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“What the heck is wrong with you?” All the little coughs and throat-clearings serving as warning that a line had been crossed.
“You can bend a little once in a while.” All the irritating—what do the Americans call it, again?—side-eyes—when the vocabulary chosen had been a touch too harsh, too unappealing for general consumption.
“No, no, no. You cannot keep using—I’m saving the world—as an excuse every time you are a jerk.” All the endless complaining, half-formed swear words, the snorting, the blowing of raspberries, the clapping hands, snapping fingers, sad whistles.
All of that.
To this?
Avoidant eyes. Not sparkling, not half-lidded from lack of sleep, not puffy from excessive caffeine, not misted from—well.
Footsteps falling just a fraction too short, too slow to match her stride as they usually did. The last time she had chased him had been during their initial, ah, interviewing process. After that he had been the one running after her often enough to keep up.
No combativeness. No bickering. No excessive talking. No ill-timed jokes followed by a wink. Not that she would have seen it anyway, with his gaze so carefully lowered. She should stop thinking about the eyes. Why was her mind returning to them? That was a new and distinctly unwelcome line of thought, best discarded immediately.
That was what a long flight and too much time to think did to a woman who was not accustomed to having even a moment to herself. The utter silence during the journey had not helped either. No blasting of their shared playlist—the one he had insisted she contribute to after gradually occupying her office with his person, his belongings, and, of course, his speaker. It had been her office, after all. The atmosphere ought to reflect her taste as well, at least a little.
Eventually it had even become something of a challenge, a mutual bet. Every time he argued with Dr. Lokken, she was allowed to delete one of his songs from the list. Conversely, if she had called any world leader the equivalent of a male appendage in any of the eight languages she spoke with proficiency, she had to, as he put it, “fess up” and add another song.
The result made the playlist considerably more bearable for her—and, in its own way, for everyone in their vicinity as well. It was, arguably, also educational for him. It forced him to explore what could only be described as actual good music.
Which was now gone. As was the constant chemistry—both senses of the word, considering the relentless stream of puns he usually inflicted on anyone, and everyone, but mostly on her.
No attempt at an argument. No fight at all. No emphatic bullshit. No misguided attempt to be helpful.
Verdammter Mist.
And all she had done was clarify her future to him.
“I’m curious,” he had asked, yes, he had asked. If he had not wanted an answer, why ask the question at all? If scientists feared their discoveries, why pursue them in the first place?
“Once we launch Hail Mary. What will you do then?”
She had made it clear there was no mystery about her. The answer had been there all along—plain, accessible, and entirely unromantic.
“Me?” she had said. “It doesn’t matter. Once the Hail Mary launches, my authority ends. I’ll probably be put on trial by a bunch of pissed-off governments for abuse of power. Might spend the rest of my life in jail.”
It was not as if he had been unaware. Ryland Grace was, by every measurable standard, an intelligent man—possessed of a mind more than capable of deducing this outcome on his own.
Nor had she failed to imply the alternative possibility: that prison might, in fact, be the far too optimistic scenario. That particular detail would not have improved morale, especially with a weeping climatologist occupying the physical space between them. She had, wisely, refrained from it, offering only a small shrug and forcing out something resembling a smile—a gesture meant to signal that she had already made peace with it.
The expression had shifted, despite herself, into something almost amused when Dr. Leclerc sniffled and muttered, “I’ll be in the cell next to you.”
“We all have to make sacrifices,” she had added, trying very deliberately not to sound noble, because this situation did not require a tragic general delivering uplifting speeches about destiny, nor was she attempting to justify their actions—that, in her view, would have been dishonest, especially to the climatologist pacing beside her. “If I have to be the world’s whipping boy to secure our salvation, then that is my sacrifice to make.”
And yet her attempt at honesty—at clarity, even kindness—had not seemed to compute in Dr. Grace’s mind for reasons she could not immediately categorize. Then again, neither apparently could he explain it.
She had even placed a steady hand on Dr. Leclerc’s shoulder as he sniffled beside her and cooed, as clearly and gently as she could manage, “Tu as fait ce que tu devais faire, François. Nous faisons tous ce que nous devons faire.”
Still, something about the exchange seemed to unsettle Dr. Grace. “You have a strange logic to you,” he had said.
She shot him a look, ready to meet his eyes and engage in a minor challenge if necessary—something small, intellectual, and fun to distract herself with. He had not returned the gaze. With a faint frown, she closed the conversation with a final clarification, spoken with the quiet certainty of someone who genuinely believed the matter self-evident.
There was truly nothing strange or unusual about her reasoning, about her.
It was time the younger man accepted that.
“Not really,” she had said. “When the alternative is death to your entire species, things are very easy. No moral dilemmas, no weighing what’s best for whom. Just a single-minded focus on getting this project working.”
If she had known it would be this simple to rid herself of Ryland Grace and his…close presence, she would have simply forwarded him the absurd contract she had signed away her life with two years earlier. Cc’d him on every addition that kept appearing, gradually, in her inbox with every use of the authority she had been given, since that authority was conditional—and, most importantly, interim, after all. Not that she read most of them. Who would have time for that?
Though, admittedly, if he had read any of it, there existed a distinct possibility he might never have agreed to join the project in the first place. He would not have begged for those three dots. He would not have spent an outrageous amount on Skittles in the American equivalent of Baumax—Hobby Lobby, right.
Unlike everyone else involved—at least those who had agreed willingly—Dr. Grace had nothing to fear from the consequences. Every action he took bore a signature that belonged to her. And hers alone.
She had extended the same courtesy to every participant—every expert, every scientist, every person of interest who was not suicidal and had a life worth returning to once the ship left Earth. The compressed timelines, the pressure, the so-called urgent extraction—it was, in essence, a form of kidnapping. A considerate one, in her estimation. They now possessed plausible deniability. They could use it against her in court. They would get to see the sun restored.
Yes, he was special, and he received special treatment. Of course he did. He was the leading expert on Astrophage, and at the moment he was one of the most important people on Earth—currently, and hopefully for the foreseeable twenty-six years.
There remained the distinct possibility that the world might not go to hell immediately once the ship launched; that putting Eva Stratt through hell would satisfy enough governments to keep them cooperating, clinging to collective survival until the Beetles returned.
And in that possibility, there would be no one more qualified than Dr. Ryland Grace to continue the research—to keep Earth functioning, to stand in golden rays in her stead.
She had dragged him along to meetings, courtrooms, rallies, military bases. Not only was he far more popular with the unfortunate people on her schedule than Stratt herself ever could be, he was also likable—capable of explaining the science in a way that allowed people to understand it without boring them or talking down to them.
