She stowed her bag in her berth. It was not hard to work out which one belonged to her; it was the one without a Kitari sword on the bed.
Having gotten rid of the bag, she went to the cockpit to look over the controls. They were standard, of course. She knew them like the back of her hand. Better than the back of her hand. She could operate this ship blind if she needed to.
Still, she sat there in the pilot’s chair and ran her fingers over them. On this ship she would be in complete flight control. She was accustomed to that, of course, but not used to being in control of Atlas. He’d still be her superior, but it would be her digits on the instruments. His life would literally be in her hands.
“Everything look good?” Atlas put his hand on her shoulder and leaned over her to check, not on the controls, but on her. She felt his attention on her, far too intense for her.
“Looks good,” she said. “All the buttons are there, so that’s good.”
His hand left her shoulder. She breathed again. He made her nervous, and that was not good. She was never nervous when she was flying. It was her happy place, her flow state. But Atlas interrupted all that.
She had to suck it up. Stop thinking about what he did to her in her quarters, and start acting like a professional. Prior to this moment, she’d always thought of professionalism as something she couldn’t attain. Now she thought of it as a shield that might stop her from being vulnerable. Maybe that’s what everybody used professionalism for.
“Lieutenant Tessil, ready for launch?”
The voice came from the bridge of the Audacity. It snapped her into work mode, which was what professionalism actually was, but she was too busy to notice.
Within minutes, the shuttle was sling-shotting into space at a great rate of speed. Coordinates for the Dinavri system were laid in, and creation was sliding by the windows.
They were going to be in cruising flight for a good few days. Now there was nothing to do but kick back and relax. Jerri leaned back in her pilot’s chair and stretched her arms. Shuttle launches were easy, but this one felt far more intense than most.
“Good work,” Atlas said, reminding her that he was there. “Take a break. Get unpacked.”
“Alright.”
She didn’t really have anything to unpack, but a little breathing space already felt like a good thing. Jerri could already feel the difference in the shuttle compared to the Audacity. The only energy on their ship now was his and hers; there were no other crew existing in the space and that made her feel many things.
“You didn’t bring any of your assigned reading.” Atlas’s voice came from the doorway.
“I didn’t have the room,” she said over her shoulder, deciding not to remove her underwear from the bag at that moment after all.
He took up so much of the shuttle, physically and mentally. He was massive aboard the Audacity. There were only a few places on the shuttle where he could stand upright. The doorway was not one of them.
“Come in,” she said, just to make things less awkward. It made them immediately more awkward. The space between them declined to the point that they were practically touching. She sat down on the bed just to make some space. It didn’t help as much as she thought it would. It put her head at his crotch level, and it made the disparity between their heights even greater.
“I was glad to know I’d be getting you on your own.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Why?”
He leaned against the back wall, which only gave her an extra inch in which to breathe.
Atlas fixed her with that deep red gaze and spoke in a low growl overlaid with a sibilant hiss. “You’re my personal project. Haven’t you realized?”
A personal project. Is that what she was? That sounded very, well, professional.
“How personal?” The question blurted out of her before she could stop it, but as embarrassed as she was to have asked it, she was immediately glad that she had. They were dancing around something that she felt so intensely and could never put words to.
He gave her a keen look, and for a second she was not sure that he was going to dignify her with an answer.
She laughed, because they both knew how personal they had been with one another. He’d been physically inside her body. It didn’t get any more personal than that.
“Fraternizing is typically forbidden because allowing superior officers to lech onto subordinates creates an imbalance which can destroy a crew, especially when superiors use their power to turn a crew into a sexual smorgasbord.”
Who was he trying to convince exactly? “So I’m not on your smorgasbord?”