playing the numbers
Even the lights in the lab shut off before she went home. He usually found her in pale ghostly light from the monitor bank, her uniform jacket slung over the chair, coding in fast staccato bursts and tapping a pen on the console in march rhythm whenever she stopped to think. If she didn't have a pen, she worried at her nails: finding a fissure, digging at it with her other thumbnail with the patience of erosion until it turned into a hangnail and she could pick it away and leave a ragged, tattered edge. Her nails usually ended up short. She looked so small in the empty lab, in front of the massive console bank, like a girl alone on the deck of a sinking ship. He'd never seen her quarters -- they always went to his place -- but he knew what they looked like anyway. Blank walls, new-furniture smell. Spotless stovetops and takeout cartons in the trashcan. A big window, always covered.
He put his hands on her shoulders and she sighed, closed her eyes and fell back away from the screen. "I'm almost done," she murmured, resting her hand on his. (So small; tiny. Doll fingers.) Smiling in that very practiced way she had, like her smile was a conversation she was having too loud on purpose, to make certain someone overheard. "Just five more minutes."
"I'll bet you've been saying that for the last hour," he said, and laughed. Her brow creased, but she laughed with him.
She'd shed her outer jacket, making her even smaller, and without it he could knead his hands into her shoulders, making her moan. The fabric creaked a little when it was squeezed, resisting his hands: Vector uniforms were tough stuff. Her carapace. He glanced at the empty doorway out of the research lab, then a little longer at the one to the data entry room, and smiling as he turned his head back, slid his hands down so they first crested and then cupped her breasts. She sighed, turning her cheek into the headrest of the chair; her eyes were closed behind the lenses, and her dissolving braid wept strands across her cheek. "Kevin..."
"It's all right," he murmured in her ear. Warm weight held in his hands. He squeezed his thumbs toward his forefingers at the center of each rise, making her uniform creak again, making her arch up in his grasp. It would be hard not to think of a doll. "Everyone's gone home. It's just us." A soft curve of smile, on the curve of her earlobe. He had a Shion voice, he'd realized; it was as undeniable as it was unplanned. It was the one he spoke in now, and always around her. But everyone did the same thing to some degree. "Well, and KOS-MOS. But she won't tell."
Did her breath catch when he said that? A soft stirring in the strands of her hair on her cheek? Any good scientist would be curious.
She was so small, really, so fragile, easy to lift and move. He set her down on the lid of the service module -- the sarcophagus, he sometimes thought of it, when he was alone and in a whimsical mood -- nudging her over so she straddled it on her back and he could scale its shallow angle in the spread V of her legs. "Kevin, no," she protested, but her chest rose and fell fast inside the opening at the top of her uniform, her eyes out of focus and glossy with excitement. Somewhere along the way her glasses had been left behind. "We can't, we, not here -- "
All by rote, really. He smiled anyway, kissed her neck and the tops of her breasts in the gap, slipped his hand up along her hip until it passed the edge of her skirt and under. "Shh," he advised the valley of skin, in that gentle voice that was just hers, just especially hers, the way her smile was everyone but's. "Shion... It's all right. KOS-MOS won't mind." Allowing himself a little more smile, allowing her to feel it, making her gasp with the turn of his mouth and the slide of his hand, skimming slick hose between her thighs. "Maybe it'll even make her happy. The two people who love her most, loving each other so close by..."
After that it was easy -- easier than he was accustomed to, to be honest. Her hands clasped behind the nape of his neck and held him, her short short nails scraping along his skin, her breath a dying bird's, a muddled wavelength. He rolled down her hose to her boots and then shoved them all off, and her bare legs wrapped his ivy-tight. His tunic joined the pile and he was on her, kissing her, she was eager, she was helpless. Helpless. Her eyes were closed and she moved like a river, lined in the pale blue light from below. Where maybe the princess was sleeping, or maybe awake. Maybe listening.
Pressing into her always made him think the strangest things.
Her eyes were always closed. He didn't mind. It was easiest to just stay hidden, and wait to be found again under less perilous circumstances, in a better light. In all these blue shadows he could be anyone at all; his face could be a mask. That wasn't what he wanted her to see when she looked at him, and though obscurely this troubled him, he obeyed his impulses.
