Chapter 30 - Don't Tell Her I Said That

She had told them to stay.

So they stayed. This was, Nathaniel reflected, a data point about the current state of things: he had been told to remain in a room and he had remained in the room, and the part of him that would have found this situation absurd three months ago had apparently been filed in a drawer somewhere and was not currently available for comment.

The observation bay had the drive array and the scratched viewport and the two service strip lights and nothing else. They sat on the floor because the floor was what there was. The drive light came through the viewport and made everything the same cold blue-white and after a while it stopped feeling cold and was just the light of the room. Eric was on his back with his hands folded on his chest. Nathaniel was sitting with his back against the wall, facing the drive array through the glass.

They talked for a while and then they didn't.

Eric said, at one point, looking at the ceiling: "She's going to have the evidence picture regardless of whether we stay."

"Yeah," Nathaniel said.

A pause. The drive hummed. The filtration junction on the other side of the wall did what filtration junctions do, the low-frequency sound that was always there in the lower decks and that he had stopped noticing weeks ago and only registered now because the room was otherwise quiet.

"I'm not arguing about staying," Eric said.

"I know."

"I'm noting that the structure is sound even if you set aside the other thing."

"The other thing being that you want to stay."

Eric was quiet for a moment. "The other thing being that I want to stay. Yes."

Nathaniel looked at the drive array. He had a lot of thoughts about what had happened in this room earlier and he was not going to organize them tonight. Some things needed more time between the happening and the analysis, and he had learned, somewhat recently, that he was not always the best analyst of his own situation.

He was going to think about the jaw thing. Later. Privately. The way she had turned his face toward the viewport and held it there and what she had said and the fact that she had been right, which was somehow the part that lingered most. Later.

The door opened.

They both looked up.

Leila came in first. One hand was in Jazmine's hair, not gently, fingers wrapped and directing, walking her in through the door with a grip that was unhurried and entirely in control. Jazmine was being moved. Jazmine was being brought in.

Nathaniel's chest kicked hard. The scene was wrong. Something had happened to Jazmine. Something was happening to Jazmine right now, she was being walked in by the hair, and everything in Nathaniel's body went to alert simultaneously because Jazz was his and Eric's and the warmth of the whole thing down here and if something had happened to her —

He looked at Jazmine's face.

Jazmine's face was not scared.

She was flushed, the warm brown of her cheeks deeper than usual, and her eyes were bright in the drive light, open and alive, nothing close to distress. Her breathing was faster than baseline. When she looked up and saw them on the floor, her face opened. Not scared. Not surprised. Something else entirely.

She had known this was coming. She had done this before.

The boys had not known. They had not done this before.

Leila walked Jazmine to the pipe run along the wall. The third bracket: there were three brackets bolted to the pipe, not two. Nathaniel had clocked two earlier and not looked for a third. The third bracket was right there, planned, installed in advance, because Leila had planned this room completely. She looped the cable through the third bracket and secured Jazmine's wrists above her head in the same configuration as theirs had been. Jazmine settled into it.

That was the word, settled. The ease of a body arriving somewhere it knows. Her shoulders dropped, her wrists rested against the cable rather than pulling. She was in it. She turned her head and looked at Nathaniel and smiled, the full smile with the freckles and the amber eyes, and the smile said: hello, yes, I know, stop making that face, I'm fine.

Leila stepped back from all three of them and looked.

She was still dressed. She was the only one standing. The crate was in the corner and the viewport was behind her and the drive light was doing its cold-blue work on everything. She took the moment in. Her eyes moved across all three of them, unhurried, and whatever she found there kept her expression level.

From the crate she produced a flogger. Short, lower-deck fabrication, leather strips. Not decorative. Not vicious. Someone had built it to purpose and used it that way.

She trailed it across Jazmine's shoulders first. Slow, light enough that it was more information than sensation, the leather strips dragging across skin. Jazmine's breath caught. Then along Nathaniel's chest, the trailing sweep of it, the weight, nothing rough about it but the fact of contact: deliberate and precise. Then across Eric's stomach. She watched each face as the leather moved.

She used it.

Not hard. Not cruel. The pace was measured and entirely her own, varied in ways that were clearly intentional: two light strokes across Jazmine's back, one firm one across Nathaniel's chest and collarbone, the sting sharp and gone before he had decided how to respond to it. Then Eric's stomach, then the inside of his thigh, closer than the last. She read the room between every stroke and adjusted for what she found there.