He was likable enough. Competent enough. And he had the potential. Most importantly, he had no real evidence against him. Which worked out neatly. Stratt had, in fact, done him a favor.
To be upset about his reaction was irrational. And yet so was his apparent displeasure with her, when she had done nothing—objectively speaking—that he ought to consider wrong. Each to their own. Yes, Dr. Grace could behave like an asshole on occasion, but she had never felt it directed at her—not like this, and never without cause. It was not a novel experience, strictly speaking. But it was unfamiliar in its focus, slightly disquieting. Certainly nothing worth dwelling on though...
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da. Life goes on.
She groaned as she stepped out of the jet, attempting to walk as though her body were not protesting violently against the decision to stand up too quickly. Behind her she heard Dr. Grace stumble slightly—well, he was not that much younger.
Forty-five years old. A failed academic, technically speaking, but not really. A man with an unfortunate talent for irritating the wrong people at the wrong time, but not really. He had been a good teacher, a good man. That much had been obvious from the beginning.
The only man she had allowed physically near her in the last decade—despite his unfortunate tendency toward commentary. Including that god-awful comparison about her being “touchy” with her personal boundaries, likening it to Hatch and his beetle probes—objects no one was ever permitted to handle, under any circumstances.
For the record, she had found that analogy deeply unflattering.
Still, he had survived to see another day. As he had suffered through her own attempt at humor in return, when she had remarked that the last man she had been involved with had been a Dutch lawyer named Ringo.
He had, mercifully, let that pass without further analysis. It was, she supposed, a skill of his—avoiding what was uncomfortable.
And now, apparently, she had become the uncomfortable element. Her mind kept pace with the silence in his absence, faster than was strictly useful—faster, even, than his usual rambling cadence would have filled it, if he were not currently choosing silence instead of speech.
Cowardice was an uncharitable assessment of him. Accurate, likely. No great loss. She did not require sex. She should not be engaging in it at all. It was a variable best removed from operational consideration. He was professional enough to continue giving the project his full effort, surely. That was all that mattered. At least now he knew not to become attached, as she had told him repeatedly.
Celibacy had, in practice, been the only significant “restriction” she had ever fully broken within her own framework of discipline—if it could be called that. A deviation, technically, though hardly significant. A fortunate thing, then, that the option no longer meaningfully existed.
Or did it? No. That line of thought was inefficient. Plainly incorrect. Unhelpful. Stupid.
She had been—effectively—forced into sterilisation.
Still, the contract had stated that sex and other attachments were not recommended. Not prohibited, of course. Nothing so crude as prohibition. Only strongly discouraged, as though moral restraint could be written into legal phrasing and thereby made enforceable.
She had presumed that the procedure itself would be sufficient. It had been easier to agree than to explain to the members of the Nations Unies who had voted her into position that she was not only childless by choice, but also forty-seven years old and, statistically speaking, unlikely to be reproducing under any foreseeable circumstances.
It had to be done, they had insisted. And she had agreed. There was no time to spare. There had been work to do.
So yes—now it was biologically impossible for her to form the kinds of attachments or dependents that might complicate the consequences of her actions after she carried out the burden of attempting to save the world.
And they, in turn, got to keep their consciences clean. Her value as a leader—and the price assigned to it, and its convenient acceptability—depended on the fact that she had no relationship, no child, no pet; no one who would miss her.
Ohne Scheiß...
Good for them.
Not that there was no other way of forming those... connections, but her psychological profile had likely already accounted for that variable, removing the emotional from consideration for the people who had once mattered in this context. They could safely assume there was no chance in hell of it happening, as long as she remained in charge. As if she had ever allowed emotional attachment to interfere with her work. Her reputation alone had ensured that conclusion.
So she was spared another hearing, and set to work on the Arclight probe destined for Venus.
Sex was not that important, certainly not—that—emotional, more practical than anything else. Plus now there was no meaningful risk of that particular deviation repeating itself. Even with Grace, it had taken her over eighteen months to allow it to happen at all.
At first, it had been nothing more than a spontaneous fling after the test-launch karaoke party, with the man who had once jokingly called himself her lapdog. Everyone had assumed they were involved anyway—so where was the harm in confirming an assumption? It felt rather nice.
Another had followed in her old ESA office, with the same giddy man discovering bits and pieces about her while he was supposed to be paying attention to the G7 leaders. That, again, was the man who had never been to Paris before—never to Europe at all. Well, he did ride a bike to work, and not for exercise. His enthusiasm had been almost sufficient to make her miss the place. And, in a sense, she had left that building with a bang thanks to him.
Another had taken place in their, at that point, shared office aboard the ship, Depeche Mode new album Memento Mori, playing in the background. It had felt nostalgic, though she could not initially recall why, until the memory of losing her virginity after one of the band’s concerts surfaced unbidden—making her lose her composure in front of the Dalai Lama.
Another had taken place on her private jet, during what he had, with very un-characteristic lack of shame, called entry into the mile-high club. Americans. Althought, he had been almost… endearing about it.
And so, a few more nights here and there followed over the last three months. It served as a distraction without being disruptive to the mission. He was attractive. Available. And she had enjoyed it.
Not worth cataloguing, not now, weeks from launch. Soon—finally—back on the ground, in Kazakhstan. And then, if she was fortunate, nothing but hearings, tribunals, and the long administrative aftermath of being the person who had done what had to be done.
It was a good thing she had removed any illusion he might have formed—if there had ever been one. There was, after all, no mystery about her; only finality. She should not feel disappointed in him for that.
Behind her, Dr. Grace slowed once more. She felt it rather than heard it—the subtle shift of footsteps, the small shuffling of his feet as he checked his untied sneakers, careful not to trip, as he once again offered quiet comfort to the wreck of a Frenchman. As he had done repeatedly. It had not stuck yet. There was a non-zero chance it ever would. Dr. Leclerc will hardly recover from this. Oh, Grace must be exhausted, or perhaps his naïveté was still shielding him from at least something—if not from her fate.
“Je ne pourrai plus jamais me montrer nulle part…”
The lament was a little too self-centered for Dr. Leclerc, but of course he would feel personally responsible. He was… Stratt almost filtered the weeping out.
Here, in the open air on the deck, she felt a shudder threaten her control and wondered, briefly, if she had been ignoring it on purpose without noticing. Perhaps that made the silence worse. Or better. It depended on whether it was preferable to be alone with one’s thoughts, or alone with the cries of a man whose entire life’s work she had effectively detonated earlier that day.
