Chapter Text
The suit sealed with the same hiss it always did. Same pressure check, same automated voice confirming cabin atmosphere, same green lights cascading down the HUD in the order she’d memorised months ago. Nothing different. Everything different.
She ran through her tether sequence. Clipped, tugged, confirmed. Her fingers were steady, which annoyed her, because steady fingers meant she couldn’t blame nerves for the way her pulse was already sitting wrong in her throat.
The airlock cycled.
“Alright,” his voice said. Right there. Right in her ear, exactly where it had been last time. “You’re showing green across the board. Pressure’s nominal, O2 is nominal, thermal’s nominal. Everything’s nominal. I’m going to stop saying nominal now because I just heard myself.”
She breathed out through her nose. Carefully.
“Copy,” she said. Even. Flat. Good.
“Stepping out whenever you’re ready. No rush. Well. Some rush. The window’s about forty minutes, but that’s plenty. You could do this one in your sleep.”
She couldn’t, actually. Not this one. Not with his voice already doing that thing where it settled into the low end of its register, casual and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and nowhere else to be. He did that when he was teaching. He did it when he was walking someone through something technical and wanted them to feel like the ground underneath them was solid.
He’d done it last time too.
She pushed off.
The Hail Mary fell away beneath her. Or above her. Orientation was a choice out here and today she chose beneath, the long pale body of the ship dropping into the dark while she rose toward the task. Panel repair on the forward sensor array. Routine. She’d run the sim twice. Her hands knew the work. Her hands were not the problem.
“Looking good,” he said. “Tether’s tracking clean. You’ve got a nice line.”
She said nothing. Moved along the hull, mag-boots clicking in the rhythm she’d settled into across a dozen EVAs. Click, release, click, release. There was a meditation to it. There had been, once. Before the last time.
“Quiet out there,” he said, after a minute. Not a question. Just an observation, lightly tossed, see if it landed.
“Focusing,” she said.
“Right. Yeah. Good. I’ll just.” A pause. She could hear him shifting, the faint creak of the chair that always gave him away. “I’ll be here.”
That was the problem.
She reached the forward array. Knelt, if kneeling was the word for locking your boots and folding at the waist in zero-G. The panel housing was exactly where the schematics said it would be. She unclipped her toolkit, set it against the magnetised strip on her thigh, and got to work.
Two minutes of silence. Her breathing settled into the suit’s rhythm, the soft cycle of air across her face. She unseated the first bolt. Then the second. Her fingers were still steady. Fine. She was fine.
“So I’ve been thinking about thermal conductivity,” he said.
She closed her eyes. Just for a second. Just long enough to absorb the fact that this was going to be a Ryland-explains-something EVA and she was going to have to survive it.
“Not about. I mean. Related to the visor issue from last time. Which is resolved, obviously. The recalibration fixed it. I ran the numbers three times, everything’s solid. But it got me thinking about the more general case. Heat dissipation across the faceplate as a function of solar angle, and how the coating interacts with.” He stopped. Started again, differently. “You know how a car windshield fogs up from the inside when it’s cold outside?”
“Yes, Grace.”
“Okay, so it’s basically like that, except instead of your breath it’s the suit’s thermal regulation overshooting on the exhaust side, and instead of a car you’re in vacuum, so the delta is.” He paused. “Are you listening or are you tolerating?”
“I’m removing a panel housing.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“They might be.”
He laughed. Just a short sound, barely there, but it came through the comms like a physical thing. She felt it behind her sternum, which was idiotic, which she noted clinically and filed away for later examination.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll save the thrilling conclusion for debrief.”
She got the housing off. Underneath, the sensor cluster was exactly as expected. One contact point showing corrosion. Simple swap. She reached for the replacement module and slotted it in, and her hands did not shake, and his breathing was steady in her ear like it had always been there, like it was part of the suit’s life-support systems, one more thing keeping her alive that she was not supposed to notice.
“Module’s seated,” she said. “Running the diagnostic now.”
“Copy. I’m seeing it on my end. Give it a second.”
She gave it a second. Then three. The silence stretched, and in it she could hear everything. The suit’s air circulation. Her own pulse, which she was not going to think about. His breathing, which she was absolutely not going to think about.
“Diagnostic’s clean,” he said. “Nice work.”
Something about the way he said it. Nice work. Two words, nothing behind them, except she could hear the shape of the other thing he’d said last time. You handled it really well. Same cadence. Same low, even tone. Like praise was just how he talked when he wasn’t trying to be anything, and the fact that it landed like a hand on the back of her neck was her problem, not his.
