They Called Me Defective, Until I Tamed the Interstellar Commander novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Quiet Room

In a soundproof steel room Vesper lays her wrist against the Commander's and his implant stops screaming. He sets his terms, and falls asleep for the first time in nine years.

The quiet room was a steel box with a table, two chairs and no windows.

Dax showed me in, then stood in the doorway and did not come any further.

"It's soundproofed," he said. "And the walls are rated for a Surge. Both of those facts are about to matter."

"That's very comforting," I said.

"I thought so." He lingered a moment. "Don't take it personally if he throws you out."

He shut the door.

Commander Roark was already sitting at the far side of the table with his coat off.

Under the black shirt, a seam of dull metal ran up the back of his neck.

Another one ran down his left forearm, from the elbow to the wrist, and the metal was faintly red.

"That's the implant?" I said.

"The Surge. It was fitted nine years ago." He did not look at it. "It keeps me alive in a fight, and in a long fight it takes my mind."

"And I'm supposed to touch it."

"You're supposed to touch my wrist, here." He laid his forearm flat on the table, palm up. "Nothing else. Those are the terms."

"Whose terms?"

"Mine." He finally looked at me. "Skin on my wrist during a session, and only then. We do not touch outside this room."

"All right."

"And you sleep in your own bunk. Never in my quarters."

"That was an easy one," I said. "I haven't offered."

For half a second something almost happened at the corner of his mouth.

Then he looked down, and it was gone.

I sat across from him and put my left wrist against his.

His skin was hot.

His pulse was hammering so hard I could feel it in my own bones.

For a few seconds nothing happened at all.

Then the red seam on his arm began to brighten.

It crept up past his elbow and lit the edge of his jaw, and a high thin whine started somewhere inside the table.

His free hand closed on the edge of the steel.

The metal bent.

"Stay," he said through his teeth. "Even if I tell you to go."

"I'm staying."

"That's what the last one said."

"I'm not the last one," I said.

I said nothing else.

I did not know what I was supposed to do, so I did nothing, and kept my wrist where it was.

The whine climbed.

The light on his arm went from red to white.

A drop of sweat ran down the scar through his eyebrow.

Then, very slowly, the whine began to come down.

The white faded to red, and the red to a dull glow.

His fingers eased off the table.

His shoulders came down for the first time since I had met him.

"That's it?" I said.

"That's it," he said, and his voice was hoarse. "Don't move."

"I wasn't going to."

We sat there.

The only sound was the air system.

My arm began to go numb, but I did not want to be the one to move it.

"Why did you walk to me?" he said.

His eyes were closed.

"I told you. I'd have had to walk back."

"There were other ways out of that Hall."

"None where I wasn't the joke." I looked at the seam on his arm, and the quiet glow in it. "You stood up when she read my number. Then you told me to go back. Which was it?"

He was silent for so long I thought he would not answer.

"Both," he said.

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the one I have."

The corner of his mouth moved again.

"Are you afraid of me?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Good. Then you aren't stupid."

"I'm not stupid," I said. "I'm also not leaving."

He opened his eyes.

They were very blue, and he looked at me for a long time, and I wanted him to keep looking, which I had not planned to want on my first night as a defective woman.

My pulse jumped against his wrist.

I knew he felt it.

He looked at where our skin touched and then at my face, and his own pulse jumped under my fingers.

"Your signal's gone," he said quietly. "Everyone else has a hum. A bright one. Yours is nothing. A quiet room."

"That's why they call me defective."

"It's why I can hear myself think."

My throat tightened.

It was not what I had expected anyone to say.

"Is that a compliment?" I said.

"It's a fact," he said. "I don't pay compliments."

But his thumb had moved, just slightly, and now lay along the inside of my wrist.

He did not seem to know it.

Neither of us said anything.

After a while his eyes closed again, and his head tipped forward, and his breathing slowed and lengthened until it was a sleeper's.

He was asleep sitting up, with his arm still lying on the table under mine.

I stayed where I was.

I tracked the steady beat of his pulse against my wrist.

The door opened an inch.

Dax looked in, and his face changed.

He stared at the commander's slack hand, and then at me.

"How did you do that?" he whispered.

"I just sat here."

"He hasn't slept since the day they fitted it," Dax said. "Nine years, Vesper. Not once."

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