KIKO (MC Bear Mates Book 3)

by Becca Fanning

  “I mean, there’s not a whole lot of ways you can describe Custer, from what I’ve read. He seems like a handful.”

  “Yeah, a handful of live dynamite,” Hyde said, leaning back. “His defining characteristic used to be ‘masturbates with his metal hand.’ Now it’s ‘ended up in a committed relationship with the splice assassin sent to kill us.’”

  Thalia tucked that little tidbit of information about Delphine away for a rainy day which, courtesy of being spaceborn, could arguably be any day she chose. “They’re good people, though. Or at least, they seem like it.”

  At that, Hyde actually laughed. “Oh, no one on this bird is a good person. Closest we’ve got is probably Zosha just because she doesn’t kill people directly. But we’re hospitable.”

  “Right,” Thalia said, drawing out the vowel. “’Hospitable’ is exactly the word I would use for you.”

  “Not dead yet, are you?” He asked, eyebrows raising.

  “The ‘yet’ part sort of ruined the effect I think you were going for there,” Thalia replied. “Can I sit?”

  Hyde gestured broadly. “Go for it.”

  Thalia pulled the chair away from the oddly spotless desk pushed against the wall opposite the bed and sat gingerly, allowing her bag to fall to the floor.

  “So if I start asking you questions, are you going to shift and bite my head off?” Thalia asked, rummaging around for her main tablet.

  Hyde looked at her, considering. “How about this. You ask me a question, I ask you one.”

  Thalia looked up. “Okay? I mean, I’m not very interesting. You’ll be disappointed.”

  Disbelief flickered in Hyde’s eye. “You track me down and chase me across at least one system border to get this story, then corner me in a bar with the apparent intent to pull a honeypot on me, and you say you’re not interesting? Come on.”

  “Alright,” Thalia said, shrugging. “I warned you, though. Why did you want to join the Red Quarter’s guard?”

  “They paid well, and the insurance covers damn near everything. And I’ve always been aggressive,” Hyde answered easily. “Why did you become a journalist?”

  “Took a bunch of random writing electives and then realized I had to actually graduate at some point,” Thalia said. Hyde made a go on gesture and she sighed. “I think people are idiots who make shitty decisions. I want them to be informed so they have the opportunity to make less shitty decisions. What’s your family like?”

  “My parents are live on Rajan now. They’re strict, but good parents. They know what I do for a living now and haven’t disowned me. What’s yours like?” Hyde asked.

  “We all get on much better now that most of them are dead,” she answered, which was a fair summary of the first fifteen tear-stained years of her life. “Who are you favorite and least favorite people on the ship?”

  “Dominic and Annie, I get along with the best,” Hyde said. “We understand each other. Everyone else is fine, except Custer, who’s the sentient version of an infected ingrown toenail. Who are your favorite and least favorite people?”

  “I have a couple friends I hung out with back on Goton. I try not to have least favorite people because it’s exhausting, but at the moment Tillman is at the top of that list as the person who has most recently tried to kill me. What do you do in your free time?”

  “Talk to Dominic. Read. I like crossword puzzles. You?” Hyde asked.

  “I have been known to do the occasional crossword. I watch a lot of soap operas,” Thalia told him.

  “Soap operas? Really?”

  Thalia shrugged. “Look, my job is talking about all the ways reality sucks. Soap operas are basically my happy place. If you could go anywhere in the universe, where would you go?”

  “I’d stay here,” Hyde answered immediately. “My crewmates are insane, but they’re my crewmates. Why do you write the kind of articles you do?”

  “Didn’t I just answer this?” Thalia asked.

  “No, you told me why you became a journalist. That’s a general question. I’m asking why you write the specific articles you write. No offense, but you don’t seem the good Samaritan type.”

  “You stalk a man once…” Thalia sighed. “I write the specific articles I write because I don’t see the point in having a platform capable of reaching people billions of miles away and using it for gossip. Or at least not just for gossip. Why didn’t you leave me behind when you had the opportunity?”

  “Because the others would have never let me live it down,” Hyde said. It was almost believable except that his gaze was trained on her left ear instead of her face.

  Thalia made a buzzer sound. “Wrong! Either tell me the truth or pass and I’ll dedicate myself to wheedling the truth out of you later. It’s what I do for a living, I’m very good at it.”