“Replacing the housing now,” she said.
“Take your time. No rush. Just nice and easy.”
She didn’t want to take her time. She wanted to finish and get back inside and take the suit off and stop being in a small sealed space with his voice and nothing else. Except she also didn’t want that. Except the part of her that had been managing this for months, the part that kept careful distance and showed up to meals five minutes after he sat down and chose the chair on the opposite side of the lab, that part was losing an argument she hadn’t agreed to have.
She lined up the first bolt. Drove it home.
“Good. That’s seated. Second one should line up if you angle it about ten degrees left.”
She angled it. It caught. He was right, because he was always right about the mechanical things, the spatial things, the things he could see from the console better than she could feel with her hands.
“There you go. Just like that. Steady.”
His voice had dropped. Not dramatically. Not in a way she thought he’d noticed. But the register had shifted, the same way it had shifted last time without either of them naming it. Slower. More deliberate. The spaces between the words wider, like each one was being placed carefully instead of tumbling out in the usual pile.
She drove the second bolt in.
“That’s it,” he said. Low. Warm. “Two down. You’re doing really well.”
Her hands stopped. Not because of the words. Because of the way he said them. Unhurried. Patient. Like he had nothing else in the world to attend to except her, out here, alone with him in her ear. Like guiding her through a task was something he could do all day. Like the sound of her breathing was a readout he was monitoring and the data was good and he wanted her to know.
He didn’t know he was doing it. She was almost sure he didn’t know. The teaching register and the other register lived in the same part of his voice and he couldn’t always tell which one he’d reached for.
“Third bolt,” he said. “You might need to apply a bit more pressure on this one. The threading’s tighter on the forward mounts. Just. Press in and hold it. Firm. Let it catch.”
She pressed. Held. The bolt caught. Her breath left her harder than it should have, and the suit picked it up and the channel carried it, and in the silence after she heard him register it. A tiny pause. The creak of the chair as he shifted.
“That’s good,” he said, and his voice was even lower now, and she did not think he was talking about the bolt anymore, or rather she thought he thought he was talking about the bolt but something underneath the words had come unmoored and was drifting. “Really good. One more. Take it slow.”
Take it slow. Her hands were shaking. The bolt was in her fingers and the stars were above her and his voice was in her ear telling her to take it slow and she was wet inside the suit, actually wet, and there was nowhere to put that information except in the same sealed chamber where his breathing lived.
She lined up the last bolt. Her fingers slipped. She re-seated it.
“Easy,” he said. Almost a murmur. “You’ve got it. Nice and slow. I’ll tell you when it’s there.”
She drove it in. Slowly. The threading caught, resisted, then gave, and the bolt sank home and she exhaled and his breathing was right there with hers, matched, like he’d been holding his breath along with her the whole time.
“There,” he said. Soft. Satisfied. “That’s perfect. You’re all done.”
A beat of silence.
Then another.
She could hear the moment it hit him. The sharp little intake of breath, the chair creaking as he sat up straighter. The sound of a man replaying the last two minutes in his head and hearing what she’d been hearing the whole time.
“Was that.” He stopped. Started again. His voice was different now. Higher. The warmth had been replaced by something startled and slightly panicked. “Okay, I need to. Can I ask you something?”
She pressed her forehead against the inside of her visor. The glass was cool. Clear. She could see the stars over the top of the hull and her own breath was doing nothing to them.
“Depends,” she said.
“Was that. What I just. The way I was.” He exhaled hard. “Is this weird? This. Right now. The comms. Is this weird for you? Because I just listened back to the last three minutes in my head and I. Hm. I did not sound like a flight controller.”
Her eyes were closed. Something in her chest was caught between a laugh and a freefall.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
“What did I sound like?”
She said nothing. He knew. The silence told him.
“Oh,” he said. Quietly. Then: “Oh, no.” The chair creaked. She could picture him exactly. Leaned back, one hand dragging down his face, glasses getting shoved askew, the other hand gripping whatever he’d been fidgeting with. “Okay. I didn’t. I wasn’t doing that on purpose. I need you to know that. That was not. I was just talking you through the repair and then at some point my voice apparently decided to. Without consulting me. It just.”
“I know,” she said.
“You know?”
“It happened last time too.”
Silence. A long one. She could hear him breathing and she could hear the exact moment the implication of what she’d said landed, which was the moment his breathing changed.
