Chapter Text
“Checkmate.”
“Ugh! Best two out of three?”
Chakotay looked up from his book—well, from his comm device. He was on the couch, sitting companionably with Hana, her legs draped across his lap, while Kathryn played chess with Vair. It was late afternoon on Eighth-day, and while the mid-Cluster worlds didn’t have weekends like the more urban and industrial inner worlds, they did have afternoons off every fourth and eighth day of their eight-day week. The Grey Moon—or Revairus, as they were all supposed to call it now, though many people were unable to give up the sweet old name—had recently adopted this convention, having decided that there wasn’t enough left of their identity as refugees to make a constant state of semi-emergency justifiable anymore. They were a society now, and they should have Fourth-day and Eighth-day afternoons off, like any other civilized mid-Cluster people. Chakotay loved these afternoons, which were spent in a variety of ways, and often with friends, doing things like they were doing now: reading, laughing, playing games.
“Did you just…lose?” Chakotay asked his wife.
She narrowed her eyes and glared at Vair a moment. “I may need to rewrite time over this.”
Vair grinned. “I’m smarter than I seem,” he said.
Hana looked up from her book and grinned. “He is.”
“I never doubted it,” said Kathryn emphatically. “Hana only likes men who are smarter than she is, which narrowed her field of choice considerably.”
“I’m not smarter than she is,” objected Vair, sounding outraged.
Kathryn shrugged. “Her words, not mine.”
Chakotay looked over at Hana. “Is that why you don’t love me? Am I not smart enough for you?”
“I’ve told you this over and over, Chakotay. It’s the dimples I can’t stand. And your upright moral character.”
“The two of you should get a room,” observed Vair, rolling his eyes. Kathryn glanced at the two of them on the couch and smiled affectionately, shaking her head.
“Why won’t they just admit that chess is boring?” asked Chakotay, directing his question to Hana. “They’re not paying attention to us and forcing us to misbehave.”
“I don’t know, buddy,” she said, wriggling around to get more comfortable. “But you’re a good cuddler. They can have their fun and we’ll have ours.”
He smiled. “What are you reading?”
“John’s Proposal for Reformation. Obviously a done deal and I’ve read it before, but I like the way he writes; always have. You?”
Chakotay looked down at the text. “Article 4: Replies to Objections. First, to the objection that the Elder Brother has always been unmarried.”
“Ha! Great minds,” said Hana.
Kathryn glanced at the clock and left the table, coming to sit on Chakotay’s other side. “Shove over, sweetheart,” she said, and Hana grumbled in faux annoyance and moved her legs from his lap.
He draped an arm around Kathryn’s shoulders and turned his face to hers. He kissed her softly. “My devious plan has worked,” he said.
Kathryn returned his kiss and smiled at him. “Saga will be home from school in half an hour.”
“Yeah?” he said, and kissed her again.
“Are you two going to need to get a room? For real? Should we head out?” asked Hana.
“No, you’re staying for dinner, aren’t you? We’re not animals,” Kathryn protested. “As much. Anymore.” She smiled and kissed her husband again.
“No judgment from where I sit,” said Hana blithely, looking back down at her book, her legs now curled under her.
“Hana says she’d sleep with either one of you if you were up for it,” said Vair, setting the last chess piece in its proper square and looking brightly at Kathryn. “Another game before Saga gets home?” The three of them stared at him and Chakotay looked to his left to see Hana turning a truly alarming shade of purple. Vair looked down the row of them and seemed surprised, then confused, then understanding dawned. “That is something you’ve only ever said to me and I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” he said quietly, wincing.
“Noooo,” she breathed out, not daring to look at her friends.