Jazmine arched into the third stroke, her wrists pulling up against the cable for purchase, not to escape. Her face went open and unguarded, the careful social arrangement gone from it all at once.

Nathaniel hissed through his teeth at a stroke across his collarbone. He did not strain. He had learned that already.

Eric went very still, then made a sound low in his throat and opened his eyes wide at the sound, like he hadn't been expecting it from himself.

She set the flogger down across the top of the crate.

She knelt in front of Eric. She took him into her mouth slowly, completely controlled, no urgency in it at all, her own pace, her hands holding his hips against the wall. His hands flexed against the cable and stilled. She went down on him and pulled back and went down again, taking her time, and she maintained eye contact until his head dropped back and the effort of holding it became irrelevant because his whole system had redirected its resources. She brought him to the edge carefully, precisely — she felt the moment before he did, and she stopped there, mouth still, just warmth, and then she pulled back and stood.

She stood.

She moved to Jazmine.

Her hand went between Jazmine's thighs. Jazmine made a sound she did not muffle. She was already wet — slick against Leila's fingers the moment they pressed in, had been since the corridor, the evidence landing immediately. Leila worked two fingers inside her slowly, curling them, and her thumb circled Jazmine's clit with the same patience she brought to everything. Jazmine's hips moved. Her wrists pulled against the cable for purchase, not escape, her body wanting something to brace against. Leila watched her face and adjusted the pressure once and did not adjust it again. The sound Jazmine made when she came had no composure in it at all and Jazmine didn't try for composure; she bit her own lip and let it go, the shudder of it visible from her shoulders to her knees.

Leila came to Nathaniel.

The same as Eric: her mouth around him, slow and controlled, hands on his hips, his breathing loud in the room, and then the edge arrived and she stopped there with the same quiet precision she'd stopped with Eric, and stood.

She stood up. She looked at his face.

"Not yet," she said.

He understood.

She went to Jazmine and unlooped the cable from the bracket, releasing her wrists. Jazmine rolled her shoulders, shook out her hands, took a breath. She was loose-limbed and flushed, her braids disheveled, and she moved with the ease of someone who had been given something good and knew more was coming. Leila held out the key for the lock mechanism on the cable ends.

Jazmine took it.

Leila stepped back and sat on the crate. The flogger went across her knees. She crossed one leg over the other and looked at the three of them with an expression of complete, unperformed composure.

Jazmine looked at the two boys chained to the wall.

She took her time. She turned the small key in her fingers, not rushing, letting them watch her consider. She trailed it along Nathaniel's collarbone, the metal edge of it, tracing the line of the bone. She looked at Eric. She looked at Nathaniel. She made a decision.

She freed Eric.

She pushed him down to the floor and climbed on top of him, knees bracing against the metal, facing away. She reached back and positioned his cock against her and sank onto him slowly, taking him in at her own pace, her thighs settling against his hips when she had all of him. She moved at the pace that suited her entirely. From the crate, Leila watched. Occasionally she said one word — Eric's name, or a single direction — and everyone in the room adjusted accordingly.

Jazmine freed Nathaniel.

She pulled him from the wall by the wrist and put her hands against it instead, bracing. He pressed against her from behind and she reached back to position him and he pushed into her, her hands flat on the wall, his chest against her back, Leila directing once from the crate with a single instruction that Nathaniel followed before he'd consciously registered receiving it. Everything in the room was warm and the drive light was cold and both of those things were true at once, and then nothing was particularly analyzable for a while.

When they were done the three of them ended up on the floor. Jazmine sprawled across Nathaniel's chest, her braids across his shoulder, laughing quietly at the ceiling at something she wasn't explaining. The laugh was small and private and genuine, the real one, no performance in it. Eric was on his back beside them, one arm at his side, looking through the viewport at the drive array with an expression Nathaniel could not read from this angle and did not try to.

Leila stood. She picked up the crate. She looked at the three of them, and for one moment something moved in her face, something that didn't belong to any register she'd used in this room. It arrived and she closed it off, the way you close off a system output you didn't mean to run.

"Get some sleep," she said.

She left.

The door closed behind her.

Jazmine turned her head on Nathaniel's chest and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then she looked at the door.

"She likes you," she said. A beat. Her voice was quiet, factual, dropping the sentence down gently. "Don't tell her I said that."