“It happened last time,” he repeated. Slowly. Like he was looking at a result he’d been avoiding. “And you. Noticed.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t say anything.”
“What would I have said?”
Another silence. Longer. She could hear him thinking, which was unusual, because normally his mouth and his brain were on the same wire and there was no lag at all. When Ryland Grace went quiet it meant the thing he was processing was bigger than his usual buffer.
“I pulled the comms log,” he said. Different voice now. Not panicked. Not the teaching register. Something underneath both. “After last time. I told myself I was checking the thermal data but I listened to the whole thing and the thermal data was not what I was listening to.”
She gripped the edge of the panel housing.
“I know what you sound like when you’re concentrating,” he said. “And I know what you sound like when you’re not. And last time, there was a point where you stopped concentrating on the task and started concentrating on something else. And I noticed. And I didn’t stop talking.” A pause. She could hear him swallow. “And apparently I just did it again. Without even trying. Which means it’s not a choice, it’s a. It’s a reflex. My voice hears your breathing and it just. Goes there.”
Her breath was audible. She knew it was audible because the suit picked up everything and the channel was open and he was hearing it right now, the exact thing he was describing, happening live.
“I know what it does to you,” he said. Quieter. “The voice. The channel. I know because I heard it on the recording and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The sound you made when I said ‘good girl’ was.” He stopped. “I have not been able to stop thinking about it. And I just spent three minutes doing it again without meaning to and you let me, and your breathing is doing the thing it does when you.”
“Ryland.”
“Yeah.” Barely a word. A vibration.
“I need to get back inside.”
“You do. You should.” Then, lower, so low she felt it in the base of her spine, and she didn’t know if this one was involuntary or not and she didn’t think he did either: “Come back in.”
Come back in. Two meanings. She heard both.
“Housing’s secure,” she said. “Heading back.”
“I’ll be here.” Then, after a beat, almost to himself but not quite: “I’ve been right here the whole time.”
The walk back was long. Not in distance. In the quality of the silence between them, which had changed texture and was now holding something that hadn’t been there on the way out. She moved along the hull and he tracked her on the console and neither of them spoke and it was the loudest quiet she had ever been inside. Her body was a problem she was going to have to solve in private, the suit holding in heat she could not account for on any readout, the slick gathering awareness between her legs that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with a man who had just discovered, live, on an open channel, that his voice went somewhere without him when she was the one listening.
The airlock cycled. She stepped in. Pressure normalised. Green lights. She pulled her helmet off and the ship air hit her face and she stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, breathing air that was not recycled through a small glass box three inches from her mouth.
He was not in the airlock bay.
He had been, last time. He’d been right there, hands on the clasp at her jaw, face close, and she’d had to hold very still while he disconnected her and his fingers moved and she had mapped the exact temperature of each one against her skin. He had stepped back then. Given her space.
She desuited alone. Hung the EVA gear in its locker. Went through the post-EVA checklist with her own hands and nobody else’s. Logged the panel swap. Noted the diagnostic result. Filed it.
Then she went back to her quarters and stood in the middle of the room and did not know what to do with herself.
The message from last time was still on her screen. She had not deleted it. She had also not re-read it, because re-reading it was a door and she had been standing in the frame for days.
Thermal line’s recalibrated. Should be good for next EVA. Sorry about the visor. For what it’s worth, you handled it really well.
She sat down on the edge of her bunk. Pressed her palms flat against her thighs. Thought about his voice dropping without his permission, going low and warm and deliberate while he walked her through bolt after bolt, and the exact moment he’d heard himself and panicked. My voice hears your breathing and it just goes there. A reflex, he’d called it. Not a choice. Something his body did when hers was listening. Thought about the wetness she could still feel between her legs and how she’d walked the length of the ship with it and he probably knew that too.
Twenty minutes passed. Maybe thirty. She was not counting, which was unusual, because she always counted. She counted steps to the lab, minutes between meals, the exact number of seconds it took his laugh to decay in a room. She was very good at counting and right now she was not doing it because the numbers were all wrong and she didn’t trust them.
Someone knocked.
It was a particular knock. Two quick, one slow. She’d heard it on the lab door, on storage bay panels, on the hull itself once when he was testing resonance because he’d had a theory about vibration frequencies and wanted to hear it for himself. It was a knock she would know in the dark. She did know it in the dark. Her quarters were not lit.
She got up. Her hand found the panel. The door opened.