Her legs hooked around his waist, her hands clenched in his back. Her skirt bunched up around her hips so all he could reach of her was where they joined, his cock deep in the wet folds of her, deep, then shallow, then deep, her back arching, a parabola drawn from the uneven axis of the service module, her hands tight, her eyes closed, whispering as she tensed and drew in and drew him in the name that wasn't really his, Kevin... Kevin... Kevin...
But the one he answered when he shut his own eyes, when he fell all the way into her in a wet dying rush, wasn't really any more hers.
He kissed her before he pulled away, eased down the slant of the module toward a seat at the end, kissed her thigh too when he passed, her legs slipping away from him in a dream. Even spent, he found the sight of her lying on that sleek black coffin, half-dozing, stirring on a level deeper than the physical, and he watched for long moments as he worked on again arranging his face into a benign, meaningless smile. Just Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, that was all. Kevin who cared and was kind.
When finally she opened her eyes, that was all she found. She smiled at it, at him, uncertainly, and then eased her skirt back down with both hands, covering herself again. He touched her knee, and she held his hand for a moment before swinging her legs over the side and going looking for what she'd lost.
"Get some sleep," he told her with hands on her shoulders -- now covered, fully shelled-in, ready for anything, but not much bigger for all of that -- and a kiss on her mouth before she left. She smiled but said nothing, and he watched her go all the way out. Seeing that apartment he could see in the back corners of his mind, the half-empty closets, the half-empty bed, the clock that would never show mercy but only tick off every single second before morning. His smile faded while he was watching, and by the time she turned the corner it was completely gone.
He left his tunic where it had fallen, his pants unfastened and casually spilling him loose at the front, and sat down at the terminal where she'd been. He reviewed the numbers for long minutes, absently taking up her pen to chew on its tip. Finally he said, with his voice slightly raised, "You can come in now."
There was a deadly, apocalyptic silence. Then the slowest, most beleaguered shuffle he had ever witnessed brought a figure into sight in his peripheral vision, standing head down and shaking in the doorway to the data entry room, and he smiled again in spite of himself. That was what he'd thought. Ridgeley, a decent engineer but with no confidence at all, the hapless puppydog always trailing the two of them with sad eyes. He half-turned in the chair so he lounged across its upper part, taking in Ridgeley's red, terrified, humiliated face, turned down away from the sight of his own bare chest and bare dozing cock. Smiled something like the next-door neighbor of his kind, bland Shion-smile.
"Getting some values in?" he asked. Ridgeley cringed like he'd been shot at. The silence was long and extremely enjoyable.
"I-I didn't -- " Ridgeley managed to sputter at the end of it, winced up inside himself as though he were trying to just collapse and implode. His pitch kept going up and up as he kept trying. "I mean, I wasn't -- Sh-she stays here so late, and I just, I wanted to make sure, that sh-she was -- I, I don't, I mean I wouldn't, intentionally, I, I'm... oh, god." A miserable dying fall. He just kept smiling at Ridgeley, his ankle crossed over his knee, watching and waiting. "You... you won't -- tell her, will you?"
He shrugged, though Ridgeley still wasn't looking at him. "Well, that all depends, doesn't it?" Which at least raised Ridgeley's head enough to look somewhere near to him, in a wide shell-shocked stare. He uncrossed the ankle from his knee. "What exactly are you going to do for me?"
There was no way it could keep from happening, but Ridgeley still seemed to fight to keep his gaze from dipping, down to the open front of his pants where he was working his way hard again. He jerked them back at once, even closed them fast, but the damage was already done. The worst of it, most likely, done by the ragged darker ring around the edges of the zip, where he'd been pressed into wetness that had stained.
Think about indirect kisses, he almost said as Ridgeley settled on his knees between his own spread thighs, wincing and crushed and still redder than his hair, but in the end the ease of it made him decide there was really no need.
After a few seconds, he went back to typing at the terminal. After all, no princess would wait forever to be woken.