Tall Thin Spacer and Stocky Crewman

“WHEN THE CORONA-SHADOW TAKES THE PORT BOW I WILL BE IN THE HYDROPONICS DARK. DO NOT FOLLOW. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.”

The words sat on her wrist-slate and threw themselves onto the cabin glass, mirrored there in pale type, a bruise in two places at once. Delayed internal mail. Her own pulse, queued and sent and unrecallable. Aurelia watched the read-receipt and watched it and watched it, a blank indifferent eye, and the ship ticked around her in the old language of hull-stress and dying starlight. Forty-one minutes. She counted every one. Recycled air moved over her tongue and it tasted of his last shift, salt and metal and the faint animal heat he left in every corridor he passed through. She did not swallow it. She let it sit.

Her hands found her own ribs and stayed there, long thin fingers spanning almost nothing. Scaffolding. She could feel each bone as a separate humiliation, the narrow trough of her torso, the flat plane of her chest lifting too fast against the duty-skin. Eighteen months of professional silence after the hull scare, after her palm had hovered a breath from his shoulder and then fallen away, and the unsent want still lived in her throat like a coin she could not spit out. The corona-shadow took the port bow. Eclipse-light crawled. She went to hydroponics anyway, because the message had been a door and a dare and a lie, and she had always been the tallest, thinnest lie on Lumen-9.

He came anyway.

The hatch breathed him in, half-unsuited, the heavy dark of his body cutting the green. A full body-length of wet air between them. Adams, short and stocky, the thick waist of him already a fact she felt in her knees. He had to look up. He always had to look up. She stayed standing so her height was a wall, a pale vertical refusal, and she did not speak because speech would have been mercy and she had not come here for mercy. Eclipse light moved over the algae-trays like something wounded. The air went vegetal, close, sweet with rot and oxygen and the old green labor of the ship trying to keep two waking bodies alive.

She mapped him with her eyes the way a starving thing maps a table. The heavy line of his stomach under the open suit. The slab of his shoulders. The way the sheer amount of him made her own frame feel like an argument the universe had already lost. He watched her long throat work. Neither of them closed the gap. Her ribs rose too fast, a small helpless weather under the duty-skin, and something moved in him, his weight rocking once from boot to boot under her stare, a flicker she read as impatience, and then he was stone again. His stillness was the dare, the entire dare, eighteen months compressed into the fact that he had followed when she had told him not to and now he would not take one step more until she broke.

He stepped into her shadow and still only reached her collarbone.

She found his face by that tilt of the chin that always felt like an apology. Her palms twitched at her sides, those endless useless hands, and his eyes went to them, to her hands, not her face, and came back. The mismatch punched through her. His heat rose at her in waves. Copper emergency light pooled in the crease of his waist then, along that heavy living equator of him, and his hand lifted, half an inch, as if to cover it, and dropped. She thought: he’s cold. She thought nothing else about it. Her knees threatened in a way that had nothing to do with the ship’s gravity and everything to do with geometry, with how little of her there was and how much of him. The message hung between them like a live wire. “Do not follow. I mean it this time.” He had followed. He did not smile.

She folded.

Tall body giving at the knees, a surrender downward, the only direction left that could make their mouths share a plane. The first kiss was not a kiss so much as a seal failing, breath and want rushing through the crack where pride had been. Her long thin fingers found the meat of his shoulder and both his hands closed around her waist and almost met, his fingertips a knuckle’s width apart at the small of her back, and the size of his hands emptied her lungs. She felt breakable. She felt chosen. And under it, cold and quick, the old fear: that she was too much length for anyone to move, that she would always be the thing that had to fold itself down to be reached.

Foreheads. His breath on her lip, animal and close. She nodded once. The dark of hydroponics closed around the permission like a mouth.

She rose. Slowly, all the way, so that he had to tip his head back to keep her, and her fingers went to the seal at her throat. The duty-skin parted with a sound like a held breath let go. She watched his face for the verdict. It gave her his jaw first, a tightening as the fabric peeled off her shoulders and bared the length of her torso, the ribs he could have counted from where he stood. His eyes moved down as the skin moved down. He did not blink when it slid past her sternum, past the nothing of her, and she waited for the flinch that had lived in her imagination for a year and a half and it did not come. The wrist-slate stayed clamped where it was, a dull grey cuff, the only thing on her she could not take off, the message still glowing faint over her pulse. She rolled the suit to her hips and stopped.