He was standing in the corridor in a faded t-shirt that said CHEMISTRY JOKES ARE BORON and joggers and bare feet, which meant he had come from his quarters and had not stopped to put on shoes, which meant this was not a planned visit, which meant he’d gotten up and walked here before the part of his brain that edited impulses had caught up.
His glasses were askew. He had a look on his face like he’d been doing long division in his head and the answer had come out wrong in an interesting way.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“So. I’ve been. Thinking. Which, I know, not breaking news, I’m always thinking, it’s sort of a persistent condition, but I’ve been thinking about. Specifically.” He pushed his glasses up. They went crooked in the other direction. “Can I come in?”
She stepped back.
He stepped in. The door closed behind him and now they were in her quarters together and the room was small and she was acutely aware of every object in it. Bunk. Desk. Chair. Her suit liner draped over the chair’s back. The screen with his message still on it, visible from where he was standing if he looked left, which he did, because he was Ryland and he looked at everything.
He saw it. She watched him see it.
“You kept that,” he said.
“I didn’t not delete it.”
“That’s. Yeah. That’s not the same as keeping it.” But he was smiling. Barely. A tilt at the corner of his mouth that she had catalogued across months of careful observation from across tables and labs and corridors and was now seeing from four feet away.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Not unkindly. She needed the data.
“I’m. Okay.” He pressed his hands together in front of his mouth, the gesture he made when he was organising information. When he was about to teach something. “I’ve been running the numbers. On this. On us. And I know that sounds. I know you can’t actually run numbers on. But I’m me, so that’s how I. The point is, I arrived at a conclusion, and the conclusion is that I can’t actually keep pretending the conclusion is ambiguous, because it isn’t, it hasn’t been for a while, and I think you know that, and I think I knew you knew that when I sent that message, and I think we’re in a feedback loop that is not going to resolve by leaving it alone.”
She was standing very still. She could feel her pulse in her wrists.
“Also my voice apparently does things without my permission when you’re on comms and I can’t. I can’t unknow that. And I told you about the comms log and I’m not sorry I told you and I’m here because I’d rather be in this room dealing with the consequences than in my room pretending there aren’t any.”
“So you came to my quarters. At.” She glanced at nothing, because there was no clock where she looked. “Whatever time it is.”
“It’s 2340 ship time.”
“At 2340 ship time. Without shoes.”
He looked down at his feet. Looked back up. “Yeah, the shoes thing was. I was horizontal and then I was walking and the shoes just. They didn’t make the cut. I prioritised.”
“Prioritised.”
“Getting here. Before I talked myself out of getting here. Which I was going to do, for the record. I had a whole out prepared. I was going to tell myself that the EVA comms thing was just. Proximity and adrenaline and the channel doing something acoustic that. But it’s not. That’s not what it is. And I think you know that.”
“I know that,” she said.
He stopped. Everything stopped. The monologue, the fidgeting, the low-grade chaos of his energy filling the room. For one second he was completely still, and she understood that this was what it looked like when a joke was supposed to arrive and didn’t.
“Okay,” he said. Softly. “Okay, so. Now what.”
She didn’t answer. She closed the distance herself.
It was two steps. His back hit the door and her hands found his chest and his were at her waist before she registered that he’d moved, which meant his reflexes were faster than his editorial process, which she had suspected for months and was now confirming empirically.
“Oh,” he said, against her mouth. Not a word. A sound. Like he’d just observed something unexpected under a microscope and found it very, very interesting.
She kissed him and he tasted like recycled ship water and the peppermint gum he rationed like it was oxygen and he kissed her back immediately, no hesitation, no second-guessing, his hands pulling her in like he’d already solved the logistics of this and was just waiting for the experimental phase. His tongue found hers and the sound she made was involuntary and small and he swallowed it, pulled her closer, his fingers digging into her hips through her clothes.
His glasses pressed into her cheekbone. She reached up and took them off and he made a sound like she’d removed something structural.
“I can’t see,” he said.
“You don’t need to see.”
“Fair point. Very fair point. Excellent point.” He was talking into the kiss, words dissolving against her mouth, and she realised that this was what it was going to be like with him. That the monologue did not stop. That the thinking engine ran and ran and ran and the only way to change the output was to change the input.
She bit his lower lip. Gently. Experimentally.
The monologue stopped.
His hands tightened at her waist and then moved, one sliding up her spine and the other pulling her hips flush against his, and she could feel him already hard against her stomach, the specific undeniable shape of it through his joggers, and the sound he made was low and involuntary and she felt it everywhere. In her teeth. In the base of her spine. In the space behind her ribs where she’d been storing the sound of his voice for months, carefully, the way you store something volatile.