Having once been the embarrassed casualty of Vair’s extraordinary—epic, really—lack of social skills, Chakotay felt for Hana. But his sympathy was cut with something that he hadn’t expected to feel, which was something like…pleasure? Hana found him attractive? She’d said once pretty explicitly that she didn’t. Hearing that she was attracted to Kathryn only confirmed something he’d half-suspected for a very long time, and he had wondered idly more than once whether she could have talked Kathryn into it if he hadn’t shown back up in Kathryn’s life when he did. He suspected that given the choice between the two of them, Hana would choose Kathryn every day of the week, to say nothing of the fact that as far as Chakotay could tell, Hana really did love her husband. So he didn’t take Hana’s apparent attraction seriously…at least not any more seriously than he took the little jolt of pleasure he felt at learning that she felt some way about him. But…there it was. Maybe…he was a little bit attracted to her?
“Oh, I’ve made things so awkward,” whispered Vair. “I see that now. I’m sorry.”
This seemed to snap everyone out of it. “It’s okay,” said Kathryn, laughing weakly. “We’ve all known each other for a long time at this point, and since the two of you moved here, we’ve all become even closer. Maybe this was bound to happen.”
Kathryn had formally opened the new Revairus campus of University Grellius two years ago, her husband and his work crews having designed and built the entire physical plant, and upon learning that Hana was looking to retire from Starfleet so Vair could go back to teaching in person, immediately offered Vair a job in the philosophy department. He had ecstatically accepted, and the two couples spent a lot of time together now that Saga’s Aunt Hana and Uncle Vair were only twenty minutes’ walk away.
Hana looked a little teary-eyed as she leaned forward and reached across Chakotay for Kathryn’s hand, which Kathryn gave her. “My husband is a holy fool,” she said. “I would never have breathed a word. I have no desire to wreck any of—“
“I know that,” said Kathryn, also getting a little teary. “Let’s go for a walk and talk it out?” Hana nodded and they got up, wiping at their eyes. “You’ll be here for Saga?” Kathryn asked Chakotay, saying it more like a statement than a question.
“Of course,” he said, relieved to have some space and time in which to think about what all of this meant.
“Hana is going to kill me,” said Vair, his head in his hands. Chakotay had almost forgotten he was there in the midst of the dramatics that he had instigated but was curiously apart from. “I don’t know why I can’t ever seem to tell what it’s okay to say and what it’s not.”
“You and Hana must have a very honest relationship,” observed Chakotay, fixing his attention on Vair. “For her to have said anything like…what she said.”
He shrugged. “Why shouldn’t she? I’m not under the impression that I’m the only interesting person in the galaxy. I don’t blame Hana for being attracted to either one of you. I feel lucky that she chose me out of all the interesting people, and I hope she feels lucky that I chose her, too.” He grimaced. “Probably today she doesn’t.”
Chakotay half-smiled. “She’ll get over it. She and Kathryn will talk it out. It’ll be fine,” he reassured Vair. But a pit of unease had opened in his stomach. This was the first time he had felt anything resembling attraction to any woman besides Kathryn since Seven, and with Seven, it had been a weirdly disconnected kind of attraction, like a poorly-assembled machine. He had found her physically appealing, because he was a man with eyes, and he had cared about her. But somehow those hadn’t ever managed to add up to produce love or even heat. With Seska there had been heat. But he wasn’t sure afterwards if he had been feeling it alone, and there sure as hell hadn’t been love. With Kathryn…ten years in and both of them in their mid-fifties, he was still so much in love with her, so agitated by her, that he was struck by a pang of longing just sitting and thinking about her off on her walk. He didn’t doubt his love for his wife. Which made the warm—more than warm, more like simmering—quality of his friendship with Hana—something he supposed had been going on for awhile, though he wouldn’t have admitted it to himself—all the more puzzling to him.
“Are you okay?” said Vair, looking at him curiously.
Chakotay wondered if Vair’s sanguine attitude towards Hana’s extracurricular feelings would remain so blithe if he were to say, ‘I return your wife’s feelings of attraction.’ Somehow he doubted it. Vair was still a man, after all. “I’m fine,” he said. “I should get up and make Saga a snack.”