She considered turning around to face Grace. She was surprised he had not asked her to translate the French—unusual. She felt, absurdly, like pointing it out. Forcing him to—what? Take a break. Sleep when he finally could; his accommodations were only five minutes away, hers even closer. Stop being merely a good friend, and instead be better—allow Dr. Leclerc to mourn in peace.
Acknowledge her.
An irrational thought intruded then, uninvited and immediately recognized as such: that if she turned around, he might disappear entirely. Like Orpheus losing Eurydice by looking back too soon. A childish comparison, unworthy of analytical thought, let alone emotional weight. And, in any case, for her it was already too late—not too soon. Too late to salvage certainty, too late to catch even a stable glimpse of the version of Grace she wanted there.
Instead she walked inside, leaving the deck behind, bidding good evening—“晚上好。”—to the soldiers stationed at the entrance. The corridor was warm, sterile, smelling faintly of recycled air and machinery. Too white, resembling the snow, the ice, the...
She shook the Antarctic wind from her coat, which, rather inconveniently, reminded her once again that her future biography would now contain the following entry: Nuclear destruction of the continent of Antarctica, executed under the authority of the interim leadership entrusted to the Petrova Task Force, which ordered and oversaw the use of strategic nuclear weapons on an unprecedented scale, resulting in the deliberate destruction of an entire continent and a permanent alteration of the planet’s climate system.
Well.
It had bought them time. A decade, at best. That had been the point, and that was all that mattered.
She would, in due course—so long as she was permitted the time—be required to account for the ecological consequences. Of course she would. Methane release, ice-sheet collapse, cascading climatic effects—entire species erased in the margins of necessity for human survival. She did not pretend to fully understand the full scope of the impact. The sobbing climatologist did, though, and he had agreed to carry it out—for humanity—and therefore that survival had outweighed environmental cost. It had outweighed everything.
And perhaps her biographers would be generous enough to note that through this—this utterly deranged and unforgivable act—she had not only neutralised the United States nuclear arsenal, but also forced the coordinated disarmament of every major nuclear power. A complete removal of ignition points for wars that were, statistically, inevitable. There would be suffering regardless. Nuclear war had simply been the version of it she could still prevent.
So she had.
Once she had changed out of clothing that had not witnessed a nuclear explosion, partly to calm her nerves, she cursed—having forgotten that her lightbulb had burst—and finally instructed the nearest soldier, as she should have done before her departure the previous night, to install replacement lighting in her cabin for now, and to ensure the main fixture was properly repaired by morning.
Still somewhat tense, Stratt headed to the labs for inspection and the daily overview. It was late, and they were waiting. She understood the importance of rest, and so she moved quickly, intent on being buried—preferably in an avalanche—of information and, hopefully, progress, so the staff could go about their respective lives and sleep, drink, or engage in whatever more interesting activities they had scheduled that did not involve briefing their humanities-focused superior on scientific work.
In Dr. Grace’s absence today, the duty had fallen to Ing. Komorov.
The man gave her a surprised sneer the moment he saw her, followed by a series of unhelpful comparisons of her cheeks to a crustacean—“рыжая как рак”, as he so helpfully supplied in Russian when she asked what, precisely, was so amusing. She mentally filed it away as unnecessary vocabulary acquisition, though she had to concede, begrudgingly, that the commitment to humiliation was almost artistically competent.
Fine. She would stop by the medbay later. A few extra steps would not kill her. And if they did, at least the paperwork would be someone else’s problem. Sunburn treatment, panthenol, and perhaps whatever additional minor indignities passed for post-jetlag care—when in Rome, as the expression went, though Rome at least had the decency to provide wine with its sunburn treatment, which would have constituted a measurable improvement tonight.
As much as she had come to tolerate Dimitri Komorov—enough to almost like him, which she refused to interrogate too closely—she only half-listened to the lab report. Dr. Grace would and will handle it better, she told herself. She was not a scientist. She was fully aware of her limitations in that regard, and unlike most people in her position, she did not confuse confidence with competence.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Dr. Grace already doing so on the far side of the hall, with Lokken of all people. Voluntarily so. Instead of starting at his assigned station or relieving his buddy Komorov of the double workload, he was…there. Useful, apparently. Efficient in a way that was either strategic or evasive, and she did not immediately know which interpretation annoyed her more.
Was he avoiding her? Or was she overreading it, and he was simply behaving intelligently for once by moving from the hardest task to the easiest? It was infuriating how both explanations were plausible.
She almost regretted taking him with her. But Dr. Leclerc required support, and in a certain capacity, so did she. Regret, as such, was uninteresting and practically useless.
The next hour existed anywhere and nowhere at once—her office, the corridors, meeting room seven, the dining hall—where she fulfilled a daily quota of nutrients as mandated by her contract. She missed home-cooked meals more than she cared to admit, though the personnel here were exemplary and she was genuinely grateful for them, and therefore for their food, even if it sometimes seemed engineered to achieve maximum nutritional compliance and minimum sensory ambition.
Of course, she knew no one would truly care if she skipped a meal. Grace sometimes rumbled at her about it and produced a snack on the move, but that was an outlier in the dataset—insufficient for statistical comfort. Besides, the man himself had developed scurvy after not eating a single piece of fruit during the first month aboard, so he had no standing to judge her.
It was all a farce, in the end. Yes, the intake requirements were contractual, but no one would physically restrain her over a skipped meal. The rules existed less to enforce discipline than to prevent her from quietly deleting herself mid-crisis, which, admittedly, was a reasonable concern expressed in the language of institutional panic.
Still, some of the rules were insulting in their stupidity. No strongly spiced foods even made the list—an entry she had once laughed at, and then laughed again at the people who had presented her with the nonsensical folder of papers. She had, at the time, felt a strong urge to annotate it with a brief historical note on nineteenth- and twentieth-century pseudoscientific claims that spicy food caused hysteria or uterine instability in women, they truly had strange fascination with her reproductive system...
No drugs, no sleeping pills—that was unfortunate—no alcohol (whoops), and severe restrictions on caffeine, which was frankly obscene and therefore conveniently ignored. And no sex—double whoops—though that particular clause could now be considered functionally obsolete. Wellness checks and monthly psychiatric evaluations were mandatory.
After a call—via Skype, of all antiquated things—with a cardinal secretary of state from the Vatican regarding formal blessings of the ship by representatives of the major religions, she felt thoroughly drained by the bureaucratic compression of reality into something she could no longer distinguish from satire.
