Chapter 7 - First Night

The bottle on Jazmine's shelf turned out to be something amber and unmarked, which was either a sign of quality or a sign that nobody was advertising where it came from. Given everything else about this place, Nathaniel assumed the latter. She poured four measures without being asked, the pours generous and exactly equal, and distributed them with the efficiency of someone who had done this before in a room too small for more than one person to stand.

They sat on the floor. There wasn't enough furniture for four people and nobody suggested improvising; they simply settled, cross-legged or with their backs against whatever vertical surface was nearest, knees almost touching in the middle of the small space. The heat from the tunnels was still in his clothes. The room was warm without that excuse.

"So," Jazmine said, settling her glass on her knee. "How."

"Corridor 7," Nathaniel said. "The access code hasn't been changed since the ship's third generation. A fact that has apparently been true for eleven years and counting."

"Who told you about Corridor 7."

"I found the maintenance logs. I have a lot of free time."

She looked at him, amused. "You spent your free time reading eleven-year-old maintenance logs."

"I've read stranger things. The upper-deck cultural archive has a complete collection of pre-exodus reality entertainment programming." He drank. "Trust me. Maintenance logs are an improvement."

Eric, beside him, snorted into his glass. It was the first sound he had made since Leila sat down, and Nathaniel felt the small loosening in his own chest that came with hearing it. Eric finding his footing. Good.

Leila was sitting against the wall with her ankles crossed and her glass held by the rim, watching the two of them in the comfortable, assessing way she had been watching since she walked in. She had not said much. She had said enough. Nathaniel was aware of her the way he was aware of the hum of the ship: constantly, at a register just below thought.

Jazmine refilled the glasses. Nathaniel did not ask how the bottle had gotten there; the upper-deck distillery mark on the label was doing its own explaining and he was not going to make it worse by being curious about it out loud.

"What's it like," Eric said. He was looking at Jazmine. "Up there, from the outside."

She considered it. Not the performative pause of someone stalling: the actual consideration of someone who has thought about this and wants to get the answer right. "Quiet," she said. "Even the corridors. Everything is buffered. The air smells like nothing."

"It smells like lavender," Eric said.

"That's not lavender."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

A small silence, the comfortable kind: something had been said correctly and there was nothing to add. Nathaniel looked at the space between Eric and Jazmine, which was roughly ten centimeters less than it had been when they sat down. He looked at Leila. She was looking at the same space with the same mild interest and had noticed the same thing and was, he was reasonably certain, several conclusions ahead of him about what it meant.

He tried the drink. It was very good. Better than the cabinet in his parents' reception room, which was saying something, and he did not say it because the moment he said it out loud the observation would become a class comparison instead of a compliment.

"What do you do up there," Jazmine asked. "Day to day."

"Nothing," Nathaniel said, at the same moment Eric said "Mostly nothing."

They looked at each other.

"We eat," Nathaniel continued. "We attend events. We read. I've been mapping the maintenance tunnel network for about two months in my spare time, which tells you the level of stimulation available."

"There are governance functions," Eric said. "Nathaniel gets invited."

"We both get invited."

"One of us has to go."

"Which one."

"The taller one."

Jazmine laughed. It was the same laugh as in the hydroponics bay: unguarded, filling the room, the laugh of a woman who found something actually funny and had no interest in managing that fact. It hit Nathaniel in the chest the same way it had the first time.

Leila's mouth did something in the corner. The corner lifted, briefly, and then held at something just short of a smile, which was apparently as far as it went. He noticed it and filed it under information he did not know what to do with yet.

The bottle went around again. And again. The conversation stopped being practical. Midnight had settled over the room by then, the lower-deck lavender substitute entirely absent from the air, Nathaniel's nervous system reporting everything it encountered without the usual editorial mediation. Jazmine told him about the hydroponics bay: the smell of actual growing things, the grow-light, which ran warm and amber-adjacent and did something different to the body than the corridor lighting, something she was not sure had a word. Leila said, without inflection, that the grow-lights ran at the same spectrum as the lavender processing units, which was either an accident of engineering or wasn't, and then she drank and declined to continue. Nathaniel watched Eric's face during this last part, the small controlled sharpening of attention as Eric added it to the list of things to think about later.

At some point the bottle was empty.

Nathaniel picked it up, looked at it, looked at the four of them sitting on the floor of a very small room, and set it on its side between them.

Nobody said anything. Nobody moved it.

