Page 9 of Adrift! (Cosmic Connections Cruise #2)

Remy, who’d been watching every movement, looked away.

“Talking to Mariah and the others, I guess I was being…really cynical.” She shoved at the couch, and he obligingly tugged on his end.

“They’re not oblivious to our situation or pretending this is okay.

Even Mariah says she wishes the universe wasn’t such a shit friend sometimes.

But everyone is just…trying to make the best of things.

I mean, literally, they are making the best scarf or hat or—”

“Or dishrag.”

She started to wrinkle her nose, but then the dismissive expression gentled to a quirk of her lips. “Yeah, or that.”

They pivoted the couch section to align with the rest and stood back.

“Anyway,” she continued. “Unlike the universe, I don’t want to be a shit friend.” She glanced up at him through her lashes. “I’ll help you finish up here. Did you already throw away my drink?”

He’d turned off the ambient binaural beats that Mariah had requested for her session, but some soulful remainder of it echoed in him anyway. “Start with the curtains and I’ll make another one for you.”

He watched from the corner of his eye as she kicked off her purple boots—ah, she’d reprocessed her cocktail dress but not the orange socks—to clamber up on a couch near one drape.

Though she was halfway across the room, a sound threaded through the quiet to reach him.

So soft he would’ve missed it if not for the enhancements he couldn’t keep tuned away from her.

She was humming.

More breath than voice, something about the meandering melody roused him.

The cybernetic interface at his temple began to resonate, picking up the frequency and amplifying it through his enhanced hearing.

The refrain, when it came around again, was haunting, minor intervals that felt like longing poured note by note into a delicate thread of song.

The first detached drape fell across her shoulder, revealing the viewport and the black void beyond. Against that emptiness, her rainbow curves were a cry of vibrant life.

As if he could take in those sounds, he swallowed hard. All the parts of him that had survived the poisoning of his planet resonated with that longing and life.

She stretched on tiptoes to reach for the temporary ties he’d rigged up, tugging lightly to scoot the fastenings of the second drape toward her grasp. The cushion sagged under her foot.

He only meant to warn her, but when he opened his mouth, nothing came out except a sub-acoustic sigh of desire.

When the ties slipped loose and she wavered, he was already behind her, anchoring his hands on her hips, holding her steady.

“Oh!” She glanced down over her shoulder at him, green eyes wide. “That was close.”

So close. Her little gasp—barely more breath than a bubble breaking—nearly shattered his composure.

Even with precise calibration in his augmented hand, he knew he was holding her just a bit too tight.

Plasteel and processors, bone and blood, all trembled as if tuning to her, his body seeking to harmonize with hers on some fundamental frequency.

Without thinking, he let it.

The quiet descant, perfectly pitched to complement her melody, emerged from his augments. Not a song, just a wordless counterpoint to the whisper of her tentative tune.

She stiffened, and he felt the chill that swept through her when her heart missed one beat, a response as if to a threat. Slowly, she spun within the circle of his hands. The curtain she’d been reaching for slid free, exposing another swath of darkness.

“What was that?” Her hands hovered uncertainly over his shoulders even though the shaky footing threatened her balance again. “That sound. Was it you?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have distracted you. You could’ve fallen.”

Her wondering gaze roamed over him, her fingers right behind, not actually touching him although he sensed the minute changes of temperature, pressure, and conductance as she traced above his artificial components. “Your biomech does that?”

“Not usually,” he admitted. “It’s designed to be mostly like the rest of me. Apparently it likes your humming.”

Her stockinged feet wavered, but she didn’t grasp for him, as if she trusted his hold. “You’re teasing me.”

He gazed up at her. “I wouldn’t. Not about this.”

“Play it again.”

“I can’t without—” He tilted his head to expose the augment molded across his cheek and jaw. “It was responding to your melody. To you.”

For a long moment, she stared at him. Though he’d been conscientious about his Earther studies before launch, he could not guess what darkened the amber flecks in her eyes.

Her suspended hand trembled. “May I?”

The discordant edge to the request nearly broke him. “Whatever you need.”

