Singularity Drift

I saw Nico four years before I ever touched him.

That's not quite true. I saw his work first. A torn-open freighter in the Drift zone, hull peeled like fruit, and his tether anchors holding the whole carcass steady while the salvage teams crawled through it. Someone had engineered the thing beautifully. I remember thinking, whoever built that rig is either a genius or a maniac.

Then I floated around a bulkhead and found him. Thirty-three, grease on his cheek, arguing with a safety officer about load tolerances. He was wrong about the tolerance. He was also right. Both things at once. I hated him immediately.

"Curator Barclay," he said, not even looking up. "Please tell me your people aren't touching the cargo bay until we clear it."

"My people touch everything. That's the job."

He looked up then. And, well. Eleven years later I'm still looking back.

I was thirty-one then. I'm forty-two now. He's forty-four, and he still argues with safety officers, and he still wins, and some nights he kisses me like the argument never ended.

Some nights he kisses me like I'm furniture.

That's the part I can't say out loud. Seven years together and we've drifted into something polite. Warm. Comfortable. Comfortable is a lovely word for a chair and a slow death for a marriage. We're not married, technically, but you know what I mean. We've become each other's furniture.

So I've decided to do something about it. Me. The woman who catalogs dead worlds for a living. I can decode the sensory rituals of a species that's been extinct for eight thousand years, but apparently I needed two months of nerve-building to seduce my own boyfriend.

Stubborn pride. It runs in my family.

Here's the plan, such as it is. Tonight, when he comes off shift, I'm taking him into the zero-g slot. The Verdigris has a few gravity-variable chambers, mostly used for cargo balancing, and I bribed the night supervisor with a bottle of real wine. Not the synthesized stuff. The real thing, from Earth, which costs more than my quarterly salary and was absolutely worth it.

And I'm bringing the oil.

The oil is my best trick, if I'm honest. Found it in a derelict temple on Luyten b, in a vault that had held vacuum for millennia. The labels are gibberish but the chemistry isn't. Mild plant-derived compound, harmless, quick-acting. It makes skin hyperaware. Every touch reads louder. It does nothing to wanting, I checked the chemistry twice. It only turns up attention. The extinct natives used it in their bonding ceremonies, apparently. I've been sitting on it for three years, telling myself it was for research.

Tonight it's for Nico.

* * *

He comes through the hatch at 19:40 station time, smell of machine coolant and recycled air, hair flattened from his helmet. He sees me standing in the corridor in nothing but a robe, holding a small blue bottle, and his face does something wonderful.

"Shelia. What's all this?"

"Zero-g slot's booked till 0600. I booked it."

"You booked the cargo chamber." He frowns at it, the way he frowns at anything unexplained. Engineers. "Why?"

"Because I want to give you a massage in free fall, and I'd rather not explain myself to strangers." I hold up the bottle. "Also I found something in the temple vault that I've been hiding from the research board."

His eyebrows go up. "Contraband?"

"Archaeological contraband. There's a difference. Legally it's mine, ethically it's a gray area, and morally I've decided it's a gift." I take his hand. His palm is calloused and warm and I've missed noticing that. "Come on. Trust me for one night."

He lets me pull him down the corridor. That's the thing about Nico. He'll argue with a safety officer for an hour, but he never argues with me when I use that voice. I learned that voice around year three.

The slot is a big padded cylinder, all handrails and soft gray walls, gravity dial sitting at point-zero-two. Near enough free fall. I kick off and drift, watching him do the same, all that big engineer body suddenly slow and floating. He's graceful for a man his size. He doesn't believe it when I say so.

"Okay," he says, catching a rail. "Massage. In zero-g. Explain the logistics to me."

"Logistics are my department. You're cargo tonight."

"I'm cargo."

"Beautiful, stubborn cargo. Hold the rail and stop talking."

He laughs. He doesn't stop smiling while I work the coolant-stained shirt off his shoulders. There he is. Scars from a tether accident on his left side, the one that scared me half to death seven years ago. Gray coming in at his temples that he pretends isn't there. My husband in every way that matters.

I uncork the bottle. It smells faintly of green things. Rain, maybe. Something the Luyten natives had a word for that we don't.

"New cologne?"

"Temple oil. It makes skin hyperaware, every touch reads louder, and it does nothing else. You can say no and we'll just do the massage. Yes?"

"Contraband and a massage? Yes."

"Then rub it in slow. And Nico? Say stop and I stop, any time. Now don't ask questions for ten minutes. Just feel."

He opens his mouth to ask a question. I put a finger on his lips. He closes it. Bless him.

I start at his shoulders. Push the oil in with both palms, slow circles, drifting weightless around his body like I'm orbiting him. Thirty seconds in, he makes a small sound. Forty seconds, his head tips back.

"Shelia. What is in this?"

"I told you. No questions!"

"This is not normal oil."

"No. It isn't!" I work down his spine, and every inch of skin I touch seems to light up under my hands, and I can tell he feels it too because his breathing changes. The compound doubles sensation. Both directions. My fingertips feel everything twice. "It's from a bonding rite. The natives used it for exactly this. Touching. Paying attention."

"Paying attention," he repeats, quiet.

"That's the part we lost. Not the wanting. The attention." I hook my legs around his waist in free fall so I don't drift off him, and I keep working his back, and my mouth is near his ear now. "I can catalogue ten thousand dead artifacts, Nico. I refuse to let us become one."

He turns in my grip, slow, careful, until we're face to face, floating, my knees locked around him. His eyes are a little glassy and a lot hungry.

"You planned this," he says.

"Two months of planning."

"The wine for Toombs. The slot. The oil."