Saga was eleven, almost twelve, and had no need for her father to make her after-school snacks anymore, but he wanted an excuse to leave the room. He headed to the kitchen and heard Vair mutter sadly to himself, “Vair Callen: clearing rooms for fifty-seven years and counting.”
He heard Saga come in a little while later. “Hi Uncle Vair!” she said. “Are my parents home?”
“Your dad’s in the kitchen,” he heard Vair say. “Your mom and your Aunt Hana are out for a walk, talking about what an idiot I am.”
“Did you say something stupid again?” Saga asked, sounding sympathetic, and Chakotay laughed to himself.
“I did,” Vair sighed. “Just remember that your mom and dad love each other a lot, okay?”
“Uh…okay,” she said, laughing. “You’re so weird, Uncle Vair.”
“I am, unfortunately,” he said. “Care for a game?”
“Sure, after I go say hi to dad,” she said.
But Chakotay heard the end of this exchange only dimly. ‘Remember that your mom and dad love each other a lot.’ His heart was suddenly pounding. Why in god’s name had he not immediately grasped that this was going to cause a problem between him and Kathryn? If Hana was attracted to him and he couldn’t honestly say he felt nothing for her…this wasn’t a situation he had seen coming. Should he have seen it? He and Hana flirted a little, but it didn’t mean anything…did it? Chakotay felt cold and sick. Saga came in and chirped, “Hi Dad!” and he hugged her and gave her the plate of fruit he’d unthinkingly cut into cubes. She looked at it and then peered at him. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” he said, probably not sounding any more convinced than he felt. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you haven’t cut fruit into cubes for me since I was about seven years old?” she said.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Why don’t you go ahead and play chess with your uncle.”
“Okay,” she shrugged. “I’ll offer him some pear cubes. A nice grown-up snack.”
He managed a smile, but barely.
When Kathryn and Hana came back, the look on her face…she didn’t look angry, but she looked guarded in a way he had not seen…since when? Their reunion day, when she’d asked how he could have married Seven in one timeline and not loved her at all in this one. That was the look. An “I’m not sure I believe you” look that he had never seen on her face since that day. The sick feeling increased to a dull burning nausea and he focused on keeping the contents of his stomach inside. Vair and Hana left quickly, and he set about making dinner while Kathryn did some chores in the garden. Then he didn’t eat at dinner, and neither did she, and he was grateful for Saga’s excited chatter about school and friends and the new tricks she wanted to teach her puppikeet, Velcro, who was attached like his namesake to her shoulder throughout the meal as usual, panting and beaming at the family in a way that Chakotay usually found funny and charming; tonight it left him cold.
When Saga had gone off to bed, Chakotay sat on the couch, his mouth dry, wishing they hadn’t used up their firewood allowance for the month already. Whatever conversation they were going to have, the fire would have been a pleasant support. “Will you come to the bedroom, love?” Kathryn asked.
“Of course,” he said. She was undressing.
“Will you undress?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said. He did, and they climbed into bed.
She curled up with him, her warm skin on his. “I need to feel your body next to mine while I ask you this in case the answer means I never get to feel you this way again,” she said, her voice shaking, and his stomach gave a lurch that sent bile into the back of his throat. “Are you in love with Hana? I need you to tell me if you are.”
“No,” he said softly. “I think—I’m attracted to her, Kathryn.” She drew in a breath. His voice was shaking, too. “But I’m not in love with her.”
“What exactly do you mean in saying that you’re attracted to her?”
“I mean that I like sitting close to her on the couch and I like flirting with her and I like how much she makes me laugh.” His whole body was trembling, along with his voice.
“That might be the most painful thing I have ever had to hear from you,” said Kathryn softly.
He wanted desperately to remain upright, to tell her that she was connecting things that didn’t need to be connected, that she needed to think differently about this, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t explain this away or make it seem different. He didn’t want Hana, not really, any more than she really wanted him. But he was attracted to her, and apparently she felt something for him, too. Why—when—how had this happened? And why the hell hadn’t he just lied, for once in his life?
