He raked a hand through his sleep-disheveled hair. “I liked you, is all,” he said.
“You what?”
“I liked you. That way, as the kids say. More than that, I thought.” He locked gazes with her. “I was hoping it would turn into something more, but it didn’t. I never told you, because I knew you didn’t feel the same way, and you were happy with Dav. I thought if I said anything, you’d move out and we wouldn’t be friends anymore. I wouldn’t have had you in my life.”
A fresh surge of guilt washed over Brya, and she groped for words. “I wish you’d told me.”
“What for?” he said harshly. “Would it have made a difference?”
“I don’t know. All I can tell you is that you don’t know how sorry I am and how much I would change if I could.”
“Me, too.” He stared down at his hands. “And I’m sorry I got so pissed off. I shouldn’t have, not when you had that kind of nightmare. What was it about?”
She held up her left hand. “When Wethmore did this.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “It was just a replay of what happened that night. I don’t get them as often as I used to, but when I do…” She looked away and sighed. “They’re bad. At least I haven’t dreamed about Dav since I bought the Rapture. I used to have that one a lot, when the cargo bay blew up.” She paused, not wanting to discuss the accident.
She got out of bed. “I think I’ll get some juice. Do you want some?”
“Sure.” He followed her to the galley, where she produced a bottle of juice and a pair of glasses from the small refrigerator beside the replicator. They leaned against the counter in comfortable silence.
Brya drained her glass and put it in the dishwasher built into the wall. “Thank you for all of this,” she repeated.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Do you feel a little better?”
“Yeah.”
He put his glass in the dishwasher and held out his arms. “Come here.”
Brya let him enfold her in a hug, surprised at how much she needed it. She wrapped her arms around his neck and his slid behind her back. He was warm and solid, and underneath the scents of soap and sleep she could smell him. Her senses heightened and she had to fight herself to keep from tasting the bare skin of his shoulder. His body stiffened perceptibly and she wondered for a panicked moment if he could sense what she was thinking. No, she told herself. He said he could only pick up strong emotions, and she wasn’t salivating over him. Yet.
His head dipped and he whispered in her ear, “Do you think you’ll get back to sleep?”
His mouth next to her sent a happy buzz through her, and she couldn’t help but shiver a little. “Yes,” she murmured into his neck.
Kai’s arms tightened around her and his lips grazed the skin below her ear. Brya inhaled sharply, her body prickling. For a second she thought he must have made a mistake, but he gently kissed the side of her neck again, and a small mewl sounded in the back of her throat. She moved her head and he lifted his, and nose-to-nose, they wordlessly caught each other’s eyes.
This time his mouth covered hers, in an innocent, almost chaste kiss. Brya gently kissed him back, sweetly as if he had just brought her home after an evening at a cinema, but inside she was trembling. An excited awareness flooded through her body, something she hadn’t experienced with anyone else and didn’t realize she could feel until now. She couldn’t help herself from kissing him again and immediately he deepened it, flicking his tongue against her willing mouth. She parted her lips and he responded with a groan, his tongue sweeping against hers possessively. Kai lifted her on to the galley counter and she was faintly aware of the salt and pepper shakers falling over. He took her face in his hands and he kissed her again, and she hooked her legs around his back. Breaking the kiss, he drifted his hands down her neck, her shoulders, to delicately trace the outline of her breasts through her thin cotton pajama top, teasing her nipples. She arched her back at the light touch and reached for the hem of her shirt, but he grabbed her wrists as soon as her fingers touched the fabric.
“Brya, this is a really bad idea,” he said softly. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“We’re both adults,” she said, and tried to pull him back to her, but he stepped away.
It took a moment for her lust-addled brain to process what he was saying. She reluctantly disentangled her legs when she saw he was serious, and her body screamed at her when she realized he was probably right. “Damn,” she finally said. She slid off the counter, her bare feet slapping against the decking’s cold tiles.
“We should go back to bed,” he said after a moment of awkward silence.
“Yeah.” She was mortified. She shouldn’t have tried to take things further. Certainly Kai had made the first move, but he had been sweet and downright romantic, and then she had to go and spoil it by essentially offering to let him have sex with her on the counter. Gods, he must think she was willing to do that in exchange for his help. Her face grew hot, and she was in danger of crying. And her body, traitorous heathen it was, was still mourning his taking his hands off her.
They faced each other at her bedroom door, embarrassed, and in Kai’s case, still aroused as she could see through the fabric of his loose pajama pants. She felt a savage triumph at knowing she wouldn’t be the only one going to bed frustrated. “Good night, Kai,” she said.
“Good night.”
She closed the door behind her, and fell into bed, knowing it would be difficult to get back to sleep.
Chapter Seven
Kai and Brya didn’t speak much in the morning beyond perfunctory greetings. She busied herself with studying star charts in the cockpit, and he holed up in his room and tried to read a Fleet-issued engineering text on his datapad. By early afternoon he had re-read the same module and still couldn’t absorb any of the information inside. Irritated, he set it aside.
He couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened only hours before, and he doubted Brya could either. Over and over his mind replayed the sensation of her lips against his, the feel of her body, the citrus scent of her hair. It was maddening. Twelve years ago he would have leaped at the opportunity to take what she was offering. Now, he had some scruples. If he had done what his body had urged him to do, he would have violated one of his few firm morals. She was in danger. He was supposed to be her protector. A few things on her ship were malfunctioning and he knew how to fix them. If he had let things continue, he would be treating her like a prostitute. She deserved better.
“Kai?” He heard her call his name from the cockpit. He got off the bed.
Something resembling music drifted out of the wall-mounted computer, a slow electronic beat that made him grateful he couldn’t hear it from his room. She was tapping around on the command consoles in front of her, periodically checking the deep space beyond. A yacht passed by. “Is something wrong?” He slid into the co-pilot’s seat.
She shook her head. “Not yet. There’s a minor fuel line break. It’s happened before.” Panic must have registered on his features, because she smiled and said, “Don’t worry about it. There’s a spaceport about two hours away from here where I can fix it. I’m on good terms with the staff there, and they’ll rent a dock to me on credit.”
“You don’t worry about spontaneous fuel line breaks in space?”
“There are safeguards in place,” Brya said. “Life support will still run and the ship will still move. We just have to get our asses to that spaceport.” Her hands grazed the controls as she changed course. “It’ll take a couple of hours when we get there. I know exactly where the break is and before you say anything, you’re not helping. You’ve done enough, and you’re still on medical leave. Besides, I don’t want anyone there to see you.”
“Your friends at this spaceport know Wethmore?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out,” she said. “I started docking and refueling there when I bought the Rapture.”
>
He nodded. He was relieved to feel the tension from their early morning indiscretion fizzling out.
“Kai,” she said quietly.
The tension returned. He knew what was coming.
“About … what happened,” she said. She turned to face him. He turned his head. If he swiveled his seat around their knees would touch. He wanted to cut her off, apologize and ask her to forget it, but words failed him.
She grasped for them, too. “I … it was awkward,” she said finally.
“Yeah.” Awkward didn’t quite cover what he’d had to sleep with last night.
“Just so you know,” she said, and forced a small laugh. “Wow. I’ve never had this kind of conversation before. Um…” She self-consciously tucked a hank of blue-streaked hair behind her ear. “I know it looks really bad, but I wasn’t trying to, well … offer payment for what you’ve done for me.” Her cheeks flushed scarlet.
Kai felt his own face grow hot. “I wasn’t trying to collect.” Despite their mutual mortification, he felt relieved by her admission. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” she quickly assured him. She hesitated. “It was … nice.”
Nice? Nice? Kai struggled not to take offense.
Her eyes searched his face. “Say something,” she said.
“I don’t usually hear nice to describe my techniques.”
“Well, what kind of words do you hear?”
Shit. She had him stuck there. “I don’t usually take up with wordsmiths,” he said.
She laughed, genuinely this time. “Well, I’m not a wordsmith,” she said, exaggerating the last word. “But just because I’m not singing your praises in four languages doesn’t mean…” She trailed off.
His pulse quickened. “What?”
“That I didn’t like it. Because I did. There. Are you happy now?” She crossed her arms and glared at him.
Actually, yes, he was happy to hear about that. He hadn’t kissed her since that awkward peck on the lips when they were married—not exactly a stellar moment in time, mostly because she had been sulking during the whole miserable ceremony—but it was gratifying to hear that she hadn’t faked a response.
Or offered it in exchange for fixing a few things on her ship.
“Me, too,” he said.
She swiveled her chair back around to face the controls. “So,” she said after a pause. She kept her eyes on the starfield.
“So.”
“Let me ask you a hypothetical question,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“Let’s imagine a reality where we weren’t forced into an arranged marriage when we were seventeen,” she began.
He nodded.
“Let’s say you weren’t going with me to drop off this accident waiting to happen on a planet in the Outer Rims and I wasn’t in trouble with the Fleet. Let’s say we met at a bar on Karys Station. What would happen?”
“I don’t go trolling around in bars that much anymore. It takes a lot to make me notice. You’d have to be showing a lot of cleavage.”
“Gods, Kai, just go along with it.”
He sighed dramatically. “I’d probably buy you a drink,” he admitted.
“And?”
“And what do you want me to say? I think you’re really attractive.” But attractive didn’t do Brya justice. He had thought she was gorgeous when they were kids, and he still did. The multicolored hair and tattoos, ordinarily features that didn’t catch his interest, only added to it.
“I mean, what would you do after you bought me a drink?”
“Brya, you don’t have to go fishing for information. If really you want to know, I don’t do one-night stands anymore, and that’s what usually happens when a couple meet in a bar, especially on a station like Karys, especially with Fleet officers. Can we change the locale? Let’s say you were a civilian contractor at Crystal Station and refueled the Starspot whenever we stopped by.”
“Contractors can’t have one-night stands with Fleet officers?”