"All of it. I'm a curator. I curate."

He laughs, and it breaks into something lower. His hands find my hips through the robe. "It's working. Everything feels turned up. You feel turned up too?"

"Everything. Every fingertip."

His thumb strokes my jaw and I actually shiver. It's embarrassing how good it feels. Eight thousand years of dead people knew a trick we forgot.

"So," he says, and his voice has dropped into the register he only uses at night, in the dark, "the bonding rite. Does it have, uh. Further steps?"

"Oh, hundreds. I've read the transcripts. Extensively."

"Research."

"Rigorous research."

He pulls me closer, chest to chest, and the oil between us makes even that feel enormous. "I love you," he says, "and I have been an idiot."

"Only for about three years."

"Fair." He grins, and my God, that grin. "So what's the next step in the rite, curator?"

I press my mouth to his ear. "The next step is I stop being patient. That's historically accurate. The transcripts get very indecorous."

"Show me the transcripts later," he says, and kisses me.

His mouth is warm and the oil turns the kiss into something I feel down my whole spine, and I hold onto the rail behind him because I honestly need the anchor. Seven years of familiarity and one little blue bottle and I'm shaking like it's the first night all over again.

He slides the robe off my shoulder, slow, asking with his hands, waiting until I nod. Then his oiled palms are on my bare back and I make a noise I'll blame on the oil.

"Good?" he murmurs.

"Keep going," I say. "And Nico? The night's long. We're just getting started."

He catches my wrist and holds it still for a second. "Yes or no, Shelia," he says. "I'll do whatever's yes."

"Yes," I say. "To all of it. And you tell me if it's ever not."

"Deal."

He slides the robe the rest of the way off and lets it float, and we both watch it drift toward the far wall, and then we stop watching it. His oiled hands find my breasts and I can feel every callus separately. "Yes?" he asks, thumb circling, and I say yes, and he lowers his mouth and I hear myself make a noise that bounces off the padded walls. Free fall makes everything slow and clumsy and funny. We turn in a lazy half-spin every time one of us pushes, until I hook a foot through a handrail and he braces against the opposite one and we stop, face to face, hovering.

"No condom," I say, because we settled that years ago, tests and exclusivity said plainly over bad coffee, and asking is still polite. "Still yes?"

"Still yes," he says. "God, Shelia. Yes."

He enters me slow, and the oil makes it too much and exactly enough, every inch arriving twice. With no weight to anchor us we hold each other and let the rhythm come from our hands on the rails, a long slow push and drift, push and drift. His mouth is at my ear saying my name, and I tell him "slower, there," and he does. When I come it rolls through me in a long doubled wave and I cry out and the chamber carries it back, and he follows with his face in my neck, shuddering, the two of us turning slowly in the dark like something in orbit.

He asks me afterward, in the dark of our honeycomb bunk, with his arm under my head.

"Can I confess something?"

"You just did. It took two months and a bottle of wine."

"Shelia." He's serious. I can hear it. "I've been nervous. About us. The routine. Same meals, same gravity, same bed. I kept thinking, he's forty-four, he's going to wake up one morning and realize we've turned into furniture."

I laugh. I can't help it. It comes out loud in our little box of a room and bounces off the walls.

"What?" He sounds wounded.

"Nico. I spent two months plotting against that exact furniture. You think I booked a zero-g chamber with a bribed supervisor because I felt spontaneous?"

"So we were both..." He trails off. Then he laughs too, this big relieved huff that shakes the bunk. "We're idiots."

"Married idiots. Effectively."

"God. I thought it was just me going stale."

"Stale." I prop up on my elbow. "You're not bread, Nico."

"Tell that to my knees."

I kiss his shoulder and fall asleep grinning.

Because here's what he doesn't know yet. The oil was step one. I have a plan. I've had a plan for two months, written in the back of a conservation ledger where nobody would ever look.

* * *

Second evening. Wednesday. I tell him to be in our quarters by 21:00 and to shower first.

"Ooh. Mysterious," he says, ducking through the hatch at 20:58, hair still damp.

"Sit on the bed." He sits. I pull the silk strip from behind my back. Deep violet, woven through with silver thread in a pattern nobody living can read. "This is from a dead queen's robe. Hallarvi dynasty. She ruled a world that's been dust for six thousand years."

"You're going to blindfold me with a museum piece."

"I'm going to blindfold you with a museum piece that survived two wars and a salvage fire. It can survive your face. Rules first. Say stop and I stop, say tether and the blindfold comes off. Yes?"

"Yes. Tether. Got it." He leans forward.

I tie it snug. And then I spend the next hour touching him with almost nothing.

Fingertips only. Breath only. The manual of sensory arts from Xing Station calls it the long attention, and the Hallarvi called it something I can't pronounce. I learned it from a transcript at 2 a.m. three weeks ago, sitting alone in my office, blushing at a document older than agriculture.

I breathe warm on the back of his neck. He twitches. I trace one fingertip from his wrist to his elbow, slow, so slow, and he makes a sound low in his chest.

"You're not touching me," he says. His voice has gone rough already.

"I am. Barely. That is the entire discipline. The body fills in what the skin doesn't confirm. It invents. It aches."

"It aches," he agrees, strangled.

"Good. Now stop talking. One hour!"

"An hour? Shelia, I'll die."

"You won't. People survived six thousand years ago with far less than you."

I drift around him. Fingertip along his jaw. Breath at his throat, no contact. The backs of my nails down his spine, once, and then nothing for a full minute while he squirms. It's the cruelest, kindest thing I know how to do, and I love it, and I love that he lets me.

By the forty-minute mark he's gripping