“I have thought about this,” he said, pulling back just far enough to breathe. His eyes were unfocused without the glasses, pupils blown, and he was looking at her like she was data he couldn’t quite believe. “A lot. More than is. Professionally appropriate. Or personally sustainable. I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“You’re not subtle.”
He laughed. A real one. The kind she’d heard through walls and across labs and once, memorably, from three compartments away when something in an experiment had surprised him. It broke open in the small room and she felt the last of her careful distance collapse like a structure that had been waiting for permission.
“I’m really not,” he said. “I’m really, really not.” And then he kissed her again, and this time there was no talking, just his hands and her hands and the slow, deliberate process of learning how another person worked.
She pulled his shirt up. He helped, arms tangling briefly because the room was small and he was clumsy and she was impatient, and then it was off and her palms were flat against his chest and he was warm. Warmer than the suit contact, warmer than the accidental brushes in the lab, warmer than anything her imagination had been able to construct in the weeks she’d spent not thinking about this while thinking about nothing else.
“Your turn,” he said, and his voice had dropped into that register. The one from the comms channel. The one that had started all of this, the patient, low, instructional tone that he used without knowing what it did and then, at some point, had started knowing.
She pulled her shirt off.
He looked at her. Not quickly, not with a glance he’d pretend was casual. He looked at her the way he looked at things that fascinated him. Openly. With his whole attention. Like she was a phenomenon he intended to understand completely.
“Wow,” he said, barely audible. Then, quieter: “Wow.”
“Is that a scientific assessment?”
“It’s a preliminary observation. I’ll need more data.” His hands came up and she thought he’d go for the obvious but he didn’t. He traced the line of her collarbone. Followed it from her shoulder to the hollow of her throat and then down, fingertips dragging over the swell of her breast, circling but not touching where she wanted him to. Mapping her. Learning the territory before committing to a direction.
“You’re doing the teacher thing,” she said. Her voice was thinner than she wanted it to be.
“What teacher thing.”
“Where you go slow so the student can keep up.”
His hand stilled against her ribs. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her with an expression she hadn’t seen before. Not the grin, not the deflection, not the curiosity. Something underneath all of that. The thing that lived under the noise.
“You keep up fine,” he said. Quietly. The way he’d said I’m really not on the comms. Bare.
Then his thumb dragged across her nipple and her breath caught and his eyes darkened, watching the reaction like it was the most important result he’d ever observed. He did it again. Slower. Circling, then a light pinch that made her gasp and press into his hand.
“There it is,” he murmured. “That sound. That’s the one.”
She kissed him again because she didn’t know what to do with that and he pulled her against him and they made it to the bunk through some combination of steps and stumbles, and she felt his shin connect with the frame and heard the short, bitten-off “ow, okay, that’s” and then they were down and the narrow mattress was not built for two people and neither of them cared.
He was over her, mouth on her throat, her collarbone, the space between her breasts. His hand found one and his mouth found the other and the wet heat of his tongue on her nipple made her arch into him so hard she almost lost contact with the mattress. He groaned against her skin, a vibration she felt in her ribs, and his hips pressed into hers and she could feel how hard he was, the full thick length of him pinned between their bodies, and she rolled up against it and the sound he made was ragged and desperate and nothing like a man who was in control of anything.
“You’re. You can’t just.” He was breathing against her breast, forehead pressed to her sternum, trying to assemble a sentence while she rocked against him. “I’m trying to take my time here. I have a whole. I had a sequence planned. You’re skipping ahead.”
“Your sequence is taking too long.”
“It’s thorough. I’m a thorough person. I have a scientific obligation to be.” She rolled her hips again and the sentence died. “Okay. Okay, you win. You win.”
His hands went to her waistband. Pulled her pants down, underwear with them, and then his palm was flat on her bare thigh and she was naked under him and the air in the room was cool against skin that was not cool at all. He looked down the length of her and his expression went slack for a second, completely unguarded, and she watched him lose a fight with himself in real time.
“You are.” He shook his head. “I’m not going to be able to be articulate about this. I need you to accept that I have a PhD and I am currently unable to form a complete sentence.”
His hand slid up the inside of her thigh. Slow. She let her legs fall open for him and his breath stuttered, audibly, on the comms-quality microphone of the two feet between his mouth and her ear.
His fingers found her and they both went still.
“You’re so wet,” he said. Low and wrecked and honest. “Is this. How long have you been like this? Since the EVA? Since I.”