“I don’t want anything more from Hana than what I have,” he said. Then he got up and ran to the bathroom and threw up, thinking dully that this felt even worse than when Hana had called him to say that Kathryn was hurt on the Enterprise. He remembered the way Kathryn had looked as he and Hana tended her in sickbay and he threw up again. He rinsed his mouth and brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, then looked at himself in the mirror for a moment. Was that him? This aging foolish man who seemed to be blowing up his life out of nowhere? It was strange the way people felt inclined to look in mirrors at times like this, he thought vaguely. Or maybe it wasn’t: am I still here? Am I still me? If I lose her, will there be anything left for me to find in the mirror?
He went back into the bedroom but did not get back into bed. He looked at her squarely, determined to be as straightforward as she had been, even if his nakedness made him feel slightly ridiculous and extremely vulnerable. “Am I losing you over this?” he asked. “I answered you honestly; please do the same for me.”
“No,” she said. “Come back here, please.” She held out a hand. He came to bed and laid down on his side, looking at her. She stared back for a long time. He thought he might have to get up and vomit again, but he tried to force himself to stay, remain calm, tolerate the hurt he could see in her gaze. “You left Seven for me,” she said. “I have always known that you wouldn’t be swayed by a pretty face. Eventually I understood that you weren’t looking to be anyone’s knight in shining armor, and I stopped worrying about that, too. But I think you like how much I make you laugh. And I think you like that we flirt—that we’re still playful. And I know you need our physical connection. So to hear you list those things as reasons you find Hana attractive—“
He leaped up and ran to the bathroom and threw up again. Why why why didn’t I lie, he said to himself numbly. She won’t forgive me. I’ve ruined everything for the sake of feeling my friend draped across me on the couch and knowing that she likes my jawline. He rinsed and brushed and splashed again and then went back to bed, feeling hollowed out and more desperately miserable than he could ever remember feeling—since…when? It came to him: since his father died.
But when he came back her face was concerned. “I’m not trying to torture you, love,” she said, and when she called him ‘love’, tears rushed up behind his eyes. “I’m not angry, really; you haven’t done anything wrong. I’m just hurt. Do you understand why I’m hurt?” She was crying a little. “Can you imagine how hurt you’d be if I told you I was attracted to someone else?”
This sliced through him like a hot knife. The idea of her casting her mischievous glances at some other man…sitting with her legs draped over him? What the hell had he been thinking? “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “Tell me what to do to make it better, Kathryn. I can live without anyone and anything else but I cannot live without you. I will do anything.”
She moved close to him. “Please just hold me very close,” she said. “Just don’t drift away from me because our lives have settled down. I cannot live without you either, Chakotay. I am still so helplessly in love with you.” Her voice hitched into a sob, and he thought his heart would just break infinitely from now on, just break and break until it was powder, molecules, atoms, nothing.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, burying his face in her hair as he pressed her body into his. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“It’ll be better tomorrow,” she said, her voice shaky. “Just don’t let go of me.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I won’t.”
The next morning he woke very early and felt her close to him, her body curving and warm. For a moment he was supremely happy, then he remembered the conversation of the previous night. He jumped out of the bed and ran to the bathroom, throwing up bile and then heaving up nothing because there was nothing else left in his stomach. When he had again rinsed his mouth, brushed his teeth, and splashed his face, he went back into the bedroom, stomach aching and empty, to find her awake and looking rueful. “You have to stop throwing up, love,” she said. “You’re going to make yourself ill. Come here.” She held out her hand and he came to lay with her, facing her. She felt for his hands and interlaced their fingers. “I had noticed that you and Hana had grown close,” she said. “I even noticed that there was maybe a little…charge…between the two of you. But I never thought anything would come of it, and I wouldn’t have thought it worth bringing up if Vair hadn’t—been Vair. Once he proclaimed his wife’s interest in sleeping with you, I felt like I couldn’t ignore that.”
“No, of course not,” he said softly.