It was almost annoying that Grace had not been present for it. He was not spiritually inclined in any meaningful sense, but she would have liked to see him try not to laugh when His Eminence casually announced that the delegation to Kazakhstan would be led by Cardinale Pizzaballa.
But there she was, by herself, as she was at her best, and at her worst, and at every intermediary variation no one bothered to name. Oscillating, as usual, between bureaucratic control and moral vertigo, neither of which was particularly stable ground to stand on.
By the time she returned to her twelve-square-meter living quarters—she used to have a terrace that size, which now felt like a personal insult—she noticed, rather inconveniently, that there were somehow too many lamps scattered around the room, more than strictly necessary. At least she could continue working for a while without having to walk back and forth to her office.
She was fully aware that efficiency had fallen somewhere out of the jet window over the Pacific. She was running on fumes. She knew it. The body knew it. The mind simply refused to release the day.
And so she could not sleep.
There was a proud, almost satisfied part of her still exhilarated by what she had done. How she had done it. The precision of it all. The sheer scale of controlled catastrophe dressed up as necessity, because that was what it was, and Stratt had to keep reminding herself of that fact. And yet it sickened Eva Startt just enough to keep her awake. Which was almost amusing, in a detached sense, if she did not feel so close to collapsing under the cumulative weight of it.
Lately, sex had functioned as a way to stop thinking, or at least to blunt the edges of thought around fuel reserves, spindrives, heroin, vodka, and a revolver stashed somewhere in the equipment of humanity’s last long shot vessel, copyright lawyers who would find her faster than any intelligence agency ever had, and—inevitably—Dr. Grace.
Somehow, sex with Grace had made it easier to not think about Grace. It had been nice, uncomplicated in its mechanics, never demanding anything she could not temporarily ignore.
Grace had too easily let her take charge. It was not something she craved—dominance—but if it felt natural to him, she adapted. She would do her best to meet it properly, to hold him, to anchor him, to keep him safe, steadily wrapped around her finger, as he seemed to prefer. She would have preferred equilibrium. But thanks to his inclinations, she at least had a role to perform—something structured to focus on, while still deriving her own satisfaction from it. And that helped.
Thinking about it now only made her angry. Not at him. At herself. For allowing it to settle into habit instead of stopping it when she should have. For letting him get closer than was sensible. For choosing, repeatedly, to demonstrate that she was not made of stone—that she could step outside of herself, speak freely, even sing to the crew with joy, to him, to people she should have maintained stricter distance from. Camaraderie was not useful in her position, quite the opposite in fact. And yet it was human. So was she. So was he. She could have stopped there; instead, she opened her legs just once more, until she ended up dust.
The knock at the door came exactly when she had reached the point where any further thought would have resulted in an entirely unnecessary morning migraine. And Stratt exhaled, something dangerously close to relief slipping through despite her best efforts. If Grace was brave enough to face her, then she could be brave enough to face this—and herself. No Fabian strategy.
Gott sei Dank… verdammt nochmal.
The relief turned to bitterness the moment she opened the door for him and noticed that he still refused to meet her eyes. The prospect of a migraine returned.
“Umm—hey, Stratt. Hope I didn’t wake you, but considering you’ve got… one, two… five—woah—lamps on in a single bedroom… yeah. I couldn’t sleep either. Can I come in?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again almost immediately, stepping aside so he could enter.
The last time he had lingered in her doorway for more than a minute, Lieutenant Ilyukhina had somehow obtained far too many photographs of the two of them and sent a small collage to Eva’s personal printer with the caption: I want to put tou two in a microwave.
Whatever that meant...
Grace smiled faintly and stepped inside with similar efficiency, shutting the door behind him—probably aware of why the no fuss before closed doors rule existed.
To be fair, strictly speaking, Grace had it worse than she did. Although that was entirely his own fault. One should not grant the entire crew access to one’s Snapchat account if one wishes to maintain a professional mystique—or one’s sanity. But then again, what should one expect from a teacher who spends his spare time joining his students’ Fortnite team?
“I have the lamps on because I needed to finish some paperwork,” she said. “The main overhead bulb burst yesterday, I forgot to have it fixed, and I do not intend to wake a technician simply because I happen to be forgetful insomniac.”
Grace blinked.
That was… excessively defensive, even for her.
Stratt inhaled slowly, recalibrating. She attempted something resembling a smile—the sort one, or rather she, deploys during diplomatic receptions and other socially hazardous environments.
To be fair, that particular smile had proven remarkably effective over the years. It had once helped secure her a position as Director of the European Space Agency. Not that she had not been qualified for the job, but on paper she was not. Her bachelor’s degree in history and a cover letter hastily written in two languages on a tram on the way to the interview should not have been enough. Her intelligence and experience compensated, certainly—but the cigarette and the light flirting with the interviewer had likely contributed as well.
She had even been complimented on the letter, the man calling it the best he had ever read, to which she had promptly replied that she had written it only because it was required at the meeting, that it had taken her about eight minutes, and that she had not even proofread it.
She had nevertheless proven to be the right choice time and again.
Later, the same smile had also helped considerably during the rather delicate process of coordinating an international effort to retrieve a stranded astronaut from Mars—a logistical miracle involving half the planet, several competing space agencies, and a level of diplomatic patience she had not previously believed herself capable of sustaining.
So she allowed the smile to sharpen slightly, polishing it into its most serviceable form, and proceeded as if this were a perfectly normal conversation between two perfectly normal colleagues who had not spent the last fourteen-ish hours avoiding each other.
Was she avoiding him as well? That thought had not occurred to her. No... Best not pursue it. And there it was again, the defensiveness. Excellent!
“Uh… okay.” Grace lifted his chin slightly, letting out a small chuckle that answered her diplomatic smile with a sound just as artificial. His hand drifted up to the back of his neck, rubbing absently at the tense muscle there.
“I wasn’t judging—”
Their eyes met.
Up close, facing her properly for the first time in hours—good job, Dr. Grace—she could see how tired he looked. Not merely sleepless. Exhausted in the particular way that comes from too many hours spent carrying other people’s emotions. No one had asked him to. Well. Perhaps François Leclerc had. Still, Grace could apparently look him in the eyes without difficulty, so...
He dropped his gaze again almost immediately.
“—the lamps.”
And there it was again, that small, careful avoidance.
Oh, fuck that.
Stratt cleared her throat, forcing the conversation back onto safer terrain. “You were fortunate today,” she said, gesturing vaguely toward the lingering evidence of the sun that had tormented them both earlier—her own face now stung at the memory—before pointing briefly at his. “No sunburn.”
