Chapter Text
The visor ices over on minute eleven.
Not all at once. It starts at the edges, a slow creep of crystalline white narrowing her field of vision like a camera iris closing. She watches it happen with the detached interest of someone who has read the manual on thermal regulation failure and knows this is a Category 2, not a Category 4. Annoying. Not fatal. She’ll lose visibility for a while. The suit’s internal heating will catch up eventually or it won’t, and either way she’s tethered, she’s mag-locked, she’s fine.
She’s fine.
“Uh oh,” says Grace, right in her ear.
His voice is close. That’s the thing about private comms. There’s no distance in them. He could be ten feet away on the hull or he could be sitting inside her helmet. The channel flattens everything into the same warm proximity, and his “uh oh” lands like he’s leaning over her shoulder.
And just like that, the careful architecture of the last few months collapses.
She figured it out early. Embarrassingly early. That his voice did something to her. And she did what any competent professional does with inconvenient information: she managed it. Kept a seat between them at briefings. Stayed on the other side of the lab when he was narrating his experiments to no one. Cultivated a careful, comfortable distance that let her enjoy him the way everyone enjoys him, the jokes, the warmth, the chaotic enthusiasm, without letting any of it get close enough to be a problem.
The distance worked. She’s had months of it working.
And now she’s mag-locked to the hull with a dead visor and nowhere to go and no seat to keep between them. Just his voice, filling her helmet like he’s pressed against her ear, and not a single thing she can do about it.
“I see it,” she says. “Thermal reg’s lagging.”
“Yeah, your whole visor’s going full Jack Frost. Very seasonal. Very festive. Totally useless for, you know, seeing things.”
“I can still see a little. Top left corner.”
“Top left corner. Great. You’ve got like a porthole. You’re a submarine now.”
She huffs a laugh. He keeps going, because of course he does.
“Okay. Okay, it’s fine, this happened to Olesya in sim training once and the fix was stupid simple. There’s a manual override on the thermal line. Left side of your chest plate, about four inches below the collarbone. Feel for a raised nub. Like a little bump.”
She reaches with her left hand. Glove on suit, zero finesse. It’s like trying to find a light switch wearing oven mitts.
“Little lower,” he says. “No, your lower. Yeah. Feel that?”
“Maybe?”
“It’s basically like a circuit breaker. Same concept. Push, click, wait. The heating element resets and the ice should start clearing in, I don’t know, four or five minutes.”
She pushes. Something gives under her fingertip with a faint snick.
“There you go,” he says. “Perfect.”
Her stomach does something small and stupid at the word. She ignores it. She’s a professional. She’s floating in the vacuum of space doing hull repair and she is not going to have a reaction to the word “perfect” said in a completely neutral context by a man who probably also calls his breakfast perfect when the eggs come out right.
“Now we wait,” he says.
“Now we wait,” she agrees.
The ice is not clearing fast. Her visor is almost fully opaque now, a featureless white with the barest suggestion of light filtering through. She can’t see the ship. She can’t see the stars. She can’t see Grace, who is somewhere out here with her, close enough to talk but invisible. She’s standing on the hull of a spacecraft in a white room made of frost, and the only proof she’s not alone is the sound of his breathing in her ear.
He hums. A low, tuneless thing, barely there, the kind of sound someone makes when they’re concentrating and don’t know they’re doing it.
“What are you working on over there?” she asks.
“Panel three. The seal is being a baby about it. I have to. Hold on.” A grunt. The faint scrape of a tool. “I have to kind of lever it from underneath and sweet-talk it at the same time. Come on. Come on. Okay, right, it’s like. Imagine you have a jar of pickles, but the jar is bolted to the outside of a spaceship and you’re wearing the world’s worst gloves and the pickles are actually mission-critical.”
“You’re comparing the relay seal to pickles.”
“I’m comparing the relay seal to pickles. This is what you get when you put a teacher in a spacesuit. Everything becomes an analogy.”
She should not find this charming. It is objectively absurd. He is talking about pickles while she stands blind on the skin of a ship travelling through interstellar space, and the fact that it makes her smile is her own problem.
“There,” he says. “Okay. Okay, that’s. Nope. That’s not. Hold on.”
A clatter. A scrape. A very soft “dammit.”
“Did you just drop something?”
“I didn’t drop it. It escaped. There’s a difference. It made a unilateral decision to leave my hand.”
“So you dropped it.”
“It’s mag-tethered, it’s fine. It’s like seven inches away. I just have to. Reach. Without. Overbalancing.”