Damn it, she was enjoying this, and Kai was letting himself get suckered in. “Yes,” he said.
“Is that an admission?”
“I’m not discussing that with you, any more than I’d ask you about your old lovers.”
She faced him, a smirk on her face. “I don’t have as much to tell as you.”
“Stop baiting me.”
“Stick to the subject and I won’t have to. What would you do, if we didn’t know each other and you ran into me in a bar? And don’t say you’d ask me to a vidshow or dinner.”
“What if those were the things I wanted to do?”
She shot him a look that questioned his intelligence. “Just because I’ve never dealt with the Fleet until now doesn’t mean I don’t have a good idea of what goes on in space. There’s only so much transporter code one person can write in a day without going bugshit.”
She had him there. The Fleet was the reason VD vaccines were widely used. “You really want to know?”
She nodded.
He took a deep breath, but it didn’t dissipate the shock flowing through him at the words he was going to say, something he never imagined he would utter to his former wife. “We’d be two strangers in a bar.”
She nodded again.
“I’d buy you a drink. And then I’d give you a story about some heroic act I’d done, rescuing a litter of kittens from some evil overlord in the Rims, a bullshit story like that. You would fall for it, and then I’d take you back to my hotel and fuck you senseless.”
Brya stared at him, jaw open in shock.
No, he couldn’t believe he had said something like that. He winced. “That came out wrong.”
She fumbled for words. “No, it didn’t. You made your point.” She was blushing furiously, clearly flustered by his admission. Over the last few days, he had seen her far more collected about being chased by a pirate and then a broken fuel line. Yet here she was, her color running high as he told her about what used to be a regular night on shore leave.
He meant every word, and she knew it.
Kai rose from the co-pilot’s seat. “I have some stuff to read in my cabin,” he said.
“It can hardly be called a cabin.”
He’d definitely gotten under her skin.
“My room, then. I have an engineering text to read up on. Let me know when we’re arriving at that spaceport.”
****
It was true that a fuel line malfunction in this part of space and on a ship like the Rapture didn’t pose a major threat. Brya could see from the report she kept running and obsessively checking that it was a small leak and they probably could have gone to the Rims before they ran into serious problems. But Brya didn’t like probably. The damaged line helped feed the secondary programs of the ship, like the replicator, communications, and the computer that ran separately from the rest of the primaries. But the connections ran around the cargo bay housing the ungraded fuel she was illegally transporting, and if the leak expanded, it could ignite her shipment. It was better to be safe than sorry, and the repair would set them back only an hour or two. Brya had done it before.
The fuel leak kept Brya’s mind off Kai’s earlier announcement. She couldn’t help but feel flattered and more than a little turned on at what he said. She had been about to propose another hypothetical situation, one closer to reality, but she realized in time that Kai clearly had no intentions of carrying out any of the answers to the questions she had posed.
It was for the best, really. After they had delivered the ungraded fuel to Ishka and Wethmore was taken down, they would go their separate ways. Kai was bound for bigger and better things in the Fleet, and Brya just wanted to try to enjoy her life. It hadn’t turned out exactly as she planned, but flying a freighter through the galaxy beat ostracism or abuse on Ra’lani any day.
There were a few ships in orbit around the Landen Spaceport 201, and she hailed traffic c
ontrol for clearance. The spaceport resembled a floating skyscraper, twenty decks in all. It was one of the older ones, built when spaceports were just that, and not gigantic artificial worlds like Karys. “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said. “This is Captain Brya Dennir on board the Rapture, requesting permission to dock.”
“Hello, Captain,” said a disembodied voice through her comm panel. “Registration?”
“Still the same. You should have it on file, and I’m flying with my ID.”
“You’re not broadcasting, Captain.”
“Let me check. Maybe there’s a glitch.” She pulled up the program that controlled ship-to-station communications on her console. There was the Rapture’s ID code, set to broadcast in open space. She sighed. “Control, could you check that again? My ship tells me I’m broadcasting my ID. Rapture, registered out of Prime in Alliance Space to Brya Dennir, ID F100453896-D.” Great, she thought. Intership communication’s decided to take a nap today. How convenient.
There was a pause on the other end, followed by muted taps as the traffic controller tried to verify her ID. “No, we’re not picking it up.”
“Can’t you input it manually?”
“We need to see your ID on our screens here, Captain. Standard operating procedure.”
“Well, my computers are telling me that my ID is broadcasting. Is there any interference on your end?” she said, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. She needed a favor from the spaceport, after all.
“We’re not picking up interference. Your ship is registering as an unknown.”
“I’ve been there before. I still have clearance codes. I can transmit them to you.” She brought up the codes that had let her dock at the spaceport before and set them to open broadcast. Her ship’s ID would be embedded in the codes.
“Receiving, Captain! Damn it!” yelled the controller. “Cease transmission! Do you want to give away docking codes to everyone in the galaxy? We’re not running a charity here! Shit!”
Brya grinned and canceled the broadcast. “Am I cleared for landing, sir?”
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