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“No, seriously, fuck her,” she ranted. “She’s the one who fucked you over, isn’t she?Fuck. Her. She doesn’t get to benefit from us nearly dying and thenscapegoat us.” She trailed her fingers over his shirt again, and his heart fluttered as warmth returned.
“Let’s just go,” she said. “We both have our ships, right?”
“You’re not afraid of being arrested?”
“We’ll be sneaky. I just took a warship hostage. You think I’m lawful?”
“You’re so criminal these days,” he praised, his tail swishing with interest.
“Notthatcriminal.”
“You’rekind ofcriminal,” he negotiated. “I hear you held a gun to your old boss’s head.”
“I did not hold itto his head.”
“You did. For me. You would threaten violence on people for me.” His grin spread widely across his face.
She lifted a brow, but let him have that point. He settled back into the covers, feeling the brunt of that welling satisfaction. Luccahadthreatened violence on his behalf. It was almost too much to ask, to dream of—yet she had done it for him. Perhaps he should stop questioning it and accept that they belonged together. Perhaps he would eventually believe it.
“So… Earth,” she said.
“Are you sure you can move?”
“Uh…” Her eyes fell lower, taking in the state of her body. “We’ll have to see.”
She settled back into him, burying her face. Eventually, her snoring returned. His tail coiled around her leg—his arm curling under her pillow, scooping her in.
It felt so easy and normal. It occurred to Caligher that he’d forgotten to continue panicking and fretting.
Lucca wasn’t going anywhere without him.
* * *
The newly constructed jump point floated in view, reflecting bright sunlight off its curved frame. Lucca ran through her status checks, reading them out over the comms one by one, then letting him know she was ready. He locked onto her ship so they wouldn’t be separated—even if they ended up off-course and in some uncharted system, they would be together.
Lucca’s mood had been unshakable ever since she got it in her head to visit her home planet. “I can show you hot springs. Oh, there’s this place I had booked out in the mountains that I never got to see. The stars will be perfect up there. Can we go, please?”
“Only if you promise to be careful,” he grunted.
He heard the little smile in her voice. “We’ll be careful.”
Lucca and Caligher had suffered some sort of role reversal. She was more certain in her actions. She still double-checked everything, but she was confident in her assessment.
Caligher could no longer keep on as he had. He couldn’t jump without a spacesuit. He had to keep a constant watch on his ship’s health. He was forced to retire from bounty hunting.
He and Lucca had been talking about other ventures. Responding to distress signals piqued their collective interests.
“I can’t wait for you to meet my parents,” she said. “Maybe we can take them up for a lap. My dad will shit a brick! I bet my mom would do a spacewalk. Oh my god, we have to bring them up.”
“Alright,” he said, hoping her parents liked him as much as she insisted they would.
She talked about Earth the entire way through the portal. She loved her homeworld. Even if it was the most messed-up place he’d ever heard of, she loved it.
* * *
They arrived at a small blue marble of a planet with white clouds that crawled lazily across the atmosphere. A grey speck of a moon hovered off in the distance. Further off was her pale little star.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but everything here was surprisingly…tiny.