A pause. A longer scrape. A whispered “come here, you little-.” Then a satisfied exhale.
“Got it?”
“Got it. Okay. Right. Where were we.”
She doesn’t answer. She’s listening to him breathe. It’s even and focused, a rhythm she can track even through the comms compression. In, out. In, out. A slight catch when he reaches for something. A longer exhale when he settles into a task.
She becomes aware, gradually and then all at once, that she has nothing to look at. Nothing to do. The visor is a wall of white. Her job right now is to stand still and wait for her suit to fix itself, and her entire sensory world has narrowed to the sound of Ryland Grace doing maintenance.
Every sound is in her ear. The small muttered commentary. The pause while he thinks. The “okay” that means he’s about to start something, soft and purposeful, like he’s cuing himself. She can hear him swallow. She can almost hear him blink.
“Hey, question,” he says. “When they designed these comms, do you think they knew they were basically building the world’s most intimate walkie-talkie? Because I can hear you breathing and it’s kind of like being at a sleepover.”
“You can hear me breathing?”
“Yeah. It’s fine. It’s nice, actually. Like company.”
Something warm moves through her chest. She files it under “suit temperature normalizing” and does not examine it further.
He starts narrating again. He can’t not. It’s pathological, the way he talks through his own process, a running monologue half-addressed to her and half-addressed to the universe at large. She catches fragments. Something about the relay coupling being “weirdly elegant, actually, look at this join, whoever designed this was having a good day.” Something about heat distribution and molecular blah blah blah. She loses the science. She keeps the voice.
He has a good voice. She’s noticed it before, objectively, the way you notice that a colleague has nice hands or a pleasant laugh. It’s warm without being deep, animated without being loud. It goes faster when he gets excited and drops lower when he’s concentrating, and right now he’s alternating between the two, bouncing from discovery to focus and back, and it’s. Fine.
It’s fine.
“Okay, I need you to do something for me,” he says.
“Sure.”
“There’s a secondary valve on your right hip. Same deal as before, feel for it. It’s about the size of a quarter. Twist counterclockwise, quarter turn.”
She reaches. Her right glove finds the curve of the suit at her hip and presses, searching. Nothing. She shifts her hand, tries again.
“Little further back,” he says. “Yeah. Think back pocket.”
Her fingers catch on something raised. She twists.
“Good,” he says, and the word drops into the low, pleased register he uses when a student gets it right on the first try.
She does not close her eyes. She was not going to close her eyes. She happened to close her eyes.
“Did it click?” he asks.
“It clicked.”
“Good. That’s the secondary thermal line. Should speed things up. You’re doing great.”
You’re doing great. Said offhandedly, the way he’d tell a thirteen-year-old they nailed a titration. There is no reason for it to hit the way it hits. No reason at all for the warmth to spread from her chest down through her stomach and settle somewhere below it, a slow heavy pulse that has absolutely nothing to do with suit temperature regulation.
She stands very, very still.
He keeps working. The sounds layer on top of each other. A wrench being seated. Bolts turning. His breath, slightly labored now from exertion, coming in shorter pushes. An occasional grunt of effort that is just sound, just a person working, and is under no obligation to be anything else.
“Almost got it,” he mutters. “Come on. Just a little more. Right. There.” A long, satisfied exhale. “Oh, that’s nice. That’s really nice. Look at that seal. That’s gorgeous.”
He is talking about metalwork. She is going to die.
“How’s the visor?” he asks.
“Still white.”
“Hmm. Okay. Give it another minute.” He pauses. “You doing okay in there? Claustrophobic at all? Because I can keep talking. I mean, I’m going to keep talking regardless, that’s not really a voluntary thing for me, but I can talk at you if you need it.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure? Because your breathing just changed.”
She feels a spike of something cold cut through the warmth. “What?”
“It’s quicker than it was a minute ago. Just slightly. I’m not. I notice stuff. Occupational hazard. Teacher brain. If a kid’s breathing changes in my classroom I clock it before they do.”
“I’m fine,” she says again, and this time she concentrates on making her breathing even, steady, controlled. Normal. She is breathing normally.
“Okay,” he says, easy. “Just checking.”
He goes quiet for a moment. She hears him shift, the fabric-on-fabric sound of his suit adjusting as he moves to a new section of the hull. Then he starts up again, softer this time, almost idle.
“You know what’s wild? Sound doesn’t travel in space. Like, obviously, we all know that, there’s no medium. But when you’re out here, your brain keeps expecting it to. I keep waiting to hear the hull creak, or the bolt clank, and there’s just. Nothing. Everything I hear is either inside my own suit or through this channel. So it’s either me or you. That’s the whole soundtrack.”
