Chapter 9 - Handsy

Leila's footsteps faded down the corridor and then the corridor was empty, which had its own sound down here. Nathaniel listened. He was already learning it.

The three of them sat for a moment in the amber-lit room with five and a half hours until Jazmine's calibration shift, the adrenaline from the close call converted into something warmer now that the all-clear had come and the room was this warm and nobody had moved toward the door.

Jazmine exhaled through her nose, something final, the body finishing a process. She set her glass down. Her hair had two braids slightly out of order from the last hour and a half. She had not fixed them. The freckles across her nose, the calluses on the hands she was now stretching out in front of her. She had work in the morning. She had not mentioned the door.

He put his hand on her waist.

She didn't move it. She finished the stretch, turned her palms inward, settled. His hand was on her waist. She acknowledged this without acknowledging it, which was, he was learning, how she processed physical contact that she'd decided was allowed: it simply became part of the current arrangement.

Eric was sitting beside him, shoulder to shoulder. He could feel Eric's attention the way he could always feel Eric's attention, the particular stillness of him watching the situation develop and running his assessment. Then, without fanfare, Eric's hand settled on her thigh.

He checked her face first. She nodded, a small economy of motion, eyes holding his for a fraction of a second.

The room was very warm and the walls were very thin.

She made a sound and then did not make sounds, which was a decision she had made and was visibly maintaining. He slid his hand under the waistband of her trousers and found her already slick, and his brain stalled on this information for long enough that his hand stopped moving entirely until she pressed into his palm. That got things going again. His fingers found her clit and she turned her face against his jaw and kept it there, breath condensing on his skin, the whole of her concentration directed at not making noise.

Eric worked the fabric down her hips. She lifted for him, unhurried, a small roll of her hips up and back, and then Eric's hand was at her inner thigh and Nathaniel's fingers were still moving and she was wet and warm against his hand in a way that landed in his body before it landed anywhere in his brain.

He had his mouth on her neck. The pulse there was fast.

Her arm came around his neck and her other hand went to Eric's curls and gripped. He felt Eric's breath change. The constraint of the thin walls had become its own texture in the room: the focused effort of three people holding completely still in all the ways that counted while nothing else was still. His fingers circled. She pushed into it in short, tight rocking motions, her thigh pressing hard against his knee, the muscle there taut and deliberate.

He was not managing any of this. He was inside it.

Her thighs clamped. She grabbed his wrist — not stopping him, holding him exactly where he was — and ground down in two tight pulls and then drove her face into his shoulder and bit down on the fabric of his shirt. Her cunt pulsed against his hand, clenching and wet, and she shuddered through the whole of it in silence, not one sound, just her teeth in the cloth and her fingers locked on his wrist and the slick heat on his palm as she came.

The neighbor's wall unit hummed on the other side of the partition.

She went loose by degrees, the tension leaving from the center outward. Then, still breathing against his shoulder, she reached back and found Eric. He felt the moment it landed: Eric's sharp inhale and then nothing, the deliberate suppression of sound, and then the shudder Nathaniel felt through his palm on Eric's back as Eric came against her hip.

Nobody froze.

Afterward the three of them were on the floor of a room the size of his wardrobe with the amber lamp on and the ship humming and Jazmine between them, her head tilted back against the storage crate, her eyes closed, breathing. She was warm and loose where she sat, the work in her face entirely gone. Her braids were fully disordered now. The freckles were dark in the low light.

His shirt was damp at the shoulder where she'd bitten down. His hand was damp elsewhere. He was going to think about both of those things on the walk back up.

Eric had his arm over his eyes. He was smiling at the ceiling, completely unguarded, something Nathaniel hadn't seen in a while, and it hit him with a tenderness he had no useful category for.

The ship hummed. The corridor made its empty sound. Somewhere in the environmental system something cycled, a deep sustained note that had probably been cycling his entire life and that he was only now hearing for the first time.

Jazmine opened her eyes. She looked at both of them, Eric at her left, Nathaniel at her right. Her amber eyes were moving between them, taking something in. He didn't know what the assessment was for, only that it did not feel hostile. More like being checked on than checked over.

She turned her face toward him. Then toward Eric. Back at the ceiling.

"Tomorrow," she said.

It was a statement of fact about the future: there was a future, and in it this continued. That was a different kind of statement than an invitation and considerably more interesting.

Nathaniel looked at the ceiling.

Tomorrow was approximately five hours away. He had a maintenance tunnel to navigate, a Corridor 7 access code that hadn't been changed in eleven years, and an upper-deck apartment where the air smelled of lavender that was not lavender and the morning light through the regulated-spectrum panels was precisely calibrated to produce the right effect on a nervous system being managed by compound.

He was, he realized, already thinking about when he would be back.

Eric's arm was still over his eyes. His other hand was resting on Jazmine's ankle, light, the unconscious placement of someone who had reached for the nearest available warmth. She had not moved it.

"Tomorrow," Nathaniel said.

Above them, the ship was quiet. Below them, the floor was warm.

Five and a half hours. He was going to make the most of them.