He looked at Jazmine. Jazmine was looking at the bottle. Leila was looking at him in the same unhurried, mildly interested way she had been looking at him since she walked in: neither encouraging him nor stopping him, the gap between those two things left entirely for him to navigate.

He spun the bottle.

It landed on Leila.

He looked at her. She was already looking at him. Her expression had not changed by a single visible degree. He crossed the small room on his hands and knees, which was the only way to cross it without stepping over someone, and she watched him coming with the same level quality of attention and did not move toward him or away from him. He kissed her. She let it happen, her mouth warm and precise, not pulling back, not leaning in, the exact degree of presence that communicated she was there and the terms were hers. He felt the moment when she decided the terms had been met, because her hand came up and rested against his jaw and held there without pressure for three seconds before she withdrew it.

He sat back on his heels. Her expression was not a no.

He spun again.

Eric and Jazmine. Eric leaned over and Jazmine met him halfway, and it was warmer and considerably longer than the first one, not hesitant, not polite. Jazmine was smiling when it ended. Eric was doing something controlled with his face and losing.

The third spin, Nathaniel already knew was going to happen before it settled. He should have run the physics.

Jazmine put her hand on his jaw the way Leila's hand had been on his jaw a minute ago, and the comparison was immediate and instructive, because this was an entirely different kind of hand. Callused, warm, the thumb fitting against his cheekbone with the confidence of someone who had decided where it was going. She kissed him and the room was quieter than it had been and his brain briefly stopped doing its job.

He was aware of Eric at his back. He was aware of Leila across the room. He was aware that the room was the temperature of something organic and that Jazmine's hand was still on his face and that he should be managing more of this than he was currently managing.

He stopped trying to manage any of it.

When she pulled back she was looking at him with something that was not amusement but ran parallel to it: her eyes were on his and they were not performing curiosity. It was different from Leila's look. He could not have said how exactly, only that Leila had been measuring something and Jazmine was not measuring anything yet.

He was very aware of the difference.

The rest cycle signal hit, three short tones through the corridor, loud enough to reach every room on the deck. The room shifted the way rooms shift when external time intrudes on the internal kind: not broken, just reminded of itself.

Nobody moved toward the door.

Leila moved toward the door.

She uncrossed her ankles, stood without using her hands, reached for her jacket where it had been folded over the edge of the storage crate. She shrugged into it with the economy of someone who had rehearsed the motion. She picked up her glass, drained what was left, and set it back on the shelf.

"Gentlemen," she said.

She looked at Jazmine. Jazmine looked back. The compression of two people who had been translating each other long enough that they were working in shorthand again, something exchanged in the three seconds of held eye contact that Nathaniel did not have enough context to decode.

Then she was gone, the door closing behind her on a click that was very quiet in a room that had suddenly become slightly larger.

Nathaniel looked at the closed door. He looked at Eric. Eric looked at him with the expression that meant he was thinking approximately the same twelve things Nathaniel was thinking and was not going to say any of them yet.

Jazmine stood and collected the glasses, moving around them with the easy competence of someone in her own space. She set the glasses by the sink unit. She turned off the ambient overhead, leaving the amber rest-cycle lamp on, the one that turned everything the color of something warm and deliberate.

"First rule," she said, not looking at either of them. "When you hear three taps on the pipe and then two long, you stop moving. Doesn't matter what you're doing. You stop."

She looked over her shoulder at them, both of them, together.

"Second rule." She didn't say it. She let the second rule announce itself, which it did, in the amber light of a room with two men in it and a work shift six hours away.

Nobody moved toward the door.

She crossed the room to Nathaniel first, and he understood, without it being said, that this was not an accident of geography. She was choosing order the way she had chosen the pour: deliberate and exactly even. Her hands went to the front of his shirt. She did not pull at it. She just put her palms flat against his chest and looked at him, right there in the amber light, and waited for his hands to find her waist.

They did.

She was warm through the fabric. He could feel the calluses on her palms even through his shirt. He kept his hands on her hips and tried to look like he had a plan.

She kissed him again, differently than the bottle spin, no distance this time, her mouth open and unhurried, and one of her hands slid up his chest and around the back of his neck. He was aware of Eric behind him at whatever angle Eric had chosen to be at and then he was not aware of anything except her mouth and the heat of her hands and the fact that she was pressing forward and he was going to have to figure out what to do with his.

He moved his hands up under the hem of her shirt.

