Chapter 32 - Same Thing, With Her

The observation bay was already warm when they arrived, the blue-white wash of the drive array filling the viewport like a held breath. Nathaniel noticed it the way he noticed everything in the lower decks now: without waiting to be asked, without filing it under social management. The bay smelled of recycled air and the particular warmth of occupied space, which was different from unoccupied space in ways he had not previously bothered to distinguish.

Jazmine was already there.

She was against the far wall, one wrist looped through a restraint above her head, anchored to the pipe fitting above the crate, the same pipe Leila had used in the first session, but Jazmine was positioned with a looseness that the anchor barely imposed, her whole posture communicating that the restraint was a decoration she'd chosen rather than a condition applied to her. She was unclothed. The blue light came off her skin in a way that managed to look less like light and more like temperature. When the door opened she turned her head and grinned.

"Took you long enough," she said.

"We were on time," Eric said.

"I know," Jazmine said. "I got here early."

She had been there a while, clearly; her posture said she had been given time and had used it well. Nathaniel stood in the doorway for a moment too long taking stock of this, the easy pleasure of a woman who was exactly where she had decided to be.

"Are you going to come in or are you going to give me a very thorough looking-at from the door?" Jazmine asked.

He came in.

Leila appeared from the shadow behind the secondary crate, which she used as a workstation when she was in operational mode, though tonight the surface was clear and she was moving without any of the apparatus of a ledger or a terminal or a surveillance map. She looked at them both. Looked at Jazmine. Looked back at Nathaniel and Eric, and the assessment she was running was briefer than usual, which he was beginning to understand meant the assessment had already been completed before they arrived.

She had two restraints in her hand. The ones they knew.

He put his hands up.

"Not tonight," she said.

He lowered them.

She held the restraints a beat longer, long enough for him to understand what she was doing with the space between what he'd expected and what was actually happening. Then she set them on the crate. Her voice was even, unhurried.

"You've earned it," she said.

He did not ask what that meant. The restraints stayed on the crate between them. Leila watched his face and waited.

Eric said nothing, which was his version of the same thing Nathaniel was thinking.

Leila crossed the bay toward Jazmine with the same economy of movement she always carried and unhooked her wrist from the pipe fitting, not releasing her but freeing her to move, one end of Jazmine's looped restraint now held in Leila's hand. Jazmine rolled her wrist and looked at Nathaniel.

"So," Jazmine said, cheerfully.

"So," Nathaniel said.

He started on his jacket. He was getting better at this part: the transition from the person who lived above to the person who was here. It used to require a small internal reorganization, like shifting cargo for balance. Now it happened fast, done before he had finished the first button.

---

She shed her clothes without display, not performing anything, not concealing anything either. He filed it. She was lean and the blue light moved off her the way it moved off the pipes: cleanly, without waste.

She looked at him.

He went to her.

She turned her back to him and reached back. She wrapped her hand around his cock and positioned him against her and sank down slowly, taking him in at her own pace, facing the viewport. The drive array filled the glass in front of her in its blue perpetual motion, and he put both hands on her hips and stayed exactly where she allowed him to stay because that was the architecture of this and it held even without the restraints. He could feel her making small adjustments, unhurried, her hips rolling to find the angle she wanted. He stopped thinking, which was new and welcome.

Her voice, over her shoulder, completely level: "Eric."

Eric had been doing very well at not standing in one place and watching, which was the instinct the room kept generating in him. He was with Jazmine, who had moved from the wall with the ease of someone released rather than freed, and who was now against the viewport with her hand flat against the glass. Eric pressed against her from behind, one hand at her hip, and pushed into her, finding the pace. Jazmine's forehead dropped forward against the glass and she made a quiet sound.

"Eyes forward," Leila said to him.

He redirected. He was also, Nathaniel registered through everything else that was currently occupying his attention, very good at doing what Leila said when Leila said it. They had both become good at that. It was a skill that had developed without either of them noting the exact moment of development.