“Just us,” she says, and she should not have said it like that.
“Just us,” he repeats, and she cannot read his tone, because she cannot see his face, because the visor is a wall, and his voice is the only data she has.
Silence. Three seconds. Four. Five. She counts them because counting is better than the alternative.
“Okay,” he says. “Panel four. Last one. Then we go in.”
“Great.”
“Going to need your help on this one. I need you to hold something for me. Reach straight out, left hand, about shoulder height. I’m going to put a coupling in your hand.”
She extends her arm. Holds it there. Waiting, blind, suspended.
His glove touches hers.
She feels it through the suit. Barely. A ghost of pressure, the dull impression of contact through two layers of insulated material. He’s guiding the coupling into her palm, adjusting her grip, and even through the gloves she can feel how careful he’s being. Precise. Patient.
“Close your fingers. Not too tight. Right. Hold that right there.”
She holds it.
“Don’t move.”
She doesn’t move.
“Good girl,” he says, and then immediately, “I mean. Good. That’s. Yep.”
The correction comes half a second too late. The original lands first. It lands in her ear and in her chest and at the base of her spine and in a place she is absolutely not going to name while she is standing on the hull of a spacecraft on a mission that cost more than some countries’ GDPs.
Her breathing changes. She knows it changes because she can hear it, inside her own helmet, the slight quickening she cannot swallow down fast enough. And he can hear it too. She knows he can hear it because he goes quiet.
Not a natural pause. Not a thinking pause. A pause where someone is recalculating.
The silence lasts four seconds. She counts.
“Okay,” he says, and his voice is different. A fraction lower. A shade more deliberate. “Hold still for me.”
There it is. The shift. So slight she could convince herself she imagined it if it weren’t for the fact that every nerve ending in her body has just recalibrated to the frequency of his voice.
He goes back to working. She can hear the tool in his hands, the small efficient sounds of the repair. But the narration has changed. It’s slower. He’s choosing his words.
“Just a little more. Almost there. Stay right where you are.”
She stays.
“That’s it. Just like that.”
Her fingers are trembling inside the glove. She can feel her own pulse in her palm where she’s gripping the coupling. Her jaw is locked. Every exhale is a controlled, deliberate act.
“Easy,” he says, and his voice is so close and so low and so warm that it might as well be a hand on the back of her neck. “You’re doing so good.”
The double beat of the praise. So good. Not “great.” Not “perfect.” So good. Like she’s accomplished something. Like he’s proud of her. Like she’s earned it. She swallows and the sound is loud in her own helmet and she prays the mic doesn’t pick it up.
He heard it. She knows he heard it because the next thing he says is, “Breathe.”
One word. Quiet. Not a question, not a tease. An instruction.
She breathes.
“Good,” he says, and her vision whites out in a way that has nothing to do with the frost.
He works in silence for a while after that. Thirty seconds. A minute. She can’t tell. Time has gone strange and liquid and she is just standing here, blind, holding a piece of hardware in her shaking hand, listening to him breathe, and every breath sounds like something she shouldn’t be hearing.
“Okay,” he says finally. “Done. You can let go.”
She uncurls her fingers. Lets the coupling go. Hears him catch it.
“Let’s head back.”
She follows the sound of his mag-boots. Step, clunk, step, clunk. A slow rhythm leading her across the hull toward the airlock. She walks blind, trusting the tether, trusting the path, trusting his voice when he says “slight step up here” and “little to the left” and “right through here, you’re good.”
The airlock opens and closes. Pressurization. The hiss of atmo returning. Her ears pop.
Neither of them says anything.
The visor starts to clear. The ice retreats from the edges inward, her vision returning in expanding arcs. First the ceiling of the airlock, the yellowish emergency lighting. Then the walls. Then him.
He’s standing three feet away. Helmet still on. She can see his face through his visor and he looks exactly like he sounds, which is a thought that should mean nothing and means everything. Slightly flushed. Eyes bright. Mouth set in a line that’s trying to be casual and not quite landing.
He reaches up and releases his helmet seal. Lifts it off. His hair is mashed flat and his glasses are fogged and he looks like a man who has been doing spacewalk maintenance for two hours, which he has, and absolutely nothing else, which is a lie.
“Your turn,” he says. “Come here.”