He thought she would sing. Instead, so lightly, she settled her hand on his cheek. Her fingertips traced the port at his temple where the nanotech threads pierced deep.

“You said it doesn’t hurt.” Her tone, still roughened, sounded as if she needed it to be true.

“Not for a long time.”

That was true enough. The ache in him now was much lower…

But he forgot his carnal pain when her eyes glistened with melancholy and she whispered, “How long for me before it stops hurting? Before I forget what I left behind? What I never had?”

“Remy.” Anchoring one arm behind her hips, he lifted her from the precarious position on the couch and lowered her to the cushions.

When she hunched next to the curtains, he quickly retrieved the drink he’d made for her.

“Here.” Kneeling before her, he pressed the small glass into her slack hand.

“It’s real, just for you. Redjade flowers only once a millennium and makes one of the most potent liqueurs in the universe, so just a little. ”

She took a sip, then coughed out a choking laugh. “Oh ouch. Burning all the way down doesn’t make it hurt less.” But the miserable slump left her shoulders when she took another tiny taste. “Is it pure fire?”

“Instead of tears.” Gently, he tilted up her chin to sweep away the droplet at the edge of her lashes.

But when she blinked at him, another tear welled behind it, as if the piquant liqueur had melted some frozen wall.

“The last time I sang for real, it was basically to an empty room like this. Except the acoustics were way worse. It just felt so…hopeless. And the saddest part?” The quaver in her voice made his augments ache in sympathy.

“I kept playing anyway. A whole set, for no one. Like I thought maybe if I just kept going, sang it sweet and true enough, no one would become someone. And someone would finally hear me.”

Boosting himself up to the couch beside her, he tugged the corner of the drape around her like a cape. He settled his arm lightly over her shoulders—to hold in the warmth against the darkness outside.

When she leaned even more lightly against him, he closed his eyes, focusing on that tentative contact. “What would they have heard?”

She was quiet for so long he thought she wouldn’t answer. Or couldn’t.

It wasn’t his place to push. He was still just the bartender.

But since they were stuck, adrift in a dark, lonely night of a last call that never ended, he could at least be here with her.

When she finally spoke, the answer was even softer than her humming.

“I was still a teenager when I left home with my used guitar and big dreams. Back then, I believed anything was possible. That’s what I sang.

But I guess nobody else believed me.” Her voice grew smaller, dimming like a dying star.

“Music used to feel like flying. Like I could almost touch something infinite. But then it just felt like falling. Like I was reaching for something that was never really there after all.”

When she let out a shuddering breath, the weary exhalation gusted through the secret hollow place in him, that draught of precious air crossing the lingering distance between them. As she tilted her head to rest on his shoulder, the scent of muddled redjade flower drifted around them.

He couldn’t stop himself from turning his face into the bright waves of her hair, breathing past the redjade fragrance to find her.

He kept his voice almost as low as hers when he asked, “And when you discovered the IDA? When you saw the stars opening up in front of you as you left Earth? What seemed possible then? How close was the infinite?”

After a heartbeat, she shifted her weight, pulling away, and he would’ve ripped out all the biowires holding him together to hold her in place.

But she only gazed up at him, her lashes spiked from tears. “But what if it’s just farther to fall?”

“The wonder of it is, out here you drift.”

Her green eyes widened, her lips parting without breath. Very deliberately, he raised one eyebrow.

And she laughed, all the air rushing out of her.

“Ikaryo!” She centered her fist on his chest with a small thump.

“That is the absolute worst silver lining I’ve ever heard.

” Then her fingers splayed wider, over his heart.

“And thank you for that. For the drink too. For that little duet. For listening.”

He put his hand over hers, something flashing within him, a resonance that went deeper than the chance harmonic convergence of plasteel tuning to an unexpected melody. “Shall I play it again? You could sing this time.”

“No. I… I don’t have any words.”

“Just the melody then. I’ll do the harmony.”

With her lips curled between her teeth, as if silencing herself, she looked at him with something like fear, but also hope. Finally, she turned her hand under his to interlace their fingers. “Please.”

“You have to start,” he said. “That’s how I find my part.”