“What Hana said to me about her feelings made me feel a lot better,” she said. “But that still left the question of how you felt, and I think I talked myself into being more scared and hurt than the situation warranted.” She paused and swallowed. “Last night was awful,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t want to do that ever again.”
“I don’t either,” he said, wiping the tears gently from her cheeks with his thumb. “It has always been you, Kathryn. Only you. If I have to earn back your trust—“
“You don’t,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to say. I’ve seen your relationship with Hana as it has developed and I do trust you. I trust Hana, too. It was just the way Vair said it—“ she stopped. “In the light of day, I think what makes me angry about what happened is that what would otherwise have been harmless flirting in the context of a long and caring friendship was turned into a reason for world-tilting conversations—between me and Hana and then between you and me. I wouldn’t want to be Vair for a few days, but I think he deserves a little suffering for that level of obtuseness.”
He kissed her hand, feeling that maybe the world was righting itself but not totally confident of his footing yet. “What you said last night, though—“ he began, but she cut him off.
“I was upset last night. Chakotay, you’re human. You’re allowed to find someone else attractive. It shouldn’t be the end of the world, and it isn’t, when I’m thinking clearly. I know there’s nothing happening beyond what I can see. Frankly, I understand why you might be attracted to Hana. It underlines why I love you so much, in some ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you’d said you were attracted to one of your fawning young graduate students I’d have her on an exchange term to the Delta quadrant in a hot second,” she said. “And you living outside in a tent.” He half-smiled and she returned the half-smile. “But you wouldn’t be. You don’t want cheap flattery or meaningless sex or to work out your fear of death on some young idiot while she works out her anger with her father on you. You would only find someone attractive if you really felt she was your equal. I love that about you. And Hana is—“ she shrugged, even though she was lying down. “Hana. When I asked how you’d feel if I was attracted to someone else I didn’t allow for the possibility that it might matter who it was. It matters to me that it’s her.”
This felt oddly backwards to him. “Are you sure it’s not worse because it’s Hana? Your best friend? It’s a cliché, even.”
“It would be a cliché if you were having an affair with her. I don’t think there’s anything cliché about your actual relationship with her. When I spoke to her yesterday she said that the remark Vair repeated was not verbatim—she was very clear about that—and was made in the context of a philosophical conversation they were having about exactly this situation—when a close friendship blurs into attraction. He asked her if she’d ever felt that kind of thing for a friend and she said she had—for both of us.“
“Were you ever attracted to her?”
“No, I’m afraid I’m as straight as they come. How boring, I suppose.”
“And disappointing for a number of eager young female ensigns over the years.” She half-smiled. “You are the least boring person I have ever met.”
“Possibly that’s why you married me.”
“That has something to do with it, yes.” He smiled and she returned the smile with a warmth that loosened the cold knot in his stomach a little more.
“But she also said something that began to make sense to me last night as my devoted husband was shaking and vomiting over the awful transgression of sitting on the couch with a friend, which was that every relationship has a horizon—a far end, which might be reached or might not. And she said she felt her horizon with you was just…a little higher than the ordinary boundaries of friendship. It’s clear that there is something a little more. But that doesn’t mean it’s too high, or too much more. ‘I’m not looking to brush my teeth next to your husband,’ is what she said. ‘Or even give him minty-fresh kisses. I just want to be a little bit close to him. He means a lot to me.’”
Chakotay smiled a little. “Hana has always had a way with words. I think that sums it up for me, too.”
“Then I don’t think we have a problem,” she said softly. “I don’t want to take something important away from you in the name of controlling you. I hate that. I hate having you throwing up and begging me for forgiveness over a friendship that you have built with Hana over many years. Last night I was upset and scared and needed to know I hadn’t lost you. That you didn’t want to brush your teeth next to her instead of me. But you caring for each other in the way that you do doesn’t take anything from me.”
He drew in a breath. “You are a remarkable person,” he said quietly. “It wouldn’t be unreasonable for you to feel very differently about this.”
