Page 74 of Folds
I expected him to collapse on top of me, to go heavy, maybe do that classic guy thing and roll away to the coolest edge of the bed. Instead, he stayed propped above me, arms trembling, his face so close I could taste the salt of his sweat on my lips. His eyes, that weird, bottomless blue, fixed on me. It should’ve been awkward—this was the nerdy, hypercorrect Bozad officer who’d once lectured me about the thermodynamics of hand sanitizer. Now he was gazing at me like I was a quantum state that, if he looked away, might collapse into nothing at all.
I surprised us both by laughing, a loose, unguarded sound that started in my belly.
“You okay?” I said, palms still pressed against the broad,vibrating planes of his chest. “You look like you just survived reentry without a suit.”
He blinked, a processing pause, then a crooked smile flared at the corner of his mouth.
“I was not prepared for this level of… physiological cascade,” he admitted.
There was a note of awe in it, like he couldn’t quite believe his own bandwidth for pleasure had glitched the system. It would’ve been funny if I wasn’t so fucking charmed.
We just lay there, skin cooling, my head buried in the crook of his arm. I traced his collarbone, slow, not really thinking, just making sure we didn’t accidentally float away into the slow gravity hush of post-orgasm. The silence between us was new and unpunctured. I couldn’t remember the last time I got to bask like this—naked, happy, not rushing for the next thing.
“You’re not even winded,” I accused, pressing my thumb into the ridged lines of his pec, mapping the infrastructure of him all over again.
He closed his eyes, savoring it. “Bozad have redundant cardiac systems. One can fail, the other compensates.” He paused, then looked down at me through thick lashes. “You have only one heart, and yet it withstood my full effort.” His mouth twitched at the edges. I recognized the sarcasm, which meant he was feeling more like himself.
“No one’s ever tried to blow it up before,” I said. I stretched, all bones and spent muscle, delighting in the friction of skin on skin. “Full marks, Commander.”
“Lieutenant,” he corrected, pretending indignation, but his voice vibrated something deep and relaxed. He was, I realized, utterly at ease. More at ease than I’d ever seen him, and that made sense, since the first hour I met him had involved a major hull breach and multiple species-specific bodily fluids.
I wanted to keep up the banter, but my brain offered a new, less cooperative line of thought. What happened now? Was this the end of the weirdest, best night of my life, or had I somehowstumbled into an open-ended... thing? I tried to imagine this scenario at breakfast, with mutual awkward nods and maybe a polite “nice work” over rehydrated eggs. Or worse, telling Mara. Mara would have questions, and she’d ask them at volume. I propped myself up on one elbow and tried to look casual about using a massive blue intergalactic security professional as my pillow. To be fair, he made a damn good pillow.
“So,” I said, aiming for light but veering hard into ‘psychotic.’ “Is this where you recite the Bozad sacred oath of post-coital secrecy, or do we go right to the after-action report?”
The words fell out of me all at once, too raw and too bright, but if he heard the panic, he didn’t let on. Instead, he cupped the back of my head, running his fingers through my hair like he was testing the tensile properties of human detritus.
“There is no script,” he said, in that way of his that made every sentence sound both like a joke and a test of emergency protocol. “The preferred ritual is mutual adjustment to altered status.”
I shifted, trying to sit up, but he just rolled us over so I sprawled across his chest, the little hairs along my arms standing up as his skin cooled against mine.
“Mutual adjustment to altered status,” I repeated, trying out the phrase. “Is that Bozad fornot awkward in the morning?”
He blinked, considered, and then, “Or in the afternoon, depending on metabolic rate and sleep architecture.”
“Right.” I traced another pattern along his ribs, using my finger like a stylus. “So what now? You demand tribute? Bozad honor or whatever?” I was aiming for a joke, but I suspected it landed closer towe both know tomorrow is going to hurt like hell. I didn’t want this to be the end. I wanted more—another night, another round, a slow reentry into something that felt as real as the blood thumping in my ears. I sucked in a breath, steered out of the orbital decay of small talk, and went all in. “Izu… how long are you on station?”
There it was, out. Too open, too desperate, but I didn’t care.His face changed at the sound of his name—not the formal, full rank, justIzu,like we’d been at this for years. He ran a lazy thumb along my collarbone, eyes smoldering in the low light blinking from the far wall.
“Three station days,” he answered, and the way he said it, gentle but certain, made my skin prickle.
I curled in closer, pretended to chase the warmth, but really I was bracing myself for the comedown.
“Three days?” I could do a lot in three days. I wanted every last hour I could steal, if only to keep this feeling—this light, this flood, this crashing wave of not being alone—alive for even one more rotation. “You got plans for all that time for yourself, or you want to meet up again?”
It was the shakiest ask I’d made since sub-docking certification, but I didn’t pull back, not even when the silence stretched so long I wondered if Izu had gone into a torpor.
“I will stay with you,” he said, “if you allow it.”
I grinned into his chest, feeling the laughter bubble up and sparks fire along my limbs. “Tomorrow, I take you to the arboretum. It’s the ugliest patch of green in six spiral arms, but I think you’ll love it.”
He snorted, a soft rumble that made my ear vibrate. “I am not calibrated for planetary foliage,” he warned. “You will need to explain the purpose of each weed.”
I kissed his shoulder, tasting sweat and salt and the new blueprint of us together. “Deal. But you’re on picnic duty. Try not to serve anything that eats us back.”
That made him laugh, a low, seismic thrum, and I felt it all the way down. “It is a mutual date,” he said, like he’d just engineered a win-win scenario for galactic relations. “And you will wear your elevated attire.”
chapter six