Her skin was warm. Her spine tensed slightly under his palms and she made a sound against his mouth that was short and caught. He did it again, deliberately, and her grip on the back of his neck tightened. His brain took a brief unscheduled leave.

Eric moved.

Nathaniel felt him before he heard him: the shift of weight in the room, the warmth along his back as Eric came in close behind Jazmine. She broke from Nathaniel's mouth on a breath, a sound between them that landed nowhere in particular. He watched her face over her shoulder: her eyes closed, her chin tilted, the flush starting at her throat. Eric's hands on her hips, visible on either side of her, dark against her shirt.

Nathaniel had seen Eric do this before. Watching it aimed at someone else was its own education.

He put his mouth on her throat. She made the same short caught sound and her fingers pressed into the back of his neck. He worked his way down and she rolled her hips back into Eric without what seemed like a conscious decision to do it, and he felt the breath she pushed out against his hair.

Her shirt came off. He was not entirely sure which of them managed that.

He stared at her for two full seconds he was not apologizing for. The amber light. The braids coming loose on one side. The weight and fullness of her against his hands when he finally put them where they'd been going for forty-five minutes. Her nipples hard under his thumbs. She arched forward and stayed there, her hands gripping the front of his shirt, her face tipped slightly back toward Eric who was doing something at her shoulder that he wasn't watching because he couldn't look away from her face.

They moved toward the floor mat. This took longer than it should have because nobody wanted to stop long enough to do it properly. He ended up on his back with Jazmine over him, and she was not shy about it, her thighs on either side of his hips, her weight settling onto him with the ease of someone who knew exactly where she was going.

He thought: okay. Okay, yes. He thought several things after that in the wrong order.

She pressed her hips down and he stopped thinking in sentences.

Eric settled beside them, close, and Jazmine turned toward him on a pivot that was entirely controlled, one hand staying pressed flat on Nathaniel's chest to anchor the geometry. She kissed Eric with the same settled attention she had used on Nathaniel. He felt her shift her weight, felt the adjustment run through her hips into his, felt his own hands tighten on her thighs.

He looked up at the ceiling. He looked at the ceiling for a while.

Clothes went where they went. It happened in increments, whoever had a free hand. He registered: the texture of the floor mat against his shoulder blades, the heat of her thighs against his sides, the specific warmth of Eric's arm pressing against his for a few seconds before it moved somewhere else.

When she took him in she did it slowly, her eyes on his, and he managed to hold her gaze for approximately four seconds before he had to look at something neutral, which turned out to be the middle distance and was not neutral at all.

She said, low, "Stay here."

He stayed.

She moved and his whole body ran the calculation and came out the other side, and he put his hands on her hips and held on, and that was about the level of sophisticated contribution he was able to make. She rolled forward and back with an ease that suggested she had the entire thing mapped out and was executing precisely, and the sound she made was low and genuine and entirely unmuffled, the way her laugh was unmuffled, the way every sound she made apparently was.

He was aware of Eric. He was specifically aware of Eric's hand on his own ribs at one point, brief, warm, the casual contact of two people who had been in rooms together for six years. It grounded him slightly. He appreciated the grounding because he needed it.

He lasted longer than he expected. He thought about that later and decided it had something to do with the full-system overwhelm: there was too much incoming data for any one channel to run an emergency.

He came with his hands gripping her hips and his head pressed back against the mat and one clear thought, which was that his body had been filing this experience as significant from the first moment he touched her and was now closing the record.

She shuddered once, breath gone sharp and broken, and pressed down hard and stayed there, and he felt her clench around him as she finished.

Silence. The amber lamp. The low subsonic hum of the ship doing its decades-long work underneath all of them.

He lay still and stared at the ceiling and was aware of his own heartbeat in more places than seemed physiologically necessary. His skin felt like it had been on a different setting than usual and was now adjusting back. Sweat, cooling. The weight of her, still, before she shifted.

She put her forehead down on his chest for a moment. Her braids fell across his ribs and he felt the edges of the wire woven through them, cool and specific. He put one hand on her back and let it sit there and tried to locate the rest of his mind.

Eric's voice, somewhere beside them, dry and quiet: "So that was the second rule."

Jazmine laughed. The full unguarded laugh, the one that had hit Nathaniel in the chest in the hydroponics bay. She lifted her head. In the amber light her eyes were dark and still amused and looking at both of them, together, as a unit.

She had, the whole time, been looking at both of them.

Six hours to the work shift. Nobody moved toward the door.