“How would you feel if I was attracted to someone else?” she asked.
“I think you’re right that it would depend on who it was,” he said, more because he’d never given it any thought than because he had. “And what exactly you felt. Is there anyone?” he asked.
“I almost wish I could say there was because maybe it would make you feel better,” she said. “But the truth is…” she stopped.
“What?”
“I feel silly saying it.”
“What could you possibly feel silly saying to me after all this time?” he asked kindly.
“That I married my fantasy,” she said, flushing. “I don’t know what I would look for in someone else. From the first time I laid eyes on you, some deep part of my primate brain knew that you were it.“
This surprised him. “You’ve always said it took you awhile to fall in love with me,” he said. “I loved you first, in the story we’ve always told each other.”
She nodded. “To fall in love, yes,” she said. “It took me longer. But that first moment…” she closed her eyes briefly. “You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen,” she said softly. “I wanted you from someplace inside me I didn’t even recognize. I knew—unconsciously, but I knew—that I would want you even if you were terrible. Fortunately for me, you turned out to be wonderful, so instead of having lifelong erotic fantasies about that gorgeous bastard I had in my brig for all those years, my dangerous, arrogant, sexy Maquis prisoner, I made you my dangerous, arrogant, sexy first officer and then I married you.” She smiled, and he smiled back.
He shifted in the bed to get more comfortable. They hadn’t talked like this in awhile, and maybe they hadn’t talked EXACTLY like this…ever. “It’s interesting to me that how I look has always been so important to you,” he mused. “I love your body and nothing makes me happier than seeing your face, but I would have loved you no less if you looked different from how you actually look. I’m not sure that’s true for you.”
She didn’t answer this at first, seeming to consider it. “It feels strange to admit it, but I’m not sure you’re wrong about that,” she said, her mouth quirking up at one side. “I adore your strength and your body and you are still so perfectly, perfectly handsome.” How different from what he had seen looking in the mirror, he thought. She touched his lips with her fingers and seemed to hesitate, then ventured: “What I wonder for you is whether you would have fallen for me if I had been an ensign on Voyager instead of your captain. You have always had complicated feelings about our power dynamics.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t you, too?” he countered. “Let’s not forget that the very first thing you wanted to do in psychospace was drop to your knees.” He had always wondered about this. “It took me years to get my mind around that.”
“It was an unusual opening move, I admit,” she said, grinning and touching his leg with her big toe, wriggling a little closer to him. “I didn’t understand it either, right away. I didn’t figure it out until shortly after I demoted you, actually.” Her expression grew wry. “I never hated being your captain more than during that time.”
He did not like thinking about this hitch in their story. He’d filed it under ‘Things that Happened on Voyager’ and therefore in a different category than ‘Things that Happened in Normal Circumstances.’ This category structure wasn’t perfect, given that Voyager had been ‘normal circumstances’ for seven years of their lives. But she’d had to forgive him for ‘Things that Happened on Voyager,’ too, and he felt like it basically washed out even. “We’ve talked about this. It was a misjudgment. Even you are capable of misjudgments.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But it was a misjudgment made possible by my authority over you. I was alone in my quarters thinking about the look on your face when I was removing the pip from your collar—god, Chakotay.” She closed her eyes briefly. “And trying to erase it from my brain by thinking about how you looked at me that day.” She looked at him again and her eyes were warm with the memory. “That’s when I figured it out.”
“What did you figure out?”
“That I was trying to stop being your captain as quickly as possible, and how better to accomplish that than by getting on my knees?” She smiled mischievously. “I wanted to wreck our power dynamic so I could get on with feeling swept away by my big, handsome, dark-eyed hero, who somehow wanted ME, like I’d become the heroine of one my holodeck novels. I wanted, for one perfect imaginary day, to just be your woman. I couldn’t have explained it at the time, but I’m quite sure that’s what I was doing.” She had never said this to him before and he felt for the ten thousandth time how lucky he was to be close to her, how much he loved continuing to learn her. “I’m glad you stopped me, all things considered. That our first time happened the way it did. But that’s what I was after. Equilibrium. Equality. I never found my authority over you exciting. But I think that isn’t true for you. I think as much as you chafed under my command, you also liked it. You’ve said a few things over the years…and remember that afternoon before I left for the Enterprise? When you saw me in uniform again? I was having fun; I think something deeper was happening with you.”