Grace blinked at the abrupt change of topic, likely still processing the fact that Eva Stratt was willingly engaging in small talk with him. He rubbed the back of his neck again. “Yeah, well,” he said, shifting his weight. “What a day, right? I’m mostly just impressed I’m still upright. I’m pretty sure if I stop moving I’m going to fall asleep on my feet.”
“I thought you said you could not sleep, Dr. Grace.” She inclined her head toward the bed. “Sit.” There was, after all, nowhere else for him to go. Plus that, presumably, was why he was here.
He obeyed immediately, dropping onto the mattress with a quiet exhale, not even acknowledging that she had just caught him in that rather transparent excuse for a lie.
“Actually,” he added after a moment, the familiar lecture-tone creeping back into his voice, “there’s a scientific explanation for that whole sunburn thing. People with similar features to you have a variation of the MC1R gene that affects melanin production, which means—”
“Yes,” Stratt said calmly. “I know.”
Grace stopped mid-sentence.
She tilted her head slightly, a faint smile playing on her lips—this time, a real one. It grew a little bolder when she caught him looking at it, an observation she noted, filed away, and did not yet interpret. She did not, however, like the imbalance of looming over him. So she stepped closer and sat beside him as she continued.
“I am a redhead. I am aware of it. It is a thing. I did have biology classes too—in elementary school, and later at a gesamtschule. It is not uncommon knowledge, I believe.”
Silence settled as they held eye contact for a few seconds longer than before. Stratt found herself thinking, absurdly, that the room felt far too bright. The lamps should have been off by now—or at least most of them—less light, less scrutiny, less demand to maintain composure. It was already an absurd moment without it.
“Never mind,” he said.
A faint laugh escaped and spread between them—small, but bright enough to warm the room. Hers, or his; it hardly mattered. The tension loosened slightly. Then it was quiet again.
He sat very still, and now, with her truly up close, she could see the faint redness at the bridge of his nose. She would give him some of the cream later; the med team had supplied her with far too much of it anyway. Grace could use it. Grace… He looked a mess—unfortunately—in a way that was almost disarming. But mostly, he looked exhausted.
And she was tired too. So, before she could overthink it, she made a decision—a careful overstep, as she would call it; an educated guess, as he would.
She reached out and cupped his face. And to her utter relief—and surprise—he moved at the same time, closing the distance before she had fully committed to it, as though some quieter instinct in him had already decided, for both of them, what neither had properly articulated.
The kiss happened somewhere between intention and collision, and for a brief, disorienting moment it was nothing more than contact—unadorned, almost disappointingly simple—which was perhaps why it immediately felt wrong, or at least insufficient, as though some expected structure had failed to materialise in the exact moment it was most required.
Apparently, it felt wrong to him too, because she could sense the hesitation before she fully registered it, as he frowned against her mouth and broke away slightly, coughing once—an awkward, reflexive attempt to disguise the fact that his nervous system had clearly outrun his composure—before asking quietly if she was alright, if this was still okay, if she wanted to continue.
Stratt barely registered the question and did not answer, because answering would have required her to acknowledge not only what he had said, but what it implied about how she was being perceived in this moment—and that implication, more than anything else, was inconvenient in a way she did not yet have language for, only an increasingly precise discomfort.
So she tried again. And he met her properly—of course he did. For a fleeting moment it worked in the simplest sense of the word: warm, present, real, a continuity that should have been grounding but instead introduced a stillness inside her that was not absence but recognition. The moment it felt right, there was a quiet internal drop in temperature that felt uncomfortably familiar—not because it belonged to this room or this person—how could she blame him—but because it resembled, with infuriating precision, the emotional geography of Antarctica itself.
Scheiße…
She realized the curse had slipped out aloud as she pulled away from the now very confused scientist across from her.
What a stupid thought, she told herself immediately. Comparing her internal state to a bombarded continent. Sentimental, imprecise, unacceptable framing. She had done worse things than deploy nuclear weapons to save the planet; she had orchestrated decisions that would be studied for decades under terms like necessity, cost-benefit analysis, and moral triage.
This—whatever this was—did not deserve the dignity of metaphorical haunting.
There were more appropriate failures to consider.
Like him.
Like Ryland Grace, sitting there—still trying, in his own clumsy and entirely insufficient way, to salvage the moment with humour, offering something small and uncertain about them “having a day,” and how perhaps this had not been the best idea after all.
Why, then, had he come? If he could already accept that there was no future to this—as there was no future for her, not really, only continuation by inertia and obligation—then what exactly was he doing here?
Stratt’s mind supplied the answer before she could stop it, precise and unwelcome.
Detachment.
Of course. That would be clean, efficient, correct—in the way she tended to be correct about things that required emotional distance disguised as practicality. It was what she would have done.
A few hours of avoidance, a brief recalibration, and he would already have reached acceptance—already folded this thing between them into some internal category labeled, if she were honest about it, temporary hookup—already done what she herself had spent years disciplining herself not to do too quickly, not to reduce the unbearable into something manageable before it had even finished happening.
He would make peace with it. And then proceed accordingly. Except he was not her. He was Ryland Grace, who cried at inappropriate intervals and attached meaning to things long after they had ceased to be useful. He cared. His peace would be temporary.
But so was her time. So were her options. And why should she be responsible for unpacking that particular coping mechanism for him? She wanted, just once, to be selfish in a way that did not immediately collapse under consequence—to have this, this brief, flawed, incomprehensible comfort of him still here, and he was here, still present, perhaps to prove to himself that he did not care, that he did not have to care, still looking out for her even when he should not be, still existing in the same unbearable proximity as though it might mean something other than an error in judgment she would later have to account for.
And worse than that—worse, and quieter, and far less defensible—she wanted him not to detach at all. Not yet. She should make that clear.
“Dr. Grace… everything is alright, you are, in fact, doing everything correctly, physically. And I would like to carry on.”
That only made it worse.
She exhaled once, controlled, then continued more carefully, as though assembling meaning piece by piece rather than speaking it whole. A thought occurred to her that she might not find comfort in it anyway—not like this. She was not feeling particularly reassured by the prospect of good sex, an orgasm, and then the immediate return of reality collapsing in on itself.
“I am… I would like to, maybe only, not be on the receiving end of this,” she admitted, each word chosen as carefully as she could manage in her state of mind. “But if you do not mind,” she added after a beat, quieter, “we could… adjust the arrangement this time. All normal—just without the focus on my body. I do not currently feel comfort in my skin. You would finish, and I would remain. That would still serve the purpose of decompression for both of us, and it would not require me to—I would still pay attention to you…”
She stopped, because there was no way to finish that sentence without turning it into something too personal and far too embarrassing. Instead, she simply attempted to hold his gaze and waited, as though this too were a negotiation table.
