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“’Nara?”
Kaylee pokes her head into Inara’s shuttle.
“Come in,” is the gentle reply, and Kaylee steps inside. She rounds a drapery, and Inara comes into view, bare-backed, a trickle of water running between her shoulder blades from the sponge she’s using to wash.
“Oh!” She steps back in surprise. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I can come back.”
“Please stay.” She turns to look over her shoulder, and her eyes seem to shine.
“You got an appointment?” They’re docked for a few days, in a port city with a host of wealthy merchants.
“Not until tomorrow evening.” She gestures to the ground next to her. “You can sit, if you like.”
Kaylee sits cross-legged, looking carefully at her knees.
“It’s all right to look at me, you know,” Inara murmurs, and Kaylee lifts her eyes, grinning.
“You sure? It don’t make you uncomfortable or nothin’?”
“From some, maybe. From you…never.”
Inara is unabashed in her nakedness in a way unusual for folks from the core planets but natural to Kaylee, who never learned to be ashamed. It feels—if not normal—comfortable, to look up to see Inara’s sponge rounding the curve of one of her breasts. (Don’t mean it’s not a little distracting, though, and Kaylee loses her voice for an instant.)
She comes back to herself when Inara lays a hand on her knee. “Did you have something to ask of me?”
“Right! I’m sorry, you’re, uh—real pretty.” She fidgets, fingers tapping on her thighs until they come in contact with Inara’s hand, and then she is tracing her fingertips over the smooth skin. “I’ve been thinkin’,” she says. “I ain’t had a man nor a woman in some time.”
“And by ‘had’ you mean…”
“You know, sex!” she says brightly. “’N I know you get more ’n your fair share, but I reckon it’s mainly men, and I was wonderin’, if you ever wanted to have sex that ain’t work, you might want to have it with me.”
Inara turns her hand over to squeeze Kaylee’s fingers.
“I’d like that very much.” She leans forward, setting down her sponge, and kisses Kaylee—slow and soft, the kind of kiss that sends anticipatory tingles all through her. Kaylee shivers—with delight, maybe—and kisses right back. When the kiss deepens, Kaylee pulls back to speak. “Now?” she asks, and Inara smiles that soft enigmatic smile.
“If you like.”
“I meant to wash first,” she says, gesturing to her grease-stained coveralls, and Inara reaches to help her get out of them.
“You can wash here,” she says, and when Kaylee nods, she draws her shirt over her head and dips the sponge into the warm water. Kaylee turns so her back is to Inara so she can run the sponge down her back, over her shoulders.
“This don’t feel like work?” Kaylee asks, as Inara presses a lazy kiss to her collarbone, and warm water runs down to pool in her belly button.
“It doesn’t feel anything like it.”
“Why not?”
She considers, placid, before deciding: “Love.”
“You don’t mean…”
Inara shakes her head. “Not romantic love. I don’t think I love like that.”
“Not even Mal?”
“Not even Mal. I thought so, for a while.”
“Ain’t that lonely?”
She presses her lips, again, against the damp skin of Kaylee’s shoulder. “I think everybody’s lonely sometimes. But you don’t have to be lonely just because you don’t love like everyone else does.”
“And you love me?”
“I do.”
“Me too." She reaches for Inara’s hand where it is scrubbing at a stubborn grease stain on the upper part of her chest. “You think we could stop with the washing now?”
“Of course.” She rubs until the mark is gone, and then sets aside the sponge. Kaylee looks down at herself, clothes still a mess. “These ain’t gonna make a mess of your fancy bed, are they?”
There’s mischief in Inara’s eyes. “Sheets can be washed. But perhaps you should leave them off, to be sure.”
She peels them off the rest of the way, letting shirt and coveralls crumple on the floor, and clambers up to the bed. Inara follows more gracefully, letting her clothes away as she does; she’s wearing satin underneath, and Kaylee reaches for the fabric almost without realizing, to draw them down her hips.
There’s something gorgeous in pleasing Inara. She comes almost silently, but Inara never makes much noise anyway. It’s not in the way she sounds; it’s the way she tangles her fingers in Kaylee’s hair, the way she draws her to her chest when they’re done.
“That was nice,” Kaylee says.
“Yes,” Inara murmurs, drawing her fingers through Kaylee’s hair. “That was nice.” Her hand gets caught on a tangle, and Kaylee yelps. “Maybe we should take care of this,” she says, and Kaylee nods against her chest. “In a minute.”
(She leaves the shuttle with braids in her hair, and they smile their secret across the dinner table.)