She can’t get the seal. Her hands are still shaking. Gloves, nerves, the whole situation. She fumbles it twice and then his hands are there, bare now, working the clasp at her chin. His fingers brush the underside of her jaw and she stops breathing entirely and he definitely notices and neither of them says a word about it.
The helmet comes off. Cool air hits her face. She blinks, adjusting to unfiltered light for the first time in over an hour.
He’s looking at her.
He is looking at her with an expression she has never seen on his face before. It’s quiet. It’s almost careful. It is so far from the grin, from the jokes, from the deflection, that she feels something twist in her chest at the sight of it.
“You okay?” he asks, and his voice sounds different without the comms. Thinner. Realer. The intimacy of the channel is gone and in its place is just air and three feet of space and his actual eyes on her actual face.
“I’m fine,” she says. Third time. Getting less convincing.
He holds her gaze for one more second. Then the grin starts. Right on schedule. Half a second before it has any business showing up, his mouth curves, and it’s wry and warm and slightly crooked and he says, “You did good out there.”
Same words. He says them the way he said them on the channel. Low. Knowing. Looking right at her. And she feels it land in every place it landed before, except now she can see his face while it happens, and she was right. This is worse.
“Thanks,” she manages.
He nods. Steps back. Starts stripping out of the rest of the suit, all business, struggling with a boot seal and muttering “come on, come ON” at it, and just like that the normal version of him reassembles around whatever that was.
She turns. Walks to the interior hatch. She doesn’t run. Walking. Normal walking. She is walking normally.
“Hey,” he calls after her.
She stops.
“Your visor should be fine for next time. I’ll recalibrate the thermal line tonight.”
“Thanks, Grace.”
“Any time.”
She does not look back. She walks through the hatch, down the corridor, past the lab, past the mess, past the storage bay, all the way to her quarters. The door slides shut behind her. The lock engages.
She leans back against it and presses both hands to her face.
Quiet. The ship hums around her. The air circulation system pushes a gentle current across her forearms where she’s rolled back the suit underlayer. She is alone for the first time in over two hours.
The replay starts immediately.
She doesn’t choose it. It just begins, like a recording someone queued up while she wasn’t paying attention. His voice, layered and close, unspooling in order from the beginning. Uh oh. The warmth. The ease. I can hear you breathing and it’s kind of like being at a sleepover.
She pushes off the door and sits on the edge of her bunk. Her hands are still trembling. She presses them flat against her thighs and breathes out, long and unsteady.
Good.
It comes back first. That word. The first one, the one that was innocent, or should have been. The pleased, offhanded “good” he gave her when she found the valve on the first try. She hadn’t reacted to it. Not visibly. But her body had filed it somewhere, logged the frequency, tuned itself to it without asking permission.
You’re doing great.
Her fingers curl against her thighs.
Hold still for me.
She closes her eyes.
The thing about being blind in the suit was that every word had texture. She couldn’t flatten his voice by seeing his expression, couldn’t dilute it by watching his hands or reading his body language. There was just the sound, rich and close, filling up her helmet. Every breath and pause and half-laugh had landed on bare nerves with nothing in between.
Good girl.
She exhales sharply. Tips her head back against the wall.
He’d corrected himself. Almost fast enough. Not quite. And the correction had been worse than the slip, because the correction meant he’d heard it leave his own mouth and known what it sounded like and understood, in that instant, exactly what was happening.
And then he’d kept going.
Hold still for me. That’s it. Just like that. Easy.
Slower. Lower. Every word placed with a precision she associates with him doing actual science. He’d been running the experiment. Testing the hypothesis. Watching the data, which was her breathing, which was the only thing she couldn’t control.
You’re doing so good.
She makes a sound into the quiet of her quarters. Small, bitten off, barely there. Her hand has moved from her thigh to the hem of her shirt and she is not going to pretend she doesn’t know where this is going. She knew where it was going when she closed the door. She knew where it was going before that, when his fingers brushed her jaw, when he looked at her with that expression she’d never seen before, the one with no grin and no joke and no armour in it at all.
She pulls the suit underlayer down to her waist. The air is cool against her skin. She can still feel the ghost of the suit’s pressure, phantom constriction around her ribs and shoulders, like the memory of being held still. Her nipples are already hard. That happened somewhere on the hull and never stopped.
She runs her thumb across one, lightly, and the sharpness of it makes her hips shift against the mattress. She does it again. Slower. The way he’d slowed down.
Stay right where you are.
His voice, replaying, closer than it has any right to be. She can hear the exact moment it changed. The fraction of a second where his brain caught up to the data and made a decision, not to stop, but to be careful about it. To be deliberate. To speak to her like he knew she was listening with her whole body.