Grace went very still, as if she were Medusa and had turned him to stone. Well—perhaps that would explain the lack of eye contact.
“No,” he said, bluntly, almost immediately, as if the thought itself had offended him more than her suggestion. “I’m not going to use you like that.”
The phrasing landed wrong in the room—not because it was incorrect, but because it was too absolute, too moral, too clean for something that had already become messy. Stratt exhaled through her nose, irritation flickering across her expression like a controlled fault line.
“That is not what I meant,” she said evenly, though even she could hear the edge in it. “You are interpreting this wrong.”
“Then explain,” he said. “Because right now it sounds like you’re trying to punish yourself or suffer through sex you don't want to partake in.”
That almost made her laugh. Almost, but the sound never formed. Of course that was what it sounded like. That was, in fact, the correct inference, well the first part, the sex itself wasn't a problem, being in bliss was, having an orgasm was the issue, as it would leave her happy for a second or two and then crashing back to reality and she did not feel like doing that tonight, And yet she did not have the language for the interior mechanism behind it. Would it be punishment to let herself be strung up and wanting to avoid feeling distressed, not exactly.
“Grace, I want this. And I swear I am not attempting to assign you a moral burden,” she said carefully, then—decisively, as though forcing honesty through procedure, as though it were simply time to bite the bullet—she added, “I simply don’t want to orgasm tonight. That is all. I would still like the physicality of the act, the comfort of it, if that is alright with you. My preference is functional distance during the act—for me. You will find it… simpler. You are tired anyway. I will do my best to make you happy. No need for all the unnecessary—”
Grace stared at her. At least he was looking at her now. Small victories. His expression tightened, not in anger, nor disgust, nor disappointment—good—but in disbelief at how neatly she had turned herself into management and him into a task. She waited and wanted to be called out on it. Instead, she got something closer to judgment.
“That’s not a preference, Stratt,” he said finally. “That’s you punishing yourself or me—with you, one never knows. Depends why you’re in need of this. Look, um… I suppose I am sorry about my behaviour today.”
“Do not psychoanalyze me,” she hissed, letting her jaw to tighten. She did not want the apology, adressing that was out of question, and she especially did not want the evaluation.
“I’m not,” he replied immediately, then softer after a beat. “I’m just… looking at you.”
That landed worse than any argument. Because once again, his eyes were not on her—his gaze had drifted downward, away, toward his lap. And something in her snapped sideways, everything in her turned so brittle. She let out a faint, humorless exhale, already conceding internally to the incoming migraine.
“You do not have to do that,” she said at last, colder now, her voice clipped into something almost composed but far too practiced. “I can see you are having difficulty looking at me today. I can understand why, even though I do not appreciate it, as I have done nothing to warrant that. So this will make things easier for you. I can lie down, not facing you. We will both find comfort. Problem solved.”
“Uh—no, no way. I’m not doing that. I should go.”
He exhaled, shaking his head once, as though trying to dislodge the entire direction the conversation had taken.
“Look, I am sorry. I know I asked. I should have inquired what I was stepping into if I was not ready to face it. Next time I will ask you what you are doing for the next twenty years and I will be there to truly hear it, and I will be able to face the answer.”
“Thank you. Next time you ask, don’t expect the answer to change.”
“Yeah.”
Then, more quietly, as she let it pass, as there was no utility in prolonging it... He was here. He was safe. That was the only variable that mattered in the present equation. Try again...
“Will you stay and fuck me now?”
His smile cracked immediately.
“Language.”
“Ja. So?” she said, flatly, lifting an eyebrow.
Grace rubbed a hand over his face, his glasses once again hanging from one ear by a thread, exhaling like a man attempting to negotiate simultaneously with the rock and the hard place. “Okayyyy,” he said finally. “Explain this to me like I’m a five-year-old. Why do you feel like avoiding orgasm will be beneficial for you tonight?”
Stratt scrunched up her nose at the phrase... “I would actually prefer you being the forty-five-year-old man that you are for this specific conversation.”
“Hey, that’s not—come on, it’s just an expression!”
“Mhmm. You are not a five-year-old, though.” She tilted her head slightly, a wry grin surfacing. “Dr. Grace,” she added, almost teasingly.
Good. He was ready to listen. That mattered. He had always trusted her judgment when it came to him; it seemed only fair that he now extend the same trust when it came to her knowing what was good for herself.
This was, she realized, the most they had ever spoken about the architecture of what they did together. Previously it had been simpler: action, pleasant consequences, comfortable silence. In a curious way, it resembled the restrained language of wartime correspondence—officers writing home with entire campaigns compressed into a few careful sentences, the unsaid carrying far more weight than what was written.
Well. Apparently they had entered a new era of comunication now. That might not be a bad thing. Or it might evolve into a colossal miscalculation. No pressure.
“I weighed my options,” she said carefully, fingers still wrapped around his hand, “and if I am not able to fall asleep, I would rather feel… strung out and thinking about you—”
He coughed. His fingers flexed reflexively against hers.
“—about the sensations you make me feel,” she amended, clearing her throat, “than have a few seconds of bliss, the brief reprieve, a cold shower, a rather abrupt wake-up call, and then be left alone with the Antarctica blues again.”
She took a slow breath, letting the air fill her lungs before continuing.
“All that is still to come—war, famine, pestilence, death,” she went on, almost academically. Unfortunately, that was very much her field to be academic in. “Astrophage is, quite literally, the apocalypse. And yet somehow today has lodged itself more insistently in my mind than any of that. I would like to rectify that situation, if you are amenable, of course, as I would very much prefer a reasonable chance of falling asleep tonight.”
Her expression tightened slightly, then softened into something faintly self-aware. The corner of her mouth twitched, almost mischievously, as she turned their earlier debacle back on itself.
“You know me. I will make any sacrifice to give it even the smallest additional chance of success. Not coming seems acceptable to me.”
Grace simply stared at her for a long moment. Then his expression eased—colour returning to his cheeks, light to his eyes. The exhaustion remained, but it softened into something almost fond as he pulled her into his arms. She let him. The movement felt new and yet strangely natural, the ease of it overcoming the faint awkwardness of first contact.
“Whatever lets you sleep at night, I suppose,” he said finally, his voice quiet against her hair.