Stopped with her thumbs hooked in it. Her hips were too much bone and not enough anything else and she knew it, and for one long pull of the eclipse she nearly drew it all back up. Then his gaze snagged on the jut of her hipbones, caught there like cloth on a nail, and his mouth opened a fraction, and she pushed the last of it down. It fell the long way. Her legs came out of it endless and pale, too much leg for a room built for shorter lives, and she stepped clear on feet that felt suddenly enormous. He stood in her shadow and looked at the bird-bone truth of her, every angle exposed, a canopy of nothing waiting to drape. He did not speak. Then he bent, and she looked down, and watched him step out of his boots one and then the other onto the cold deck plating, that short heavy stance planted bare on the metal, his toes curling once against the chill. The half-suit followed. Thick waist bared, the barrel of his chest, and his cock already lifting in the copper light, warm-looking and unhurried, a fact rather than a boast. She did not look away. Insecurity and hunger braided in her until she could not tell them apart: all length and no softness, and him the living heat she had been circling like a dead star’s last loyal satellite.

The nutrient-ledge waited behind her, polymer, breathing algae-stink, and she felt its edge find the backs of her thighs. High on her thigh. On him it would catch at the crease of the hip, a shelf he would have to climb rather than sit. Adams planted himself where her knees would part, stripped and dense and looking up one last time, and waited.

She sat. The ledge bit cold through the thin skin of her thighs, an altar of polymer and algae-stink, and her legs opened around him like a gate that had waited eighteen months to unlatch. Adams stepped into the V of her. His waist filled the hollow her body could never fill on its own, his stomach pressing the pale, almost translucent inside of her thighs and shoving them wider than a slim man’s hips would have asked. Seated, she still had height on him: her sternum hung level with his mouth, and it seemed to her that he looked at it the way a man looks at a horizon he cannot quite reach, lips parted, his breath landing on bone with nothing to soften it.

His palms found her hipbones, sharp, ridiculous things, two blades of her under the skin, and spanned them as if testing whether they would hold. She tried to link her long fingers behind his back and failed, fingertips clawing air somewhere over his spine. Too much of him. She was scaffolding. He was the furnace she had been built to hold and could not quite enclose.

He lifted her. Her lightness shocked even her; she came off the ledge like something half-imagined, her whole frame draping over his chest because there was no mass in her to argue with gravity, and her legs went around him on instinct, long enough to cross at the ankles behind the thick of his back where a shorter woman’s would have slipped. For one dizzy second the deck was gone and there was only him under her and the dark. Then he turned. She felt the polymer edge meet the backs of his thighs, felt him stop, felt him let go of her waist one hand at a time so he could brace both palms behind him on the ledge while she hung off his neck with her whole slight weight. He heaved. One short brutal hoist, shoulders bunching under her arms, a grunt into her sternum, and his backside landed on the shelf with a slap of wet skin on polymer and the ledge that had been a wall became his seat, and his lap became hers. He gathered her again. Lowered her astride him. His cock, average, warm, unheroic, nudged the slick of her. No violence. A grind. The slow fit of her narrow pelvis settling onto him, tightness born of geometry, of how little room her body made for anyone. She took him in increments. Breath as metronome. The hydroponics dark drank the sound of it: the small wet catch of entry, the hitch in her throat, the low animal noise he made against her sternum. She had to sink all the way to feel the base of him. She did. Her ribcage slotted against his without cushion, bone to bone.

Almost still. Rock, not thrust. Millimeters spent one at a time. He breathed open-mouthed at the flat of her chest as if it were a landscape he meant to weather. She towered even seated, her spine a long pale question mark curving down over his shorter, thicker frame, her calves locked behind him, ankles hooked and straining to stay hooked around the breadth of his waist, her thighs doing all the work of holding her to him because there was nothing else to hold with. His hands stayed on that waist that felt breakable. There was no room in her for thrusting; the grind was the whole language, her tightness dragging along him with every rock of his hips, her clit riding the heavy plane of his stomach, the soft heat of him giving and pushing back with each roll. Every rock reminded her that he was all heat and she the scaffolding around it, and the mismatch was the entire point, the year and a half made flesh.