  Hyde stared at her for a tense moment, then huffed out a resigned sounding sigh. “I don’t relax. Ever. It’s not that I enjoy being uptight, but Dominic and Rick are the only ones on this ship that think before they act, and Dom can’t put himself in situations that stress him out too much and Rick trusts the captain too much. So that means when people make dumbass decisions, I’m sometimes the only one willing to say they’re dumbass decisions. Like with Annie, and Zosha. I’m glad they’re here now and that it all worked out, but at the time they were strangers with dangerous people chasing them and we didn’t have the connections we have now. We didn’t have the benefit of being able to see the future and know it’d all be fine, so I stand by not trusting them when they first boarded. There’s too much jumping first and looking second on this ship for me to be able to take it easy most of the time.”

  “I don’t understand what that has to do with me,” Thalia said uncertainly.

  “At the bar, when you walked over… I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t think of a reason to be tense. For once, my first instinct was to just go with flow and see where I ended up. You sidled up, all smiles, and offered to buy me a drink and I was able to relax for what seemed like the first time since we ran into Annie.”

  Thalia felt something uncomfortably like guilt twitch in her stomach. “And then I nearly got you killed.”

  Hyde snorted. “No, and then you nearly got you killed. Tillman’s hitmen are as incompetent as his politics when he’s not framing innocent men for murder.”

  “Still, I’m…” Thalia swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you don’t apologize much?” Hyde asked, sounding almost amused.

  “Because you’ve got animal instinct on your side. How do you feel about pretending this never happened and never, ever telling anyone we had actual emotions?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Hyde said.

  There was the sort of awkward pause that followed unexpected emotional connections. Thalia reached into her bag and pulled out a plastic water bottle that’s she’d filled with rum. She popped the top and took a swig before wordlessly handing it to Hyde, who accepted with a raised eyebrow. He nodded approvingly after taking a sip.

  “Not bad,” he told her, handing the bottle back over.

  “I figure there’s a time to get wasted on the cheap shit and a time to bring out the decent stuff,” she replied. “This is the second.”

  “I have nine hours before I’m on deck. Is there anything you need to do before that?” he asked.

  Thalia considered. “Nope, can’t think of anything.”

  Hyde pushed himself up the bed until he was leaning against the wall and grabbed the tablet on the table.

  “Alright. I’ll probably go to sleep in an hour, so if you need anything after that, go find Delphine.”

  Thalia stood up and walked to the far side of the bed, bottle held loosely on one hand. She sat, toeing her shoes off, then rolled over so she could see what Hyde was working on. Hyde gave her a silent, judging look but proceeded to turn to his tablet and open a crossword app without telling her to fuck off so she decided to count it as a win.

  “Eight down is �
��coronation,’ you know,” she told him.

  He grunted in response and typed it in. Thalia watched as he typed in a few more answers before giving in to her need to be talking.

  “So what’s your deal with Zosha, anyways?” she asked.

  Hyde sighed. “She’s irritatingly perky and thinks she’s more mysterious than she is. She’s somehow become our mascot and I don’t like it. Also, she listens to annoying music while at the deck. Why don’t you have thirty million friends and what’s the theoretical temperature at which molecular activity ceases, two words?”

  “That’s two questions.”

  “Okay, one, you skipped my turn, and two, I don’t count help on a crossword worth personal information on its own,” Hyde informed her.

  “I don’t have thirty million friends because I’ve been reliably informed that I have trouble ‘letting people in’ and ‘expressing myself,’” she told him, making finger quotes. “Also, absolute zero.” She took a long sip of rum as he typed it in. “Why do you pretend you don’t have friends? Or at least, why do you pretend that Dominic is the only person on board who’s your friend?”

  “I’m not pretending, I’m just not an emotive person and don’t care to correct other people’s misassumptions. If you don’t like connecting with people, why did you choose a job that requires connecting to as many people as possible? Also, ‘egglike,’ five letters.”

  “Ovate. And the difference is my articles connect my readers to an event or a place or a person, not to me. I’m not the destination, I’m the pilot. Does that make sense? Great. So if you’re Mr. Lowkey from Planet Serious, why do you wear a bright blue eyepatch?”

  Hyde’s eye narrowed. “There’s nothing wrong with my eyepatches. How are you so calm about all this, and I need a six letter word meaning ‘irritating,’ starts with a ‘T.’”

  Thalia pouted. “Hey, now. I am a delight. I’m not freaking out because… I don’t know? I’m not exactly used to being in danger, but the worst that could happen is I die, and that’s going to happen anyways.” She paused for a moment. “’Trying.’ And why are you still being nice to me.”

  “You think this is nice? You may want to make some new friends,” Hyde said, a hint of disbelief coloring his tone.