Leila gave a direction. The configuration shifted: Nathaniel on his back against the floor, Leila above him still with his cock inside her, Jazmine brought from the wall and positioned over him — her knees at either side of his head, the warm inside of her thighs at his eye line, her cunt above his mouth. She settled. He went up to meet her, his tongue against her clit, and she tightened her grip in his hair to brace herself and let him work.

Eric behind Jazmine, both of them between Nathaniel and the viewport. Leila's cock still moving on him in its deliberate pace above, Jazmine's thighs warm against his face below. He could hear Leila's breathing quicken. He could feel Jazmine getting close in the way her weight shifted against his mouth, the small involuntary roll of her hips.

Leila's hands came up to Jazmine's hair: not directing, not shaping, just holding, a palm cradling the back of her head with the ease of someone who had decided to be careful and needed no audience for it. Jazmine's hands found Leila's waist.

He could not see what was happening above his eye line. He could feel it happening. Even without looking he knew when Jazmine's grip on Leila's waist tightened.

He knew because Jazmine made a sound into Leila's mouth.

He knew they were kissing because of the sound and because Jazmine's whole body responded to it, a full-length shiver he felt through her thighs against his face, and because Eric, who could see, went audibly still for exactly two seconds before Leila's foot connected gently with his shin.

"Back to work," she said.

---

Jazmine came first. She was loud enough that the drive hum covered it. Her thighs clenched against his face and her grip in his hair tightened once and then released, and she settled forward with a long exhale.

Eric followed. He made very little noise. He made, in fact, no noise at all except one involuntary exhalation and then a period of very controlled stillness that Nathaniel recognized as Eric's version of losing composure, which looked, from outside, like extreme composure.

Then Nathaniel.

He had not planned to make noise either, and did not, for approximately three-quarters of it, and then for the remaining portion had no available cognitive resources to direct toward planning.

Leila was last. She finished on her own terms, her hips moving in the same measured pace until she decided she was done, which she did while the others were already coming down, and she brought herself through it without consulting anyone or waiting for acknowledgment, which was exactly how she did everything.

Afterward: the four of them on the floor in the blue-white light. The drive array went about its work beyond the viewport. Somewhere in the ship's walls a coolant line pulsed and settled.

Jazmine arranged herself across Leila's lap with the boneless ease of someone who had arrived at exactly the destination she had been traveling toward. Leila's hand moved to her hair. Not directing it, not shaping it. Just resting there, the weight of a palm against Jazmine's braids, the colored wire ends of her decorations catching what light there was.

Nathaniel lay on his back with his chest still working through the last of it, the sweat cooling at his temples, the floor of the observation bay hard against his shoulder blades, the edge of a pipe housing pressing into the left one. He looked up at the pipes and then at the drive array beyond the glass.

Eric's head was on his shoulder. Eric was watching the viewport with the same attention he brought to engineering problems: patient, not needing to interfere.

The room was quiet except for the ship.

Nobody moved for a while. Leila's hand stayed in Jazmine's hair past any functional requirement, which Nathaniel registered from across the room without comment, and which Leila was aware he was registering and also did not comment on. Neither of them had a word for what that particular non-commentary meant, but both of them understood it.

Eventually Nathaniel sat up. Eric retrieved his jacket from the corner where it had landed. Jazmine murmured something into Leila's knee. Leila replied in a low voice that did not carry to where Nathaniel was standing. He did not try to hear it.

They dressed in the quiet and the blue light. At the door Nathaniel looked back. Leila was still on the floor, Jazmine still across her lap, and she was watching him with the mild, elevated-eyebrow expression that was her face's default and also, he was becoming convinced, the face she wore when something was going on at a level below her face.

He went through the door.

In the corridor Eric fell in beside him, running both hands through his hair, the curls already in their standard low-grade chaos. They walked two junctions in silence.

"She likes us," Eric said.

"She tolerates us," Nathaniel said.

Eric considered this with the expression he brought to models that needed refining.

"Same thing," he said. "With her."