“Since you told me you pulled the comms log.” Her voice was barely functional. “Since you told me you listened.”
His fingers slid through the slick of her, parting her, learning the shape of her with the same careful attention he gave everything that fascinated him. He found her clit and circled it once, lightly, testing, and her whole body tightened.
“Right here?” he asked. Not a guess. A confirmation.
“Yes. There. Right there.”
“Okay. Good. That’s.” His thumb settled into a rhythm, slow circles with exactly enough pressure, and then his fingers slid lower and one pushed inside her and she bit down on her own lip and his breath caught. “You make the best sounds. Has anyone ever told you that? You probably don’t want me to talk right now.”
“Don’t stop talking.”
He looked at her. Registered what she’d said. And she watched the understanding land, the data point connecting with every other data point he’d been collecting since the comms channel. The breathing, the silence, the way she’d fallen apart to nothing but his voice in her ear.
“Yeah?” Low. Lower than the comms. Lower than anything. “You want to hear me.”
She couldn’t speak. She nodded.
“Okay.” He added a second finger and curled them and she choked on air. His mouth came down to her ear, and he was right there, the same distance as the comms, the same frequency, the same voice but warmer and real and in the same room, and when he spoke she felt it through her whole body. “You’re so tight around my fingers. I can feel every time you clench. Right here.” He pressed deeper, curled again, found the spot that made her vision blur. “There. That’s the one. I can tell because you stop breathing for a second and then it comes back twice as hard.”
Her back arched off the bunk. Her hand found his wrist and held on.
“You’re close, aren’t you? I can tell. I’ve been listening to you for months and I know what you sound like when you’re trying to hold it together and I know what you sound like when you can’t.” His thumb kept circling her clit, his fingers kept that devastating rhythm inside her, and his voice was the third point of contact, the one that had always undone her. “Let go. I want to feel it. I want to feel you come on my hand and I want to hear what that sounds like when I’m in the room for it.”
She broke. Not gently. Not quietly. She came with his voice in her ear and his fingers inside her and her hand clenched around his wrist and the sound she made was loud enough that in any other context she would have been mortified but he was making a sound too, a low, shattered groan against her temple, and he was working her through it, not stopping, fingers and thumb keeping the rhythm while her body clenched and released and clenched around him.
“That’s it,” he breathed. “That’s it. You have no idea what you look like right now.”
She floated. Came back. His hand had stilled but not left, fingers still inside her, and his forehead was pressed against her temple, and he was breathing like he’d been running.
“Okay,” he said. Hoarse. “Okay. So. That was.”
“Don’t analyse it.”
“I’m not analysing it. I’m appreciating it. There’s a difference. One involves spreadsheets and the other involves lying here with my hand still inside you trying to remember how my cardiovascular system works.” He lifted his head. Looked at her. In the low light of her quarters, without his glasses, his face was open and stripped and slightly stunned. “You’re incredible.”
She reached for him. The waistband of his joggers, tugging them down, and he helped with the graceless urgency of a man who had been patient for exactly as long as his nervous system could sustain and had arrived at the limit. His cock was hard and flushed and when she wrapped her hand around it he hissed through his teeth and his hips jerked, one sharp involuntary thrust into her fist.
“Oh. That’s. Okay. That is.” He was propped on one arm and his head dropped forward and she could see his stomach muscles tighten as she stroked him, slow, root to tip, learning the weight and the heat and the specific way he throbbed in her hand. Thick. Hot. The skin velvet-soft and the shaft rigid beneath it. She ran her thumb over the head and it was slick already, leaking, and the sound he made was the sound of a man who had been thinking about this for weeks and was unprepared for the reality of it.
“I need to,” he started. “I should get. There might be. In my quarters, I have.”
“Implant,” she said. “I’m cleared. If you are.”
“I. Yes. Yeah. Clean bill. The pre-mission physicals were. They were very thorough. Uncomfortably thorough, actually, there was a whole thing with.” He closed his eyes. “I’m talking about medical exams right now. While you’re holding my. You’re holding my dick and I’m talking about medical exams.”
“It’s very you.”
“It’s really not my best work.” He kissed her. Hard, graceless, and she guided him between her legs and he settled against her, the length of him pressed along the wet heat of her, and when he rocked forward the drag of his cock through her folds made them both groan.
“Like this?” he asked, pressed against her entrance, barely there, trembling with the effort of not pushing in.
“Yes.”