“I think that’s right,” he said quietly, recalling that day. The memory of what had been a very intense, very pleasurable half hour in bed together was cut with the pain of remembering how he’d felt about her leaving. “I think—“ he swallowed; his pulse had elevated a little. “I think I alternately loved obeying you and fantasized about you submitting to me. Which I guess was my version of seeking equilibrium. I would like to think that if I had outranked you when we met, I still would have fallen for you. But it would have been very different. I think I have always felt that I needed to bring everything I had in order to match you. And I like it that way. I couldn’t want someone I had to hold back for.”
“How fortunate for both of us that you were so pretty and I was so powerful,” she said, smiling at him with that impishness that he loved so much.
“I think I would die if you looked at another man the way you’re looking at me right now,” he said. “Whatever limits you need on my friendship with Hana I will gladly accept.”
Her smile dropped but then returned, softer, and she reached out to touch his face. “The limits that you and Hana have set for yourselves are fine,” she said. “You can sit close to her and flirt with her and make each other laugh. You care for each other. Why wouldn’t I want that for both of you? As long as you’re still coming home to me. As long as you’re still mine.” She ran a hand over his body, down to where her touch made him exhale a little short breath, back up to his heart, where it stopped and rested. He put his hand over hers. “As long as this is still what’s true.”
“I am, and it is,” he said, and reached for her. “Can I show you?”
“Please,” she said, and she reached back and he took her in his arms and kissed her, and she returned his kisses with passion, heat, all the love in her body, it seemed. He gave her as good as he got, touching her everywhere, whispering her name, watching her expression as it changed from warm to wanting to needing, entering her and feeling acutely the sense of awe that he still felt when he was making love to her, when it was emotional and sweet rather than dirty and fun. What was wrong with men who weren’t infinitely humbled by the gift of being allowed inside a woman?
“I love you, Kathryn,” he whispered, as she got closer and began gasping and clutching at him. “I am the one who has always been on my knees.”
“I love you, too,” she moaned. “Chakotay, I—“ she was cut off by the buckling of her body beneath him, and the little shivers that always followed. She lay panting and catching her breath. “You didn’t?” she said after a moment.
“Not yet,” he said. “I thought you were closer, so I focused on you.”
She shifted her body a little. “Finish deeper?” she said. “If you can.” She had been liking this more in recent years. She had always preferred shallow speed when she was on her back, and in fact couldn’t accept all of him in that position. Something about the shape of her inside and the way things settled when she was on her back, she supposed? In any case, taking him fully, to the hilt, was painful in that position, but possible in others, so they didn’t worry much about it. But then the night after John’s wedding they’d found, quite by accident, that if she angled her hips a certain way everything opened, all the way back, and the first time they found it again and he pushed all the way in and looked down at her, she closed her eyes and exhaled as if he had given her something she had been wanting for ages, then looked up at him with such honeyed satisfaction that he’d nearly come right then.
Now he pushed in slowly but completely and she circled herself with her fingers while he made short thrusts, staying deep, and her eyes stayed closed. “I love this so much,” she breathed. “I love feeling you completely inside me.”
“I love it, too,” he said. “It makes me feel safer than anything else in the world.”
She opened her eyes and they looked into each other’s eyes and it struck him that what he’d said wasn’t exactly sexy, but it had come out without his having known beforehand that he was going to say it.
“Me, too,” she said, smiling at him a little and putting a hand on his cheek. “It also feels—“ she laughed and closed her eyes again. “So, so good.”
