Chapter 12 - Not a Given

They stopped at a stall on the way back. Not the wine vendor; that woman had already packed up and moved, the alcove where she'd been sitting empty except for the folded piece of scrap she'd left for the next person who needed to sit. Jazmine found a different one, a man with deep-set eyes and three bottles arranged in front of him like he wasn't selling anything, just happened to have them there. She looked at the bottles. She looked at him. She pointed at the middle one. He named a number and she named a different number and they met somewhere between the two without drama, and she tucked the bottle under one arm and walked back to Nathaniel with the expression of someone who has handled the important part of the day.

"That was negotiating," Nathaniel said.

"No," she said. "That was buying a bottle."

---

There is a quality to an afternoon that has already had too much in it. The market was behind them. Mira was behind them. The platinum bob planted in front of a seedling display with the absolute commitment of someone not looking at them: also behind them, at least physically. None of it had stopped. It had all just settled into the back of the room where things went to keep vibrating.

---

Her quarters were warmer in the afternoon. Different quality of warm: the ventilation system running at its afternoon setting, the yellow of the rest-cycle lamps turning amber where the service light came in through the door seam. She set the bottle on the low table and the three of them settled onto the floor because the shelf was the sleeping shelf and there was nowhere else, except that it felt more like a choice than a concession. Eric got his back against the wall. Nathaniel crossed his legs. Jazmine sat between them with the ease of a person in her own home, which she was.

She poured into the three cups she had. Mismatched. Nathaniel's had a small chip at the rim. He ran his thumb over it and didn't say anything.

The bottle was good. Sharper at the back of the throat, no smoothing out the roughness. Not upper-deck good. He noticed he liked it better.

They didn't talk much. Jazmine described one more market transaction in brief, the one she'd finalized with a thin man in brown coveralls who'd seemed to be discussing seed preservation but was actually, apparently, negotiating access to a filter system two decks down. Eric asked one question about the filter. She answered it. Then they were quiet again.

The market energy was still in the room. The near-exit was in the room. Leila's very deliberate not-looking was in the room. Nathaniel's hand was not at Jazmine's back anymore; he was a foot away, the three of them in their own separate heat envelopes, the bottle between them. Didn't matter. Something had nowhere to go and the room was small.

Jazmine looked at him.

He looked back.

She reached forward, got two fingers into his collar, and pulled.

He came. That was the word for it. He came, like a thing on a string, and did not experience any ambivalence about this.

She kissed him without hurry. Her mouth settled on his and stayed there. Her hands moved to his shirt buttons from the top down, one at a time, and he got his hands under her shirt and found the warm skin of her waist and she made a small sound into his mouth that did something immediate to his ability to think clearly.

He got her shirt open. She shrugged it off her shoulders and his hands went to her breasts, full and heavy in his palms, and his brain took a brief unscheduled vacation. He had thought about this. He had thought about this more than was strictly reasonable. Her nipples hardened under his thumbs and she pulled back from his mouth just enough to look at him looking at her, and whatever was in her face, he didn't have the processing capacity to name it.

He put his mouth on her nipple.

Eric was against the wall. He was not moving. He watched without speaking, his arms loose at his sides.

Nathaniel was vaguely aware of this. Then he was not aware of anything except her.

She moved him where she wanted him with light pressure from her hands: back, down, here. He went. The shelf was narrow and he was on his knees on the floor, her underwear on the floor, her fingers in his hair. She was already slick when he put his mouth on her cunt and he felt her pull in one sharp breath and hold it.

He worked. Her hips moved in a small arc, deliberate and controlled, the neighbor's wall unit six inches away and humming its steady indifferent hum. He found her clit and she stopped controlling her hips entirely. One hand came off the shelf edge and settled at the back of his head, not directing, just present. He could feel the grip on the shelf tighten when he got it right and loosen when he drifted off and tighten again when he corrected.

He stayed there. He learned it.

She tightened for a different reason: her whole body going taut on the shelf, the grip in his hair honest and hard, her breath out through her teeth in one long controlled release. Still quiet. The wall unit hummed. He held still and felt her clench against his tongue, her thighs pressing against his ears for a long moment, then the long slow release back.