And at that, perhaps, she reflected distantly, if they had spoken about it like this earlier she would not have spent an entire tedious meeting—one in which she was not required to pay attention, or at least could reasonably justify multitasking—excessively googling how one was supposed to behave as the dominant partner in a sexual relationship, nor reading an alarming quantity of contradictory and often rather crude advice on how to be a soft dom.
Well. It had certainly been a learning experience. And Dr. Grace, it turned out, was a reasonably effective teacher—not that she had ever doubted that. All it required was following his leads and doing the homework.
She could live with that.
It also gave her an opportunity to improve upon her rather limited instincts when it came to showing care for others. She had never been particularly good at it. The act itself always felt slightly artificial, as though she were performing a role for which she had studied the theory but never quite grasped the natural execution. Still, patterns could be learned. Cues could be followed.
At first it was small things.
Avoiding the second lower-deck bathrooms during lunch breaks, for instance. Then quietly moving an entire afternoon’s meetings off that floor so that the future heroic astronaut of the Hail Mary, Dr. Dubois, and the future Nobel laureate, Dr. Shapiro, did not have to resort to the restrooms for their rather enthusiastic relationship.
She made sure Ing. Komorov and Lieutenant Ilyukhina—also, in all probability, спасители мира—had both the time and the privacy to watch the results of the Russian presidential election, and somewhere appropriate to drink and scream away their disappointment afterward.
She arranged for Dr. Leclerc’s lodgings to be placed near the sunroom and had it filled with an excessive number of flowers. He seemed calmer around them. Slightly less distressed.
She arranged for Commander Yao to have the opportunity to celebrate the Chinese New Year with his son.
She made certain the CIA unit assigned to her had access to their own gym, as did all the other agencies, along with a shared one where they could mingle if they felt like it. She also scheduled one hour a week there to spar with Special Agent Carl Boyce while he debriefed her.
She occasionally ensured that Dr. Lokken and Dr. Grace had sufficient opportunity to argue. Their disagreements, irritating as they could be, almost always produced something unexpectedly productive—however much they were a thorn in her side while occurring.
“Stratt?”
She made a point of glancing at Grace from time to time during meetings to determine whether he needed a break. He was oddly reluctant to leave a room once a discussion had begun, even for something as mundane as a restroom visit. A reflex, perhaps. If one of his students had been that hesitant to ask, he would likely have been deeply concerned. So was she.
She also found her old keychain for him—a fox. It held no particular importance to her anymore, no keys attached, no place she would ever return to—but Grace liked foxes, and he liked having something to fidget with when he was made to sit through discussions he was not especially interested in. She would get him a fidget spinner, as Yáo Li-Jie had suggested. She still resented the fact that he had done so for his son, and she was most certainly not Dr. Grace’s parental figure—but it had been a good suggestion nonetheless.
For now, the keychain would suffice. And even if she let him keep it—then what? She still had the second one somewhere—a reminder that she once had a life that contained warmth, and a motorcycle, and not just the sterile geometry of command decks and sealed corridors. The small medallion of Saint Christopher, patron of travelers, now separated from what it once signified—stripped of function, reduced to a souvenir. As that part of her life would never see the light of day again, she made the choice.
What was one life weighed against saving the world?
It was not as though she could request copies of keys to the vat or one of her private jets just to restore the symbolism. That would be far too sentimental, and sentiment, in her line of work, was rarely useful.
It all hurt, in its own quiet way. Camaraderie had never been her plan. It did not need to be. She could care from a distance. It would hurt regardless, would it not? This way, at least, she could make their lives a little less insufferable for the time being.
“Yes?”
She let her thoughts cease, focusing instead on the simple fact that Grace was holding her. They had never really done this sort of physical comfort before. It was not perfect—she did not hold him back—but she was grateful for his presence nonetheless.
“Let’s… brainstorm this for a second.” He shifted slightly, clearly thinking out loud. “Why wouldn’t the opposite work? I could try to, ya know—”
She could tell he was blushing from the way his voice softened and how the rest of the sentence dissolved somewhere into her hair.
“—focus on you more. Multiple orgasms are a possibility too.”
“No,” she said calmly. “I would be overly sensitive afterward. That is not something I am particularly interested in experiencing.”
She felt him nod against her. It was not as though he was unaware of that already. He knew perfectly well how her body reacted to certain kinds of stimulation, and how uncomfortable she could become when it crossed that line. He had always respected her boundaries. She had respected his. They had arrived at that understanding without ever formally discussing it—simply learning one another through cautious observation and small acts of trust.
“Right… okay.” He hesitated. “Soooo… what if we just… um… I don’t know… do frottage?”
“No. Too many layers,” she replied without missing a beat, while recognizing the irony that most of those layers were indeed hers. “And I would prefer you to have some measure of fulfillment from this. I meant that. I also see no reason for you to ruin your clothes in the process.”
“That’s oddly considerate of you,” he said, sounding faintly amused. “I thought making me—uh—finish without touching… or in my pants… might’ve been part of the appeal.”
He trailed off, clearly reconsidering the phrasing halfway through the sentence.
“If you think so.” Stratt allowed herself a small, knowing smirk. Perhaps she had played the dominant role a little too convincingly earlier.
Another pause followed while he recalculated the situation.
“So… the classic approach, and I stop if you get close?”
“Perhaps.” She considered it for a moment. “Or you could simply position yourself between my thighs.”
“Oh.” His voice brightened immediately, then quickly reassembled itself into something more schooled, as though he had caught himself mid-reaction. “Okay, that sounds… doable. Would you actually get anything out of that?”
“Well, yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “I intend to. The physical aspect is still present. Some stimulation as well—though not too much, which is ideal.”
“Ideal.”
“Yes.”
“…”
He exhaled once, as though concluding a complicated calculation, or whatever he usually did while working—science and such. Not her field. Not her monkeys. But in this apocalyptic scenario, sadly, her circus.
“Alright. So, I made this complicated. This is on me. What you suggested is okey dokey with me—oh, I did just not say that. Please don’t comment on this. Oh my goodness… let’s not let me overthink this!”
She let out a gentle, relieved, content laugh. It was lucrative, in a way, not to lose this yet—this version of Grace, this option of having someone like him close, this friendship. Yes. Definitely, let’s not overthink this. Kiss. They should kiss again.
Grace did seem to read her mind, which he did far too often when he stopped rambling and actually thought things through for a second. He brushed her hair aside, pushed the collar of her knitwear down a notch, and then there were his lips against her throat, leaving hot, open-mouthed kisses, suckling, nipping.