She pushes the underlayer the rest of the way off, kicks it to the floor. Lies back. The sheets are cool and slightly rough against her bare skin and the contrast after two hours sealed inside that suit is almost too much on its own, every nerve ending dialed up and oversensitive. She runs a hand down her own stomach, fingers spread, and her muscles tighten under the touch.
Hold still for me. That’s it. Just like that. Easy.
Her hand slides between her legs and the sound she makes is not small this time. It’s low and open and honest, pulled out of her by the first real pressure after an hour of deprivation. She’s wet. She’s been wet since “good girl,” probably, and the acknowledgment of that sends a fresh pulse of heat through her.
She finds a rhythm. Slow. Matching the pace of his voice in her memory, the deliberate, careful cadence he’d used when he figured it out. Two fingers pressing and circling and pressing again, and she can feel how swollen she is under her own touch, how close to the surface everything has been sitting this whole time.
Breathe.
She breathes. Ragged now. Not hiding it. Not performing it. Just her own sounds in her own room, graceless and real, her hips rocking up against her hand in a rhythm she’s not controlling anymore.
She thinks about his hands. Bare, after the gloves came off, working the clasp at her chin. The brush of his fingers against her jaw. How close his mouth had been. She thinks about what it would sound like if he were here, that voice not in her ear through a channel but against her throat, low and warm and saying those words directly into her skin.
You’re doing so good.
Her back arches. Her free hand twists in the sheet.
She’s close. She’s been close since she lay down, maybe since the airlock, maybe since the moment he said her name on the hull in a voice she’d never heard before. All of it has been foreplay. Every word, every careful instruction, every praise that landed somewhere it wasn’t aimed. Two hours of it with no release and no relief and now there’s nothing between her and the edge but her own hand and his voice on repeat.
She speeds up. Two fingers slick and insistent, the heel of her palm grinding against her clit, and her thighs are trembling the way her hands trembled in the suit. She is making sounds she would be embarrassed about if she had the capacity for embarrassment right now, which she does not, because all of that burned off somewhere around just like that.
That’s it.
So good.
She comes hard. Harder than she expected. It hits in a long wave that locks her whole body tight, her hand pressed flat between her legs, her mouth open on a sound that starts as his name and ends as just breath. It goes on. Rolls through her in slow, heavy contractions that she rides with her fingers still moving, gentler now, drawing it out because it’s still going and she doesn’t want it to stop.
A second peak catches her off guard, smaller but sharper, pulling a gasp out of her that she feels in her teeth. Then another. She’s oversensitive now, trembling, her own touch almost too much, but she keeps her hand there and lets it ebb at its own pace. Each aftershock tugs his voice back through her. Good. That’s it. Easy. A feedback loop she can’t switch off and doesn’t try to.
When it finally releases her she goes boneless. Lies there with her hand still cupped loosely between her thighs, her chest heaving, sweat cooling on her stomach. She stares at the ceiling. Her pulse is everywhere. She can feel it in her throat and her fingertips and the soles of her feet.
The quiet settles around her slowly, like silt in water. She breathes. She keeps breathing. Her body feels wrung out and new at the same time, like something structural has shifted and is not going to shift back.
The ship hums. The air circulates. Somewhere on this vessel, Ryland Grace is recalibrating a thermal line and probably talking to himself while he does it. Muttering “okay, right” and narrating his own hands and having no idea, or every idea, about what he just did to her from ten feet away without touching her once.
She pulls herself together. Fixes her clothes. Washes her face in the small sink. Looks at herself in the mirror and meets her own eyes and thinks, very clearly: this is going to be a problem.
Her tablet pings.
She picks it up. A message from Grace. Timestamped three minutes ago.
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 reads it twice.
It’s a perfectly normal message. There’s nothing in it. “You handled it really well” is a thing colleagues say to each other. It’s professional. It’s kind. It is also, unmistakably, praise, and the fact that he chose to send it. That he sat somewhere on this ship after everything that happened on that channel and decided those were the words.
He might not know. He might just be being nice. He might be Ryland Grace, who tells everyone they did great, who hands out “good” and “perfect” like they cost nothing.
But he might know.
She types back: Thanks, Grace. See you tomorrow.
She puts the tablet down. Picks it up again. Reads his message one more time.
You handled it really well.
She sets it down. Stares at the ceiling. Laughs, once, at nothing, at everything, and presses her fingers to her mouth.
The frequency is still live.