Three Months of Almost on Watch
Micah wanted Morgana on his shift, and wanting her was a firing offense he had stopped pretending he would not commit. Not on anyone else’s hours. His. Under his call sign on the log, behind a hatch only he had the key to, where nobody else got to watch her come through a door. There was a bigger word for what moved in him when she did, and he did not use it. He used want. Want could be filed. Want was his shift, his hours, his, and it went no further than the board the rule was written on.
At 2:17 the storm sat on the antennas and turned the ridge channel into a long hiss. The watch room held them the way it always did after midnight: unused bunks, the cot against the far wall with its blanket still folded, a kettle set on the bench between his end and hers like a border. He would not share the bench. She would not ask why. He kept his hands spread on his thighs and felt his stomach sit heavy over the waistband, the chair complaining every time he shifted, his knees out past the bench line because there was nowhere else to put them. A man that size did not get to want a woman he could bruise by forgetting himself. The rule said no contact on watch. His intent had already broken it. His hands had not.
Morgana drew her knees in and watched the width of him through the kettle’s thin steam. Wire-thin, flat through the chest, she knew how little of her there was to put between his bulk and a wall if he ever let it off the chain. The knowledge did not cool her. It lived under her sternum with the insomnia. Three months of almost. His wrist passing the log close enough to lift the hair on her arm. Doorways he checked before she reached them, his eyes going to her shoulders against the frame as if clearance were the problem he was solving instead of the want. She had let this be about hands. Hands and hours and a hatch that locked. Anything softer than that was a door she had nailed shut a long time ago, and she did not go near it, not even at this hour, not even for him. She kept her knees drawn. If she let them fall open he would call it an invitation he was not allowed to take, and she was done protecting him from a trespass they were both already committing in the dark.
The channel burped a call sign and died without the check. Missed. Micah stood because procedure said stand. Morgana was already at the console, and the space in front of the set was built for one. He came in on her left. His stomach brushed the sinew of her side, heat through station cotton, the weight of him meeting the hard edge of her hip and finding it would not give an inch. He thought, in the half second before he killed it, that if his hand went to the back of her neck she would stay under it. That she was already under it. That she had been his for three months and he was the only one in the room still pretending otherwise. Neither of them shifted off the contact.
Static crawled the speaker. His breath went nearer, not louder. Morgana felt the brush travel her ribs and did not step out. His palms stayed open at his sides. They shook. She did not look at them. Looking would have made her kind.
The rule, she said. No contact on watch. You wrote it on the board yourself.
The press of her side against him dragged the rest out before he could bite it down. I have been checking doorframes against your shoulders. Since the March rotation. Every time you come through the east hatch I check whether the frame will take you without you turning. It will. I still check. If I am looking at the frame I am not putting my hands on you.
She turned into the contact. Full. Her ribcage met the front of him with nothing to cushion it, bone to bulk, and he went rigid everywhere except his hands, which stayed open, which shook in the air like a man holding them over a stove and refusing to pull back. He wanted her marked. The print of his hand on her hip in the morning. The hatch locked from the inside. Kept. The want was not polite and had not been polite for weeks, and the only discipline left in him was the refusal to close those hands.
If you are going to keep not-touching me, she said, you have to leave. East corridor. I will log the miss alone. You do not get to stand here and shake and call it the rule. That is you using me to prove you can suffer.
He did not leave. Eight steps to the corridor. He took none. Heat climbed the back of his neck and sat in his face, his body too much for the narrow well of the console and still not a reason to keep starving her. Morgana’s hand closed on his wrist, stronger than the leanness promised. She took the hem of her shirt and pulled it over her head in one motion, the cotton clearing her without a snag because there was nothing on her for it to catch on, and she set his heavy palm on her bare chest, over the sternum, where there was no curve to hide in. His fingers spanned her because there was nothing to span around. She was hot under his hand and there was no give at all, just the bone of her pressing back into the heel of his palm like she meant it.
Micah flinched. The smallness hit like a reprimand. Worse was his own body answering it, heat low and immediate, modest and impossible to mistake, hardening against the inside of his thigh where there was not enough of him to make a claim and too much to pretend he was only thinking. He angled his hips back. A half step. The gap was an inch and it confessed louder than the doorframes.
Morgana stepped into it. Her hip sank into his stomach and found no bone there to brace against, nothing but the warm weight of him taking the shape of her. I am not a rule you get to keep clean, she said. If you want me, want me where I can feel it.
His forehead came down to hers because her mouth would have ended him. Bone and heat. The shake still in his arm. His hand spread on her sternum, pressure asking, the broad pads of his fingers learning the hard small span of her and refusing to pretend it was other than what it was. She split the front of his shirt open, button by button, until the heavy bare of his chest and the upper curve of his stomach were in the air and the cotton hung off him like a surrender. His belt was next, and the buckle was caught under the overhang of him. She had to push the weight up with the heel of one hand to get the tongue free, and he made a move to turn his hips from her, to put the bulk of himself somewhere she could not see it. She held the belt and did not let him.
Fatigues and shorts went down together because she took them together, and they stuck on the thick of his thighs and had to be worked, inch by inch, while he stood there with his face burning and his hands open and useless at his sides. He stepped out of them because she waited and he had already spent the right to walk away. Hers came off faster. They hung off her hips to begin with, and she shoved them and the shorts beneath to her knees and kicked free in two kicks, and then they were both bare from the waist down in the cold of the watch room. He was hard. Not enough and hard anyway, half lost under the hang of his belly, and the sound he made when the air hit him was small and helpless.
