Page 35 of Tracked and Taken

6

One Bunk

Tael

She walked through the airlock at 0551 and my entire nervous system stopped doing its day job.

No uniform. No regulation starch. A black cardigan cut long, falling off her shoulders because it’s a size too big, and underneath it a shirt the color of cold tea with a soft V at the throat: two inches of collarbone I have not, in any office I have stood across from her in, been cleared to see. Her braid is loose. A strand has already escaped at her temple. She smells like soap and cold air, and her pulse is running four beats above her baseline because she knows, whether or not she’s ready to admit it, exactly what she just walked into.

My body answers before my brain does. Heat floods low and hard. My cock thickens against the seam of my pants from the simple fact of her standing in my airlock in clothes that were never meant for a station corridor. I lean against my bulkhead with both hands in my pockets because if I don’t put them somewhere with a mandate, my hands will find their own employment—and they want the cardigan off her shoulders and her back against the hatch.

“Torres.”

“Vosk.”

“I forgot to welcome you aboard. Now let me give you the grand tour.”

“This ship has three violations of civilian hauler protocol visible from the hatch.”

“Only three?”

The corner of her mouth stops one millimeter short of smiling and stays there, and that millimeter is a gift I am going to carry in my chest. The fact that I can pull that almost-smile out of her with nothing but a dry line sits makes it deeply satisfying.

I step aside to let her pass. The corridor on Helia’s Reach was built for one Draelith at a time, and making room for her puts me closer to her than the geometry strictly permits. Her sleeve grazes the rosettes on the inside of my forearm. Wool on skin. Half a second.

Every rosette on my body lights up like I’ve stepped into a shallow surf. The contact is brief and accidental, and it still goes straight to my cock which hardens fully against the fabric. My tail cracks against the deck plating. Loud.

She doesn’t turn her head.

She walks past me, and her scent cuts a warm line through the corridor behind her, and every instinct my species has spent a hundred thousand years calibrating is currently telling me to follow it nose-first into the nearest flat surface and put my mouth on the pulse under her jaw until she makes a sound. I put both hands on the nearest hatch wheel, because the hatch wheel is a thing a male’s hands can hold onto with a clear operational justification, and I hold it for three seconds while my sensory system reboots the part of itself that is supposed to be a professional. The reboot is incomplete. The heat stays.

Then I go find her.

Helia’s Reach is forty-one meters. One berth. Built for long transit and solo work, registered to a dried-botanicals shell in the Veil Cluster, and three years of my cup in one place and my boots in one configuration, and in seven minutes the female standing in my cockpit has rearranged the gravity of it. The ship is mine. She is in it. The combination is doing things to the territorial circuitry that my species does not turn off for the convenience of shared missions.

“Galley,” I say, and herd her aft.

The galley hatch doesn’t clear my shoulders on a direct approach; I’ve angled through it for three years. Torres follows me, and the galley, built for one, now contains a human female in a cardigan too big for her, and I am in the corridor, because the corridor is where you stand when someone else is in the galley.

Which puts my chest eight inches from the back of her head. Close enough that I can feel the heat of her through the space. Close enough that if I leaned forward my mouth would be in her hair.

She reaches up for the rations locker.

The cardigan rides.

The shirt underneath rides with it, and when she stretches the right shoulder goes bare, shoulder to collarbone, a strip of skin that has lived under cloth, a shade lighter than the rest of her, and my brain produces, uninvited, a fully rendered picture of what her skin would taste like if I set my mouth against it right there, right now, on the first morning of a transit I volunteered for.

My mouth on her shoulder. My hands at her hips, pulling her back against the hard line of my cock. The cardigan on the deck. Her back flush to the bulkhead and her braid in my fist and her legs around my waist, because the galley would hold her weight if I took it off her feet, and the geometry of this ship was built by a male my size for exactly this—for taking a female in the narrow spaces and making her forget the rest of the corridor exists.

She lets the shoulder show for three seconds.

She knows.

She tugs the cardigan at second four. No fluster. The smooth adjustment of a woman who clocked herself, chose not to move, and fixed it. The deliberate delay is worse than the bare skin. It means she let me look. It means she wanted me to look. The knowledge sits in my blood like a claim I have not yet been given permission to enforce.

“Coffee, middle shelf,” she says. Neutral.

“Middle shelf.”