She swallowed once, then, so softly he almost missed it, she started the song again. Now, instead of humming unconsciously, she was watching him with anticipation, her grasp on him tightening.

Maybe it was that urgency in her hold or the need in her eyes, but when his augments activated, the sound was deeper, sonorous and wild, as if they’d tapped into some primal key of the universe.

As she sucked in a startled breath, he tried to modulate it, but she shook her head hard, red locks flying as she smiled wider. So he let it go.

Long ago, the tech had put him back together, had saved his life.

Now it set him free. The cybernetic elements vibrated, seeking the spaces between her notes and filling them with complementary tones.

The song that wove between them was nothing that had ever been—yet felt as ephemeral and eternal as the last of starlight at dawn.

When it finally faded, Remy pressed the back of her hand into his chest. “I felt you singing with your whole body.” Her smile was tremulous. “It used to be that way for me.”

Nudging back gently, he mimicked the gesture against her sternum. “I felt you. It is that way again—if you want to believe.”

Her heartbeat thudded hard against his knuckles, as if the push/pull of their hands had been strenuous work, the humming a precarious task. And maybe for her it was.

“I can’t wait to hear what your new song is about,” he said.

“You’ll be the first to know. Probably because you’ll be…” Her teasing tone trailed off, a blush feathering across her cheeks. “Unless you don’t want…”

“Remy.” He cupped her face with his altered hand, brushing his thumb over her lower lip to pause the words of retreat. “I want to be there.”

Seated side by side, they were essentially on the same level, and her gaze locked on his.

Though he’d found that some beings had trouble looking into his bespoke eyes, hers were unwavering, green and amber like the thorny stems of the Earther rose.

Rather than pulling away, she leaned toward him, sliding both her palms up his chest to anchor on his shoulders.

As her hands passed over him, his biomech parts sparked with tiny suns, and the last of the span between them disappeared, her lips joining with his as naturally as a chord finding its resolution.

The kiss was tentative at first, both of them afraid to shatter the unexpected convergence. The tender tension of flesh, the weightless pressure of shared air… He would have happily floated in those sensations forever.

But when she sighed against his mouth, lips parting, and her fingers slipped higher to curl in the short hair at his nape, the caution dissolved.

He traced his tongue along the sharp upper curve of her teeth, courting that erotic danger.

And she licked him back with a low keening in her throat.

She tasted like the spiced tonic he’d made for her, fiery and complex, intoxicating.

Electricity cascaded through the neural filaments of his tech, sparking into excitement along every organic nerve.

The feedback loop felt wild, uncontrolled—like the interference of a coronal storm disrupting the adaptations that had kept him alive.

He closed his eyes, struggling for balance though they had barely moved.

But the self-imposed darkness only sensitized both his skin and the tech sensors, amplifying her every touch.

Her nails scraped lightly over his implant when she framed his face with her palms, urging his mouth wider.

She let out another hungry sound, and the sensual rumble bypassed every control filter and safety manual passage, shooting straight to his core, making him shudder in her hands.

She seemed to sense his momentary vulnerability because she softened the kiss, her circling tongue finding his again with endless patience, as if they had all the time in the universe.

His hands, which had been hovering uncertainly at her waist, finally settled, and he buried his fingers in the soft fabric of her morphed outfit.

Through the eyelets in the weave, the pliant heat of her skin teased him, and it took every erg of his faltering self-control not to delve deeper into those tempting holes.

Behind his eyelids, riotous colors bloomed—wavelengths even his enhanced vision had never registered before, prismatic cascades that pulsed in syncopated rhythm with their aligning hearts.

Some distant, saner part of him registered the unlikely expansion as problematic, but he was too dazzled by the synesthetic explosion of impossible sensations: the stroke of her fingertips tasted like moonlight, her kiss danced like music, her breath shimmered with an unvoiced promise.

Something shifted around them, not just the curtains she’d pulled down but the fabric of the universe itself. At least his universe.

He’d been looking for a place to belong. Here, adrift in one of the most dangerous sectors of space, he might’ve finally found it.

All he had to do was open his eyes and tell her that.