He pushed into her slowly. One long, devastating slide, inch by inch, and she felt every part of it, the stretch and the fullness and the way her body opened around him and pulled him deeper. He was big enough that it ached at first, a bright, sweet sting that faded into pressure that faded into heat, and she exhaled and he exhaled and the sound he made into her mouth was the best thing she had ever heard. Better than the comms. Better than her name. A broken, shuddering breath that contained the ruins of every joke he’d ever used to keep distance.
He bottomed out. Held still. Buried in her to the hilt, his hip bones flush against the inside of her thighs, and she could feel him everywhere. The throb of him inside her. The weight of his body braced over hers. His heartbeat against her ribs, fast and real and here.
“Oh,” he said, very quietly. “You feel. I can’t. You’re so.” He pressed his face into her neck and breathed and she felt his cock twitch inside her and his whole body shudder. He held there. Not moving. Just breathing. Just feeling her. She could feel the effort of it in his arms, in the locked line of his shoulders, and she understood that he was trying to stay inside this moment without rushing through it. That he was paying attention the way he paid attention to everything that mattered to him.
She clenched around him. Deliberately.
His breath left him in a rush against her throat. She did it again.
“You’re mean. You’re a mean person. I want you to know that.” But his hips moved, a shallow rocking thrust that was less decision than reflex, and the friction of it dragged a sound out of her that made him do it again, harder.
He started to move. Slow at first, careful, long deep strokes that pulled almost all the way out and then sank back in, and each one pressed the head of his cock against the spot his fingers had found earlier and she couldn’t keep quiet. Every thrust punched a sound out of her that she couldn’t shape or control and he was cataloguing each one, she could see it in his face, the way his jaw tightened when she moaned, the way his rhythm shifted when she gasped.
“There,” she said. “Right there, don’t change anything, just.”
“Here?” He angled his hips and thrust and she nearly came off the mattress. “Yeah. There. I can feel it, you get so tight when I.” He did it again. “When I hit that spot you just.” He lost the sentence entirely.
His composure was cracking. She could hear it in his voice, the sentences getting shorter, the spaces between words getting wider. The monologue was failing and what was underneath it was raw and wrecked and honest.
“You feel so good,” he said, and it was the least complicated thing he’d said all night. No analogy, no deflection, no self-deprecating follow-up. Just the fact. “You feel so good I can’t think.”
She put her arm over her eyes.
It was instinct. Not a decision. She needed to stop seeing him so she could hear him, needed the dark behind her forearm to turn his voice back into the thing it had been in the suit, the thing it had been on the comms, close and disembodied and everywhere. The visual was too much. Too real. Too many inputs. She needed the channel. She needed just his voice.
He slowed. She felt it immediately, the rhythm dropping, his hips stilling halfway through a stroke.
“Hey,” he said. Soft. Careful. “Are you.”
“Don’t stop.” Her voice was wrecked. “Keep going. Keep talking. I just need to. I can’t look at you and hear you at the same time. It’s too much. I need to just hear you.”
A beat. She couldn’t see his face but she heard the breath he took, the sharp little catch of understanding. She heard the chair on the comms. She heard the EVA. She heard him put it together.
“Oh,” he said. Barely a sound. And then, lower, the register dropping back to the place it went when her breathing changed: “You want it like the channel.”
She nodded behind her arm.
He started to move again. Slower now. Deliberate. Each thrust deep and measured and she could feel every inch of him and the dark behind her arm was the dark inside the suit and his voice was right there, right in the space where it lived, where it had always lived.
“I’m right here,” he said. Close. His mouth near her ear, his weight over her, and the voice was the voice. The frequency. The low, warm, patient thing that had taken her apart through vacuum-sealed glass. “I’ve got you. Can you feel that? How deep I am? You’re taking all of me and you’re. The sounds you make when I’m all the way in. I’ve been thinking about those sounds for weeks. I used to sit in the lab and watch you across the room and wonder what you’d sound like if I.”
She made a sound. She didn’t know what it was. It came from somewhere below language and his hips snapped forward and the combination of the dark and his voice and the fullness of him inside her was the EVA and the comms and the suit all over again except he was real and warm and pressing her into the mattress and she was going to come apart.
“That’s it,” he said, and his voice was fraying. “Right there. You’re so close. I can feel you getting tighter and I can hear it in your breathing, the same way I could hear it on the channel, except now I can feel it too and it’s.” The sentence broke. His hips stuttered. “It’s so much better than I imagined and I imagined it a lot.”