“That, too,” he said, focusing on the sensations, the lust part of the love he felt for her, feeling every little stretch and movement with her, watched her want him helplessly as his rhythmic movement gradually increased in speed, felt his own helpless want, gave her every bit of love he had, and when he at last unraveled into her, she sped up her hand and squeezed her thighs a little and took a breath and contracted around him with a little surprised-sounding oh of happy pleasure.
“Found something new?” he asked, as he pulled out and settled down next to her.
“No, I just wasn’t sure I was going to get another one. That was nice. But it was one of those wake-you-up ones, not a knock-you-out one. So I’m going to want you again soon.”
“Works for me,” he said. “I think I’m needing about twenty minutes these days.” She curled up next to him, hand on his heart, and he kissed her hair.
Ten minutes later they had both fallen back to sleep, but when they woke an hour later, officially to start the day, they just laughed and kissed and wandered out to the living room where Saga was ready for school and reading something on her comm device. She had become a surprisingly serious pre-teen, given what a sweet and goofy little child she had been.
“Are you sick, Dad?” she asked, looking up as they came in. “I thought I heard you throwing up a few times last night and this morning.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I was upset about something, but your mother and I talked things out and I feel a lot better. Why were you awake? Are you okay?” He had long ago bought a noise-canceller for their bedroom because he liked Kathryn loud and the house was so tiny, so he wasn’t afraid she’d heard anything else. But of course it didn’t extend to the bathroom.
“You threw up because you were upset?” she said, frowning and ignoring his questions in a way that made him file the omission away for later investigation. “What were you upset about?”
“Nothing you need to worry about, little one,” he said, smiling at her and kissing the top of her head before going into the kitchen to make coffee.
***
Saga did not believe her father. For one, Aunt Hana and Uncle Vair were supposed to have stayed for dinner and a Jane Russell movie the night before. Aunt Hana had recently decided that Saga’s mother was more like Jane Russell than Katharine Hepburn, and since she and Saga had been watching twentieth-century Earth cinema together for a couple of years without managing to see a Jane Russell movie, Saga was excited about it. But they’d left abruptly, in the midst of something that Uncle Vair thought was going to upset her parents. And they had been upset. Saga had chattered away like a lunatic all through dinner to cover it up, because she’d never seen them so silent and tense before, and she didn’t know what to do besides talk and talk and talk. She’d escaped to walk Velcro and go to bed as soon as she could, not understanding why they looked so miserable on pancake night.
At least, she hadn’t understood until she listened at their bedroom door after being awakened by her father vomiting. Something had happened with Aunt Hana, and she didn’t know what, but her mother was upset and her father was throwing up and apologizing. Eventually they’d gone to sleep and Saga went to sleep, too. In the morning the noise canceller must have been on because she couldn’t hear anything at all from their room, but they must have made up because they looked happy this morning. Still. It made her nervous. What had happened with Aunt Hana? Why had her parents been so quiet and strange at dinner?
“Is Dad really okay?” she asked her mother.
“Yes, sweetheart, he’s—“ her mother stopped. “Oh my god,” she whispered, looking at her comm device.
“What is it?” Saga asked.
“What is what?” asked her father, coming in with yogurt and fruit for his wife. “Coffee’s almost ready.”
Her mother handed her father a comm device and he began reading a news brief out loud. “San Francisco—Interpol is reporting a rash of arrests connected with a failed attempt on the life of the CEO of Olympus Technologies, a key supplier of the large, highly durable panels used on the outer hulls of deep-space Starfleet vessels and some high-end, long-haul private commercial spacecraft. Little is known at this time, but a provisional list of the suspects’ names has been released. Jack Henry, Pierce Lofgren, Koji Taka, Charlotte Just, Sekaya—“ he stopped, seemingly frozen.
“It could be another Sekaya?” her mother said. “But—”
“Isn’t your sister named Sekaya?” asked Saga.
His face looked blank and he stared at the comm device. “Yes. My sister,” he said.
“Why did she try to kill the CEO of a spaceship company?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken with her in more than twenty years.”