Then he stopped her.

Both hands on her hips, a sudden vise. The rock died. He stayed buried, a thick pulse she could feel behind her pubic bone, deep in the front of her where he ended and she began. She looked down the humiliating drop of her own height and found his face. Not smiling. Never smiling. The copper emergency light crawled over the heavy line of his stomach, over the place where they were joined.

“From the feet,” he said. Voice scraped raw. “Slow. I want you to worship me from the feet up. I have wanted that since the hull scare. Since you almost touched me and didn’t.”

The confession hit her like a pressure drop. Everything she had read in him as stone, the shift of his weight on bare feet, the hand that had almost covered his stomach, his eyes going to her useless hands, turned over and showed its other face. He had been the one looking up all this time. He wanted the looking reversed. He wanted her mouth to make a pilgrimage of him.

She unhooked her ankles. Lifted off him. Slow, wet, a long drawn-out withdrawal that pulled a sound from both of them, cold air rushing in where he had been. She stood on legs that did not trust her, and took his hands, and he slid down off the ledge, heavy, unhurried, his back finding the polymer, then the plating, until he lay stretched on the cold deck with the algae-trays dripping over him. She went down. The metal bit her knees. Her endless legs folded and folded, her narrow torso bending until her mouth found his bare instep. Salt. Recycled air and the animal of him. She licked the arch, the tendon, the blunt unsightly toes, and felt him shudder all the way up that short heavy body. She would not rush. That was the worship.

Calves next. The dense muscle, the hair, the heat trapped there. She mouthed the back of his knee and he made a sound that was not language. His thighs. God, her long thin fingers could not close around them, could not come near to closing. She dragged her mouth up the inner seam, learning with her tongue what her eyes had mapped in the dark: the body that did not match hers and therefore belonged to her more completely.

His cock when she reached it. Warm. Slick with her. She did not rush it. She gave it her mouth the way he had given her height his hands, slow and plain and without euphemism, just lips and tongue along the length of him, the weight of it laid on her palate and staying there without ever crowding her throat, the taste of both of them. His hips tried to lift. She threw a forearm across his waist to pin him and her arm did not span it; she had to drive her elbow into the plating and lean her whole slight weight on him, and even then he barely stilled. Not yet. The ritual had a path.

The waist itself. She climbed it with her mouth, the soft-hard give of his stomach, the place copper light had made unbearable. She dragged herself up his body as she went, knees scraping deck, and because there was so much more of her than of him the arithmetic did itself: by the time her mouth reached the drum of his chest her pelvis had come to rest on his thighs, and his cock lay caught between them against the thin skin of her belly, hot and wet and left out of it. There was no give in her anywhere, her sternum a blade scoring up his ribs, the two of them meeting bone to bone with nothing between to cushion it. His heartbeat came straight through her as if she had no ribs at all. Throat. The jump of his pulse under her tongue. Then his mouth.

When she reached his face the path completed. She kissed him the way she had folded in the first place, downward, a surrender of height, and he came with a broken sound into her mouth, as if, it seemed to her, he had held it back until the worship finished, his cock pulsing untouched against her belly, his whole body locking under hers and not shifting an inch when she pressed down. Hers arrived from the worship itself. She ground her narrow pelvis to his thigh, that ridiculous tightness dragging over the heavy muscle, and the orgasm took her in a long, shaking, almost silent wave, her whole frame seizing, her chest crushed flat to his ribs, her unsent want finally leaving her throat like metal melting.

Eclipse ended. Ship systems pinged, soft, bureaucratic, indifferent. They did not dress. She was too tall to curl fully into him; her legs sprawled past him into the algae-tray shadows, pale and absurd, while he tucked her narrow torso against his thick side, one heavy arm spanning a waist his hands had already learned would not span back.

She reached for the delayed mail on her wrist-slate and deleted it. “WHEN THE CORONA-SHADOW TAKES THE PORT BOW.” Gone. He watched her do it and said nothing. They stayed tangled on the cold plating, waiting for the next shadow, and did not go back to their bunks.