She pulled him down with her free hand. Kissed him blind, her arm still over her eyes, finding his mouth by feel, and his sound against her lips was shattered and desperate. His pace picked up, harder now, the careful rhythm dissolving into something uncoordinated, his hips snapping into hers, and she could hear the slick wet sounds of their bodies meeting on every thrust and his breathing ragged and her own voice saying things she wouldn’t remember, his name and “harder” and “please” and “there, right there, don’t stop.”
“I’m close,” he said, strained. “I can’t. I’m going to.”
“Not yet.” She reached between them. Found her clit. Circled it with her fingers while he kept moving and the combination of both was too much and not enough and exactly right. Her arm was still over her eyes. She was in the dark with his voice and his body and her own hand and nothing else.
“Are you.” His rhythm stuttered when he realised what she was doing. She couldn’t see his face but she heard the sound he made, punched out of him. “You’re touching yourself. While I’m inside you. That is. That is the single best thing I have ever. In my whole life. Including the thing with the Astrophage. This is better. This is objectively better than discovery-level science.”
She would have laughed but her orgasm hit her like a system failure, sudden and total, her whole body locking tight around him, clenching in waves, and the sound she made was broken and loud and she felt it in her throat for hours afterward. He felt it too. She knew because his hips stuttered and his mouth opened on a sound that had no consonants in it.
“Oh. Oh, I can feel you. I can feel you coming. That’s.” His rhythm fell apart. Three more thrusts, deep and desperate and graceless, and then he buried himself to the hilt and came inside her with a groan that started in his chest and ended nowhere, just kept going, his cock pulsing inside her while his body shook and his hands gripped the sheets and he said her name into her neck in a voice she had never heard from him and would never forget.
She moved her arm. Opened her eyes. The light in the room was low and his face was right there, closer than she’d expected, and the expression on it was the most undefended thing she had ever seen on another person. Like he’d been taken apart and hadn’t started reassembling yet. Like she’d found the frequency under all his frequencies, the one he didn’t know he was broadcasting.
She held him through it. Hands on his back, feeling the aftershocks run through him, the small involuntary jerks of his hips as he emptied himself inside her. She could feel the warmth of it, the spreading fullness, and he was shaking and she was shaking and the small bed in her small quarters on the ship that was carrying them both through the incomprehensible dark held them anyway.
Silence. The real kind. Not the loaded, waiting silence of the comms channel but the thick, settling quiet of two people who had just stopped pretending and were lying in the aftermath of honesty.
He pulled out slowly. She felt the loss of him and then the slick mess of it, evidence, running down the inside of her thigh, and he looked down and his expression was something she filed away carefully. Possessive was the wrong word. Awed was closer.
He rolled onto his back. One arm slung over his face. She could see his chest moving. Could count his ribs in the low light if she wanted to. She wanted to.
“So,” he said, to the ceiling.
“So.”
“I came here to talk.”
“You did talk.”
“I did. I talked a lot. I talked during.” He moved his arm and looked at her. His hair was wrecked and his face was flushed and he looked like a man who had just had every equation he’d relied on for composure solved out from under him. “I talked during sex. That happened. I compared you to discovery-level science. While inside you. That is a thing that I said out loud.”
“I liked it.”
He stared at her. “You liked it.”
“I asked you not to stop.”
“You did. You did do that.” He was quiet for a second. Then: “Is it. I mean. This isn’t going to be a thing where tomorrow we pretend this was an anomalous result and go back to. Separate tables and looking at opposite walls and me talking about thermal conductivity to fill the silence because if I stop talking I’ll think about your breathing and if I think about your breathing I’ll.”
She put her hand on his chest. Over his heart. He stopped.
“It’s not an anomalous result,” she said.
He covered her hand with his. Pressed it there. His heartbeat was still fast under her palm, and he turned his head to look at her and his expression was the one from the comms, the bare one, the one under everything. The loneliness that looked like wonder when someone finally matched it.
“Okay,” he said. “Good. That’s. Good.” He exhaled. Long, slow, shaky. “I really like you. I should have. That’s what I came here to say, before the whole. I just really like you. As a scientist I feel obligated to state the hypothesis up front and I didn’t, so. For the record.”
She curled into him. His arm came around her. The ship hummed its low, constant hum, the frequency that lived beneath everything, that you stopped hearing until you listened for it.
“I know,” she said. “The signal was pretty clear.”
He laughed. Softly, into her hair. His arm tightened.
“Frequency locked,” he said.
She closed her eyes.