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Orion beat the shit out of the punching bag at the gym that night before returning to his suite. It was, of course, to work off his pent-up energy. Make sure his head was clear after the clusterfuck of the last couple of days.
It wasn’t that he was stalling. He knew what he’d face back at his suite: the broken pieces of whatever progress he’d made with Kaia. He could already picture her stare, if it was anything like the look she gave him before slapping him on theZenith. That was why Orion followed up his gym session with a few shots with Bretton at the pilot’s bar.
“You all right, man?” Bretton probed as Orion fidgeted with his shot glass, sliding it in circles on the synthmarble bar top.
“Yeah.”
“This about what happened last night?”
Orion leveled him with a stony stare. “What do you think happened last night?”
“Oh, come on, it’s no secret you two got into it.”
“She knew what she was getting into.”
“Damn right.” Bretton gave his beard a scratch. “Something’s off about her too.”
He didn’t fucking know her. “Jealous she outshined you back there?”
“Nah, man… Just something was weird. Haven’t worked it out yet. You should be careful.”
Careful?Me?
Kaia was the one who had to be careful. She was testing his limits in ways no other woman would’ve dared.
He shoved his untouched shot over to Bretton, no longer in the mood for it.
By the time Orion did get back to his suite with a large container of fries in-hand, it was midnight. She was asleep, curled up in a tight ball at the edge of his bed. Orion stashed the fries in the coolbox beneath the hydra station, then stood in the bedroom doorway. She had his sheet held against her face. He observed an empty glass on the floor. Good, she’d drunksomething.
He thought he might need to blow off whatever meetings he had earlier that day to watch her, but the doc he’d fetched gave her a fluid drip and said she’d be fine. Not having to see the look on her face when she woke was a relief, and Orion attended each of his duties with a diligence he’d rarely felt.
Orion turned off the lights in the suite. He didn’t need them. Aside from the NS painting rough outlines of objects in front of his eyes, his vision was better than most in the dark. Perk of the genes.
He stripped off his clothes, piling them on the floor. When he got into bed, he attempted to be quiet about it. It wasn’t that the sight of her finally in his bed didn’t make him hard. If he woke her up, the fight would start, and he was tired. So he lay motionless on his back, hands folded beneath his head. It was when the soft sound of her breathing paused that he knew she was awake.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, staring at the ceiling.
“No.”
“Well, good.”
The silence hung between them like a void that just kept expanding. The longer it lasted, the harder it was to break. So when her voice came again, the rip in the fabric of quiet jarred him.
“You knew what you were getting into too.”
He hummed a begrudging assent.
“Are you disappointed it didn’t work?” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“The exorin. I don’t think I’m addicted. You missed.”
Orion had expected her to be angry, or to cry, or something. He wasn’t prepared for this hollowness in her voice. And he didn’t like the way she was putting him on the spot.
“That wasn’t the point, Kaia.”
Although having the chemical addiction take hold would sure as hell make his life easier going forward, and probably even hers, that wasn’t why he did it.
