Page 36 of Tracked and Taken

“You keep coffee on board.”

“I keep a range of provisions.”

“You don’t drink coffee.”

“No.”

“When did you buy this.”

I could lie. The lie is cheap and Torres would clock it.

“Yesterday afternoon.”

Her pulse jumps. The sound of it is a direct line to the heat still sitting hard between my legs. I bought the coffee for her. The knowledge is doing something to both of us.

She picks up the coffee tin. She puts it back down. She says, still addressing the tin: “Head.”

“Starboard.”

She pivots.

Ninety degrees, in a galley built for one, with a male my size in the corridor, and the pivot brings her sternum-to-sternum with me for a full, catastrophic second. Her heat through two layers of wool against my chest. Her braid against the inside of my right forearm. Her breath at my throat. The soft pressure of her breasts against the plane of muscle she has never been this close to. My cock, already hard, throbs once against the front of my pants at the contact, and there is nothing I can do about it except not move.

My tail cracks against the nav-chart rack.

She looks up.

Eight inches shorter than me. The eight inches are doing something to the angle of her chin that I am going to need the rest of the transit to come back from. The look of a woman who has just felt exactly how hard I am and is choosing, for now, not to comment. The restraint of it is almost as hot as the contact was.

“Head is starboard,” I say. Low. One decision away from closing the gap and finding out what her mouth tastes like when she is this close.

She steps past. The door locks.

I stand in my corridor with my hands flat against the galley hatch and I breathe the way my species trains itself to breathe when it needs to come down from an intake spike. The spike does not come down. The memory of her body against mine is still running under my skin like a live current.

“Bunk,” I say, when she comes out.

This is the part I’ve been managing since 0430.

I pull the charcoal curtain aside. She looks in.

The bunk is made. Not regulation-tight; better than that. Blanket folded square at the foot. Pillow centered. Clean towel on the shelf, folded in thirds. Reading light on its low setting, because I set it there last night when I made it, because I did not know what setting a human female prefers to walk into a bunk at, and I picked the setting that watching her under Junction One fluorescents would suggest. I made the bunk for her. The knowledge is territorial and deliberate and I am not going to apologize for it.

Her jaw adjusts. Her pulse climbs.

“One bunk,” she says. Flat.

“One bunk. It’s yours for the transit.”

“Where do you sleep.”

“Cockpit couch.”

“The cockpit couch is six feet long. You are six-five. You are flying this ship into a dead node in nine hours. Take your own bunk.”

“Your duffel is already at the foot of the bunk, Torres. The argument is closed.”

“The argument has not been opened.”