She closed her eyes. For a moment, there was almost no empty, white, crumbling space at the front of her mind.
Grace tilted her chin up to meet him, and their mouths connected.
The following seconds were not frantic. They were both too awkward, too cautious, to simply tear at each other’s clothes. No—there were neatly folded packets on the shelf beside the bed now. It worked for them. Being at his pace helped—it was the same as when they were working in tandem. Still, they acknowledged the urgency of the fact that they had already wasted too much time tonight. For example, she did not watch him struggle to unclasp her bra this time, letting him off the hook and doing it herself instead.
They kissed some more. He touched her; she touched him less—or rather, only where it was necessary. She offered quiet, gentle praise instead, encouragement spoken softly between breaths. Some habits died hard, and it seemed to make him visibly happy, so she did not correct it.
The connection lasted a while—perhaps twenty to twenty-five minutes—as they settled into a quietly familiar rhythm. Grace was bit more attentive than usual, less restrained in his curiosity, and she allowed it. It gave him something to do with his hands, a way to remain present without fixating solely on her reaching her peak, learning as he went where to respond and where to hold back.
She did not mirror him in equal measure; she never truly did, in terms of tenderness. Yet she gave what she intended to give—enough presence, enough reaction to keep him anchored, to keep him close, enough touches to the certain spots on his body that demanded attention most.
When the time came, and he was almost whimpering when her thumb stroked the base of him, she shifted into the position they had agreed upon, not wanting to torture him too much. She lay down, faced away, and exhaled slowly, letting her body settle rather than resist. Trust, in its most pragmatic form, made it possible. It was not unfamiliar between them; they had had sex in this position before, though something about it tonight carried more exposed notes.
She expected him to focus on himself now, knowing him and how he looked when he was on edge. He did not. He leaned down first, kissing the back of her throat again, then her shoulders, his torso brushing against her back as their hips occasionally met when he shifted closer to her ear. He only brushed there, warm breath; the trust in him was well placed. There would be no marks on her, at least not on places she could not cover with a turtleneck or a scarf.
She never intended to be perceived in a way she knew she would be once her deeds were tallied up, so the decision to be as wrapped and covered as possible—loose, non-form-fitting clothing to keep every inch of skin concealed—was wilful.
She knew she would be dissected. She knew her visage would be as well, and she could not give a single shit about that. What she could not afford was collateral damage in image—ammunition, however trivial, against every woman who would come after her, and pay for the fact that Eva Stratt had simply existed and done her job. Because, of course, women in power would bear consequences. So she did not offer them anything easy, no shallow inventory people defaulted to when they ran out of more difficult things to understand.
“Stratt?” Grace whispered into her ear, enough to make her flinch. She had not expected it. It was not his fault, and based on the lack of his usual chain of apologies, he seemed to understand that and chose instead to pretend it had not happened for her sake.
He leaned a bit further away, and she could hear his smile through the tone of his voice.
“Stratt, stop thinking. That’s an order.”
“Pardon?” What did he say?… They were not military. Then again, he did salute her for fun far too often. Called her captain, sir—perhaps it meant, did, something to him. Still, who did he think he was, telling her to stop thinking?
Any other reaction she might have had vanished the moment his palms settled into the muscles of her shoulders. Only then did she realise how truly tense and sore she was after the flight. She could not wait for a proper hot shower and some time in the gym—and then her mind went blissfully blank...
No need for an orgasm, apparently.
She let herself focus on each touch—the pressure of his hands, the small, deliberate miniscule scratches of his nails against tight muscle. It had been a long time since she had had a proper massage, but this was not clinical, not precise, not professional targeting of knots and strain. This was something else entirely, freely given, slightly clumsy, attentive in a way that was almost disarming. It was better.
And the fact that Grace was still bothering with vorspiel, still taking his time—Oh. That felt good. His thumbs circled a stubborn knot at the base of her neck, years of bureaucracy made manifest in muscle. Her breath caught. Her thoughts scattered.
His hands moved lower, easing tension she had not even realised she was carrying—well, of course she was aware of it, just not that the pressure had settled into something so tangible, something that could be dealt with by the hands of her smart, silly little scientist, just as everything else he got his hands on.
And somewhere between sensation, delight, and embarrassment, her internal monologue—or what was left of it—began slipping further into German, as if English curses had become insufficiently precise for the situation.
To her absolute shock and horrifying realisation, she made a sound... No. She did not. It had to be Grace. Grace moaned and whimpered and whined a lot; she did not. Why were her cheeks burning, then? Sunburn. Yes. Definitely sunburn.
Grace reached into her hair, and she felt one terror replaced by another. She never liked men tugging at her hair—it did not produce the pleasure–pain response they seemed to expect of her. She should tell him that. He always voiced his likes and dislikes after she told him it was necessary for them to function. She could not find her voice, could not trust it after the sound it had just made.
Grace was not tugging, though. It was not a reasonable thought to assume he would, or that he would make her face him, make her confront the fact that she had made that sound. Who was hiding now?
A tear slipped down her cheek, and it burned like hell.
His fingers continued—massaging, combing through her hair, nothing more. It was… pleasant. She did feel good.
She heard him open his mouth, then close it again, reconsidering.
“You know you’re allowed to do that, right? I mean—you’re allowed to do anything right now. You could probably breach the Geneva Conventions one by one, so it’s more like you can allow yourself to do that. Yeah. I get I am way more vocal, but you telling me I don’t have to be quiet helped me before—I was just worried about it unconsciously, about us getting caught, embarrassing you. So I’m returning the favour. I want you to be comfortable. Evidently, you are. That’s good, I’m glad.”
He took a deep breath, deep enough that she felt it, and it prompted her to follow suit. Nothing like a breathing exercise during whatever this was. The only thought that registered was that he had been worried about embarrassing her before—and whatever she had done to ease that worry and not, in the process, ruin this or him, she was glad of it.
He never made her feel embarrassed, in either professional or personal settings. There was little he could do to achieve that, and far more reasons why he left her instead in awe of his mind, proud, amused…
“And Stratt… that was so sexy. To be fair, with your voice, anything that comes out is… not like when we’re working. I would not dare to yearn… that would be unprofessional and wrong, considering I respect you as my superior—but… you get me?”
Another tear slipped down, an absolutely human reaction, heightened by the fact there had been no place for it lately; yet it made its way down her face, not the pillow. This time it burned significantly less.
“Thank you, Ryland,” she said quietly, not trusting herself to voice anything beyond what she felt was necessary to convey. “That is very kind of you.”