She did not let the gap become a retreat. She walked him back from the console, his spread palm still asking on her chest, until the watch cot met the backs of her calves and she dropped to sit on the edge of it. The kettle ticked on the bench as it cooled. Micah stood where she had put him, broad and shaking, and found the eight steps to the corridor had never been there at all. He had finished pretending the rule would save either of them.
She hauled him down by the open front of his shirt and tipped back onto the blanket as she did it, and he came with her, dropping between her knees until his forearms hit the cot and took the load. His stomach only grazed her waist. He held the rest of himself off her, chest carried high, because he already knew what happened if he let it down. The weight of his middle did not rest on a body like hers. It sat between them. To get anywhere near her he had to keep his chest up and tuck his hips in under his own belly, and even then it was a reach. She locked her thighs around his waist before he could brace back, and the stretch of them was a hard line biting into his sides, the smallness of her under him like a threat he had already failed to leash.
He kept his hips angled away even now, and his body made it easy, the overhang of his stomach a thing he could hide the rest of himself behind. Shame sat hot under his sternum at the modest length of him, hard and inadequate against the lean hollow of her. Morgana reached down past the weight, found him by feel, and drew him forward until the blunt head was set against her. Then she let go. Her hand came up out of the way and gripped the thick of his hip, and she pulled, and he went in on a shallow stroke that left him nowhere to hide. The fit was tight and slow. He could only reach her at all because his pelvis was rolled under and tipped up against the hang of his own stomach, hips brought flush to hers with nothing between them but skin and the wet heat of the breach. She held him there with her thighs, eyes locked on his, so the size he was ashamed of stayed pressed inside her and he could not angle away from it.
His mouth found her chest because there was nowhere else for it to go. No swell to perform against. His teeth found bone because there was nothing between, the hard ridge of rib and the hammer of her heartbeat under thin skin, tongue and teeth working the same small span while his hips worked in short seats. There was no depth to spare. She only had him at the root when his pelvis ground flush to hers, and that only came when he kept his chest lifted and rolled his hips in beneath the shelf of his stomach. Both of her hands went to the soft sides of it, fingers disappearing into the weight of him, hauling his hips into that grind every time he tried to draw back from her.
Micah’s breath broke against her collarbone. The friction was tight and close, the kind that made his thighs shake where they bracketed her. On every withdraw he slipped nearly free and she had to clamp with her thighs to keep him, and still he refused to drop his full weight. Forearms corded, stomach hovering, every thrust a held pause at the end so she felt all of him and nothing more. Morgana met him there, ankles crossed at the small of his back, pulling, the lean muscle of her legs trembling with the effort of holding a man built like a closed door.
He was halfway through another slow seat when the words left him. Not planned. Not a want he could still file under a rule he had broken. His mouth stayed on her sternum and he whispered it into the skin over her heart, voice wrecked and low. I love you. Not this. Not the shift. You.
The rhythm stopped. Morgana’s hands went still on his stomach. The storm hissed in the speaker. His breath shook against her sternum, and the confession sat between them heavier than his body. She did not have the word. She had nailed that door shut, and now she could hear him on the other side of it, and the terror was not that he had said it but that something in her had gone toward it. She could not say it. She could not give him that. What she had was her ankles and the weight of him and the one thing he was still holding back, and she would take that instead and let it stand for the rest.
She locked her ankles harder and yanked. His forearms gave. The whole of him came down, chest on hers with nothing to cushion it, ribcage to ribcage, and the belly he had been holding off her all this time spread over her thin waist and wedged there. The push of it shoved his hips back. He felt himself slide. The shallow seat he had fought for went in one breath, the weight of his own middle levering his pelvis off hers until only the head of him was still caught in her and the rest lay pressed flat and useless in the slick between them. He scrabbled for it, hips rolling under, grinding against the soft mass of his own stomach to get back even an inch, and could not.
He came like that. Barely inside her, more out than in, hips stuttering against the wedge of his own weight, still saying it against her neck while the heat of him spilled in thick pulses he could not stop. The first went into her. The rest smeared hot between them where he had slipped, slick across her and across the underside of his stomach. The word kept leaving him. Love. Love. His arms shook with the effort not to crush her and failed anyway, and the shame of his size dissolved under the worse shame of having named what he wanted out loud where it could not be taken back.
Morgana followed with her face buried in the heavy curve of his neck. Her thighs clamped, her flat chest heaving under the smother of him, and the clench of her around the little of him she still held pulled the last of it out while she made no sound that answered the word. She did not say it back. She held on, thin arms locked around the width of his back, and let the aftershocks run through both of them until the only thing moving was the tremor in his stomach against hers.
The radio screamed. Overdue check, the ridge channel barking his call sign into the dark of the watch room. Neither of them moved. Micah stayed where he had fallen, the whole of his weight on her, afraid to lift it now that the word had trapped her under it, afraid the shift of his body would be the thing that let her go. He slipped the rest of the way free of her, wet against her thigh, and he did not reach for it. He kept his mouth at her temple and waited for the refusal he had earned.
Morgana’s voice came out raw against his skin. I’m not leaving the cot. The log will show we abandoned the watch. Her hand found the side of his stomach and stayed there, fingers spread, claiming the weight instead of pushing it off. I’ll sign it beside your name.
