Chapter 14 - In the Dark

Nobody moved.

There was a beat of held stillness, the three of them in the maintenance access with the warden's footsteps still fading and the emergency strip painting their feet orange, and in that beat Nathaniel was aware of nothing except his own heartbeat and how far it had traveled from where it usually lived.

Then Jazmine turned.

She knew the space; she moved in it the way she moved in her quarters, without hesitation, without looking for obstacles, her body oriented by memory in the dark. She turned and found Eric's mouth. He felt the shift: her hands on Eric's face, the soft sound of the kiss, Eric's breathing changing register. No desperation in it. Deliberate. The adrenaline finding its direction.

He was directly behind Eric in the narrow space. There was nowhere to step back to. The conduit housing was solid against his spine.

Eric's hands found her waist in the dark. He felt the movement of it, the shift in Eric's shoulders, the flex. She made a sound against Eric's mouth that was quiet enough to be almost nothing. Almost. The neighbor's wall unit was still audible through the partition, a faint presence, less of a constraint than before with the warden's footsteps gone and Jazmine already moving on Eric like the corridor was theirs again.

She wrapped a leg around him. Eric's hands moved, adjusted, bearing weight she was giving him, the pool of orange at their feet barely enough to see shapes. Nathaniel could see the line of her shoulders, the shape of Eric's back, nothing more.

He heard the specific sound of fabric. Then Jazmine's breath catching, short and controlled. Eric's hips shifted. Went still. Shifted again.

He knew what was happening before he had words for it, and his body registered the knowledge before his brain did.

He reached around Eric in the narrow space and found her face in the dark with one hand.

He didn't know exactly how he found it. The geometry of it was beyond him in the moment. His hand was on her face and her mouth turned into his palm, warm and deliberate, and then her teeth and then the press of her lips against the heel of his hand, not a kiss but in the same register as a kiss, and he felt it in his whole arm.

He kept his hand there. His other hand, moving on no instruction from the part of his brain still pretending to be in charge, went to Eric's back. Felt the shirt damp already. Felt the short, controlled shifts in his shoulders, the stillness between them, the tiny increments the space allowed.

Okay, he thought. Okay.

His hand moved from her face down to her chest. Through fabric he could feel the weight and heat of her tits, the full curve of her under his palm, and she arched into his hand the same way she'd turned her mouth into it, with the same deliberateness, giving him more of her weight. He pressed his palm flat and felt her nipple go hard under his thumb.

Jesus, was the complete content of his brain for approximately two seconds. He filed it.

He reached inside her shirt.

Her skin was warm and smooth across her sternum, and then the full weight of her breast in his palm, and her nipple hard between his thumb and the side of his finger. She inhaled sharply through her teeth. Her leg tightened around Eric. Her hand found the conduit housing beside Nathaniel's shoulder and gripped it.

He felt her grip through the metal, her tension transmitted into his arm.

He stayed there. Eric moved inside her, those short, controlled thrusts the space allowed, nothing large, nothing with room for anything large, and Nathaniel could feel the rhythm of it against his own chest, feel it in Eric's hip under his free hand, feel it in Jazmine's breath against his wrist. The confined space made them one configuration, three people with no air between them, and it was different from the shelf. On the shelf there had been light and roles and positions and choreography, the familiar map. In here there was none of that. In here there were bodies and no information except touch and the sounds they were managing and the orange strip on the floor and the specific smell of sex in a hot enclosed space, working into his lungs with every controlled breath he took.

His thumb moved against her nipple. She exhaled through her teeth, even quieter.

She came with her face against Eric's shoulder.

He felt it in her breast first, a shudder through her whole chest, and then her hips jerked once, twice, her fingers white-knuckled on the conduit housing, her cunt clenching around Eric in a way he could feel transmitted through the configuration of them, through every surface they shared. The sound she made was so controlled it barely registered, a breath pushed out through her teeth with her mouth pressed to Eric's shoulder. Her fingers released the housing. Her hips went still.

The ship hummed.

Eric followed with his forehead against her temple, his hands tightening on her waist and releasing, the short rhythm of him going uneven and then finding its end. A sound at the back of his throat that he'd been holding somewhere and finally let go, quiet and brief and real. Nathaniel could feel the shudder of it through his palm on Eric's hip, feel Eric's cock pulsing in the moment before he stilled, all of it transmitted through the press of their bodies in sixty centimeters of dark.

Nathaniel last. Almost no movement required: the space left him only the smallest increments, the rhythm already established, and he went with it to its conclusion with his forehead against the back of Eric's neck and his hand still cupped around Jazmine's breast and his eyes closed in the dark where it didn't matter, and there was nothing in his head except the moment and its own heat.

He came with his teeth against the back of Eric's shoulder. He did not bite down. It was close.

They stood.

The ship hummed. The orange strip lit their feet. Somewhere in the maintenance access to the left, a pipe did the thing pipes did under thermal expansion: a small metallic complaint, brief, then silence.

His hand was still inside her shirt. He was aware of this in the specific way you become aware of things when your brain starts coming back online after a brief absence. He moved his hand carefully. Her shirt settled.

His cheek was against the back of Eric's shoulder. He was breathing. Eric was breathing. Jazmine was breathing. The three of them were still pressed together in the narrow space with the specific gravity of bodies that have been thoroughly used and have nowhere to fall. The smell of sweat and sex was present and complete. He breathed it in.

He waited for his brain to come back online. It took longer than usual.

Eventually Jazmine moved. He heard her rather than saw her: the careful shift of her weight, the orientation toward the panel, the fabric adjusting. She pressed her face to the seam at the edge and was still, reading the corridor through the gap. He could see the line of her back in the orange light, the arch of her shoulders, the braids with their wire ends catching what little light there was.

Clear.

She opened the panel, stepped through, and was gone into the room.

He and Eric came out after her. The quarters felt large by comparison, which was not how he had thought of them before. The amber rest-cycle light was different from the emergency strip, warmer, more complete. He blinked in it.

Jazmine was standing in the small kitchen space at the far end of the room.

She had her back to them. Both hands on the low counter. Her shoulders were set in a way he couldn't read: not tense, not relaxed, something between, or something else entirely that he didn't have a name for. She was looking at the wall in front of her.

Eric appeared at his shoulder. Nathaniel looked at Eric. Eric looked at Jazmine.

He read her posture, with the overconfident half-accuracy he applied to everyone, and came up with: she's deciding something.

He was wrong about the what. He was right about the deciding.

She didn't turn around. After a moment she picked up a cup that was already on the counter and set it down again, a small gesture with no purpose except the motion of it.

He waited. Eric waited. The ship hummed in the walls, constant, down here always constant, no ventilation cycle to mask it.

Then she laughed, once, short, a breath of sound.

"So," Jazmine said, still facing the wall, "that's the warden on the eastern corridor doing his rounds. Three weeks ahead of schedule." A pause. "New schedule. I'll need to update." Another pause, smaller. "Both of you should probably clean up."

She set the cup down one more time.

He looked at Eric. Eric's mouth was doing the thing it did when he was working out how to be tactful and had decided it wasn't worth the effort.

"Good system," Eric said.

"It was until tonight." She turned around then, her face clear and the amber light on it doing the work it always did with her: the freckles, the amber eyes, the specific quality of the aftermath that lived in someone's face after something had happened and they were still deciding where to put it. "Four taps means clear. Three-two means run. You'll remember that."

"Three-two," Nathaniel said. "Yes."

She looked at him with the expression he still didn't entirely have a name for. He was working on the vocabulary. He'd get there.

"You will," she said. The corner of her mouth moved. He breathed out slow, clean and flush and right.