Page 43 of Tracked and Taken

“Berth options?”

“C spur’s sealed. Maintenance.” The keeper speaks without looking up. “Ten-through-twenty in the A spur. Nine’s got a leak. Eleven’s yours if you want it.”

“C spur,” Tael says, casual. “That’s the one with the quiet chambers, yeah?”

The Jixian nictitates. A slow lateral blink, the inner membrane sliding once and back. Nothing that would read on a species that didn’t have one. Tael’s shoulders drop a quarter-inch, and I have been clocking his body long enough to know the drop is a confirm.

“C spur’s sealed,” the keeper says. “Maintenance. Three weeks.”

“Shame. Best atmo on the route.”

“Take eleven.”

“Eleven, then.”

Tael’s hand has not come off my back. His thumb, for one half-second, moves. A single stroke across the fabric at my lower back. He does it and he takes his hand off. The stroke was too slow for pure cover. Or exactly the right speed for someone who knows he is being watched and wants the watching to include this.

We move toward the bar.

The bar is an eight-table operation in a low-lit alcove off the central concourse. Three tables occupied. Tael walks us to an empty one in the corner and pulls out the chair for me, a move a male performing ownership of his mate in public would make, and which my body registers as new.

He does not sit across from me. He sits beside me. Bench seating. His thigh along mine. His right arm across the back of my chair. The smirk a quarter-inch deeper than it was at the counter. Close enough that the cover is no longer the only thing explaining the proximity.

“What are we drinking, sweetheart.”

Quieter. I am not arguing with any of the liberties he has taken so far, and is testing the next one. The test is working.

“Surprise me. Don’t make it green.”

“I’ll make it green.”

“Vosk.”

“Rook,” he corrects. Low. Right at the edge of my ear. “Come on, sweetheart. Stay with me.”

He orders in Trade. His is kasa. Mine is green, because he is a functioning adult with free will and he used it to make mine green. It tastes like licorice married a diagnostic fluid.

“I will remember the green.”

“Note it, sweetheart.”

His arm moves from the back of my chair to the back of my shoulder. His thumb starts a small circle on the fabric at the top of my shoulder blade. Easy. Not obvious. The absentminded circle a male draws on a female who is his, in a public space, when his attention is elsewhere and his hand is on its own. My body is negotiating between the necessity of the cover and the physiological specificity of having a Draelith’s thumb drawing a slow, repeated circle on my shoulder blade for the first time in my adult life. The circle is steady. Patient. The touch that assumes it will still be there in ten minutes. I let it stay.

Tael is watching the bar. His eyes run a slow circuit of the three occupied tables, his ear cocked toward the Jixian freighter table at our left, and his jaw does the small tightening it does when his overlay has registered something.

His thumb does not stop.

He leans in. His jaw grazes the strand of hair at my temple and his mouth finds the space just below my ear, and his breath is warmer than the ambient air by five degrees, and my entire nervous system lights up like a male has just said something I am not currently cleared to receive in a low-lit bar at the edge of Velarkis, and my body, in the half-second before I hear the actual words, braces for something that is not on the cover sheet.

“Cameras in the ceiling. Three.”

Operational.

My body registers the disappointment in my sternum before my brain is prepared to file it. Disappointment. Fine. Noted.

“SENTRY saw two,” I say. Pitched for his ear, murmuring something soft to her mate over a green drink. The cover requires soft. I am not entirely sure the softness is only for the cover.

“SENTRY did not have the angle for the third. Service hatch behind the counter. Cycles every ninety seconds.”