'd stood on for thirteen years, still there, still supporting her.

Some part of her did not want the safe answer. But she was a woman who had put down objections before, from louder sources than this, or so she told herself.

The thing was, this one had a name.

Fine,she told the dark. She meant it as a truce and a surrender, both.Have it your way.

And then, because she had never once been able to leave a solved problem alone, she checked her work.

That was the mistake.

The solution meant nothing would change. She would go on holding the line she had just drawn, and the years would go on the way they already had. She could see those years all at once. Earth Nights she would attend and find reasons to leave early. The Observation Room with Charlie beside her on the bench, the way she always was, close enough that Reyna would feel the warmth of her. Their shoulders together, and Reyna never once letting herself turn it into more. There would be years of that. And she would call it enough.

Steady and useful.

Alone.

She had asked for that. For the last forty minutes she had sat in the dark arguing for exactly this, and she'd won.

But the truth was, for the first time in years, she had wanted. And yet she had just talked herself out of it, calling it safety.

The ease went out of her chest.

What came in had no countermeasure. She had no tactic for it, nothing left to cut. It was a very quiet question, one she had spent time keeping out.

What if Charlie is what I want?

Not the fondness she'd been calling it, or the small, manageable piece she'd filed away an hour ago which now seemed like a joke. What if what she had held gold against all evening, what had moved her blood and showed up on her faceand pulled a hitched breath out of her she never authorized, was exactly what it looked like? What if she had spent the entire night arguing against it precisely because it was true?

Before she knew it, her hand had reached for her datapad, as if her hands moved on their own, a step ahead of her the way her body had been all night. She scanned her front page and opened the music program, just as she'd done another night when her own words weren't enough for what she was feeling.

Hours ago, she had told Charlie not to expect her, and she had meant it as mercy for Charlie, but also as armor for herself. She would not be walking three corridors to the Observation Room tonight. She had seen to all of that in advance, while she still had the strength to.

The music program was smaller. This she could allow. A song in the dark, in her own quarters, with no one to see. She could tell herself it wasn’t the same as going to find her.

She could almost believe it.

She scrolled Charlie's library, stopping abruptly on a single word.

Drive.A song, by some band of Charlie's called The Cars.

But it was the title that stopped her, because it was hers. It was what she did every day, and had been doing for thirteen years, but not only with the ship. She'd learned to drive herself, knowing that if she ever got the opportunity to sit still long enough to feel what stillness would cost her, she would never resurface.

So Reyna kept moving, one heading after another. It was how she had survived losing Elena, and then Jere. When you were moving, the years just passed underneath without being able to catch you.

She had never once had trouble. Until now.

She tapped it because, in the dark, it looked like the one thing she was still sure of.

It opened quiet. A slow, haunted thing, a man's voice over almost nothing. And the question in it was not about a ship, or a heading, or a crew.

It was about her.

The song asked, with no mercy in it at all, who was going to driveherhome. Who would catch her when she fell. Who was going to take care of a woman who had spent thirteen years taking care of everyone else, and had built her whole life around the answer that it would never be anyone.