When he lifted his head she was looking at the ceiling.

She looked down at him. He was still working up to language.

Her hand came off his head and reached sideways, toward the wall.

Eric was already there. He'd crossed the room while Nathaniel wasn't watching, or he had watched and forgotten, the timeline blurring, and he was kneeling at the edge of the shelf. His shirt was gone. Jazmine's fingers found the waistband of his pants, worked the fastening, wrapped around his cock. The sound Eric made was low and involuntary, the specific kind of sound he almost never made where other people could hear it. She pulled him toward her mouth and he went, his hand going flat against the wall.

Nathaniel moved up her body.

The logistics of this were not complicated. They had done this before, not with her, but the architecture was familiar. He pushed into her and she made a sound that was not quiet, immediately muffled against the inside of her arm, and adjusted, hips shifting, finding the angle she wanted, done. He felt her settle around him, slick and hot, and felt the shift in the rest of her body as she settled around Eric too, her mouth working, her free hand at the back of his thigh.

The rhythm took thirty seconds to find. Then it held.

She was wet and tight around him and he could feel her swallowing. The motion traveled through her whole body into his.

Eric's jaw was the tell. Nathaniel had learned this years ago: the slight tightening when Eric was close to something and managing it. He watched it from across her and paced himself accordingly, had been doing this without thinking about it long enough that it was reflex. He gripped her hips and she pressed back against him. Her mouth pulled off Eric long enough to exhale through her nose, then back.

Her body changed. A realignment, something going deliberately different: hips tilting, taking him deeper. She clenched around him once, testing. He tightened his hands on her hips. She did it again.

Her second orgasm took her whole body with it, a long contraction in stages, her cunt pulling tight around him and tightening further, her hand coming up to grip his forearm with a strength that would leave marks. Her mouth came off Eric and she pressed her face into the shelf and breathed through it open-mouthed, committed to the quiet, the wall unit six inches away and humming. He felt every second of it, her whole body shuddering around him and then going deliberate again, wringing the last of it out.

Eric finished with his forehead dropping, Jazmine's fingers at the back of his neck, a sound low in his chest that didn't make it all the way out.

Nathaniel followed with his face against her shoulder and the ship's hum in his bones.

---

Nobody moved for a full minute.

His cheek was against her collarbone. She was damp with effort, warm, her heartbeat doing what heartbeats do after, slower than before but not slow. His body was in the state bodies are in afterward: weighted, limbs inconvenient, the specific pleasant heaviness that meant he'd used himself up. Eric had shifted to Jazmine's other side, one arm across the foot of the shelf, his breathing audible and even.

The wall unit hummed.

The bottle was still on the low table. One cup had tipped over. Nobody had noticed.

Eventually Jazmine lifted her chin toward the ceiling and looked at it. The amber light moved across the surface slowly, some trick of the ventilation pressure making it shift. Nathaniel watched her watch it.

Eric's eyes were closed. His face in the aftermath was the one with nothing deployed. Nathaniel saw it sometimes: the face under the face, the one that existed before the useful-one routine switched on.

He thought about how to say something that wasn't stupid.

"Stay," Jazmine said to the ceiling. "Both of you. I'll make food eventually."

Eric's eyes didn't open. "That's a threat or a promise?"

"Depends on whether you're hungry."

"He's always hungry," Nathaniel said.

"Shut up," Eric said, and did not move.

Nathaniel stayed where he was. His hand was on the warm skin of her stomach, not doing anything, just present. She didn't move it.

The upper decks existed, technically: the governance floors, the ventilated modules that smelled of synthetic lavender. He couldn't feel any of it from here.

She looked at the ceiling for another long moment.

"You can come back," she said. "That's — not a given, where I live. I'm telling you it is."

He said nothing. He turned his face against her shoulder and said nothing, because what he felt was too large for the room and also exactly the right size for it, and he didn't have words that were worth her time.

The ship hummed around them. Down here, at this depth, it came through the walls differently. Not mechanical. Something deeper than that, something that had been running longer than any of them had been alive.