Page 62 of Tracked and Taken

She signs off.

Hours in. Tael has been at the helm since launch. I have been on scope. The purr has been ambient for so long I have stopped treating it as a fact requiring commentary. My body has anticipated it.

My eyes drift.

The scope is showing the Parr’s Anchor approach, still too far to resolve. I should be reviewing. My eyes are on his hands on the yoke. The right retracted to smooth black fingertips. The left with a single claw out, the index, the tell I have been calibrating as his focused operational readiness signature. His forearms bare where the sleeves are pushed up, the rosettes along his wrists shifting in the low cockpit light, and I am looking at a male’s forearms on his own yoke, and I am not looking away.

He does not look up. He does not need to. He has been tracking me in his peripheral vision the way he does every time we are in the same room.

“Torres. Your scope.”

“Yes.”

“Is it interesting.”

“…Yes.”

“Natalie.”

My name. That register. My body does the thing it has been doing since the cockpit couch.

“Your scope, sweetheart. Look at it.”

“I am looking at it.”

“Are you, though.”

I look at the scope. I do not look back up for a long time. The purr through the cockpit has moved into a register I do not have a filing category for and am not going to invent one for until we are not both in this cockpit.

I take the yoke on the rotation. Not a negotiation; a watch rotation, overdue by an hour, and I am the Head of Station Security and I do not miss a rotation for a purr I will not name.

“Vosk. My yoke.”

“Copy.”

He stands and walks past me toward the bunk. The cockpit does not hold two people comfortably. He pauses behind my chair. His hand, on purpose, I know it is on purpose, comes to the back of the chair, and his thumb brushes the nape of my neck where my hair has come loose from the clip. One beat. The touch is exactly where his breath was this morning. My pulse answers it before I can stop the answer.

His mouth at my ear, from behind: “Wake me in four hours.”

“Copy.”

“And, Natalie. I am going to sleep in a bunk that is going to smell like you for four hours, and I am going to dream about it, and I am going to wake up and pretend I didn’t. I want you to know.”

I do not respond. I cannot respond.

He walks to the bunk. I hear him settle into a mattress that is, for the next four hours, going to be warmed by his body alone. The cockpit hums. My face is warm. The rest of me is warmer.

I hold watch for three hours and tell myself I will not check on him. I check on him. I tell myself it is because SENTRY has flagged his sleep rhythm as slightly off-baseline and I am, in my capacity as Head of Station Security with responsibility for the operational asset in the other bunk, the person who should verify.

He is asleep. Actually asleep. The soft version of him. Lashes longer than his face earns when awake. Jaw loose. The hand that was at my hipbone opened on the mattress, palm up, claws fully retracted, the rosettes on his forearm moving slowly with his breathing. He looks young. He looks like he has decided that the bunk is a safe place to be.

I stand in the doorway for a short time. His breathing does not change. The threat-vigilance protocol has, for the second time in a day, decided I am cataloged as a pair and will not wake him for the check.

“SENTRY.”

“Yes, Natalie.”

“The behavioral file. Upgrade it. Priority.”