  “In general? No. For you? Yes. I think every single one of your expressions is a variation of ‘it’s a shame I’m too busy to disembowel you right now, I’ll have to make a note to do it later’ but with me you’re… softer, maybe? The point is, you advocated for throwing Zosha out the airlock apparently because she annoys you. I chased you down to dig up your past and got you chased by assassins and you play twenty questions with me. You should hate me, but it doesn’t seem like you do,” Thalia said.

  It took so long for Hyde to answer that Thalia suspected he wasn’t going to. “Manning the array in wildspace is irritating. You’re not close enough to a tower that you can reliably get good connections, so you have to spend hours fine tuning the equipment so you can get a clear enough signal just to be able to pick up communication requests. But every so often, you pass by a ships that running on the exact same frequency as you, and the connection is perfect. No lag, no static. And I kind of get the feeling you’re maybe on the same frequency as me,” Hyde said, eye never leaving the screen.

  Thalia leaned her head on his shoulder. “I can’t believe you’re the lonely hot guy,” she said quietly.

  “The what?” Hyde asked.

  “The lonely hot guy. You know, you’re super hot but you don’t let people get too close even though your soul cries out for love. And I’m the lady who walks in at your best and only friend’s thematically important engagement party in a red dress and four inch heels and we make eye contact across the room, but I have, like, a fiancé, or a mafia boss dad, or some big important secret and we can’t be together until you chase me down in an airport to stop me from leaving by confessing your love and kiss me. While it’s raining.”

  “Is it raining in the airport?” Hyde asked with the voice of someone who dealt with people far stranger than Thalia on a daily basis.

  “Obviously,” she said, rolling her eyes. She looked up to see the barest hint—bearest hint, ha—of a smile.

  “You know, you—” she started before a yawn cut her off.

  “Long day?” Hyde asked wryly.

  “Oh, shut up,” she retorted, suddenly aware of how heavy her eyelids were. She had guessed she would crash quickly after all the excitement of the day, but she wasn’t prepared for the swiftness of the lethargy creeping over her body. “I’m just…” she trailed off, resting more heavily on his shoulder and letting out a muffled curse when her glasses pressed uncomfortably into her cheek. She pulled them off and tossed them to the side before curling instinctively back into the warmth of Hyde’s body.

  “I’m just gonna sleep for a little,” she told him blearily. “Wake me up if something happens.”

  “Of course,” Hyde answered.

  “And listen,” she said, closing her eyes and feeling her body almost melt into the mattress, “I just want you to know.” She grabbed his hand to make sure he was listening. “I’m glad you’re on my frequency.”

  She felt his fingers twitch once before gently threading through hers.

  “Good night, Thalia,” she heard him say softly before she slipped off into sleep.

  Thalia woke up, rested and refreshed (if a bit groggy), eight hours later to Hyde shaking her shoulder.

  “Whazzit?” she asked, blinking up at him.

  “I’m going to my shift,” he told her. Check in with Rick or Annie at some point to talk more about what’s going to happen.”

  She nodded and waved him off, pressing her face into the pillow and falling back asleep almost before he was out the door.

  The second time she woke up was an hour later, her body having had enough of stillness. Dressing and taking care of her morning hygiene routine quickly, she strode out the door before realizing she had no idea where she was going or what she was doing. She wandered aimlessly until she realized she was hungry and made her way to the kitchen where she found Zosha and Delphine watch a holovid over what appeared to be dried fruit.

  They looked up when she entered, Zosha smiling and Delphine nodding in acknowledgement.

  “Hey there,” Zosha said brightly. “Care to join?”

  Thalia smiled back and took a seat. Delphine pushed the plate of fruit over to her and she gratefully took what she thought was an apricot.

  “So, are you going to interview us?” Zosha asked, leaning forward and propping her chin up on her hands.

  “Do you want me to?” Thalia asked around a mouthful of apricot. “Because I totally can.”

  “Great! Do I need to pull my hair back so I look more serious?” Zosha asked.

  “No, I work mostly with audio,” Thalia said, laughing. She opened the recording app on her multi-tool and cleared her throat. “Breakwater series, entry one, subjects Zosha and Delphine. It is nine hundred in standard time and we are in the Breakwater’s kitchen. How did you two end up on the Breakwater?”

  “I stowed away in the cargo hold because I was trying to get away from people chasing me,” Zosha said. “So, a little like you. We had to settle a civil war to get them to leave me alone, but we did it. I ended up falling for Rick and never left.”

  “I was sent to assassinate the crew in retaliation for a business relationship that was disrupted when they settled that civil war. They convinced me to join them,” Delphine said.

  “Hyde mentioned that you were a splice. Who did you work for?” Thalia asked.