Date Point: 16y7m2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Xiù Chang
Julian bounced back. He was tough, dependable, innately cheerful… Nothing kept him down for very long.
But some things took longer than others to bounce back from. Xiù knew that well. Which was why she’d devoted herself to turning their home into a little slice of heaven as much as she could.
And why not? All three of them were home for a change. Al was on maternity leave, Julian had taken time off to process the attempt on his life, and Xiù worked from home anyway. It wasn’t like her property portfolio needed her constant attention after all…
So she devoted herself to being a mom and a carer. Caring for Julian was easy; he wanted good food—and lots of it, which tickled at her heartstrings like she’d never imagined it might—and to snuggle up on the couch with everyone, and watch movies.
They weren’t watching anything just then, simply…resting. She sat on the couch and he curled his muscular legs around her, all gentle possessive strength and familiar, affectionate warmth. The boys were off playing with friends and that left them alone, enjoying an interlude of peace.
“I could do this forever,” he grumbled happily. Xiù smiled and massaged his big sturdy feet, since they were right there in her lap and she enjoyed giving him pleasure. That earned her a blissed-out expression of deep relaxation as a reward; Julian loved being touched, and he responded to it so well…
She worked her hands up the unyielding heroic shapes of his body, earning a stream of contented rumbles and some enjoyably tighter squeezes. His was a beautiful soul, vigilantly selfless and yet happily willing to soak up any positive vibes anyone sent his way. There was no possible way she couldn’t love him for it…
…And she certainly wasn’t complaining about the body that came along with it, oh no. Physiques just didn’t come any better, except for possibly his supersoldier friends, and even then, though she was definitely partial, she thought he was was the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Better yet, the handful of civilians who came even close to his size, or his strength, or his frankly perfect shape weren’t nearly so ultra-healthy. Or as tenderly affectionate, probably. He didn’t have the inflated ego those other men so often had and that was one of his very best qualities. He was a special man and she was blessed, truly blessed to love him.
All three of them were blessed in each other. Xiù was buzzing with good feelings and would have loved to give some to Al, but she was asleep, and Julian was just so good to feel…
It was an intimate and playful affection they were sharing. Physical, yet gentle, and without the electric charge of something more profound and intense…there would be plenty of time for that later. For now, she kept things mostly but not completely chaste. He could be pretty volcanically passionate when provoked and honestly…she loved him dearly, but she couldn’t handle that at the moment. Now was the time for snuggles, and touches…some of those maybe suggestively promising of things to come. A quick teasing feel or three, a kiss on his naval…
And flirting. Lots of that. Which was absolutely not a burden at all.
“All this lying around and eating, you might actually get a little fat on you…” she teased, rubbing her hands along the unyielding bumps of muscle layered over his ribs, then slowly up and down the rock-hard cobblestones of his abs.
Julian grinned his happiest, dopiest grin and groaned in deep, deep pleasure. He was so easy to please…her hands worked up to his bulging chest and slowly rubbed along his thick neck and shoulders, before following his arms back to his ribs.
It was a while before he said anything. “Mmm…would you sti ll do that if I did?”
He tensed his core as he said it and a troll-like expression spread across his face…which made tickling his ribs such a temptation. He was lying flat on his back on the couch with Anna asleep on his chest, a perfect tickle target as he wouldn’t dare squirm away. Allison, who lived by the ‘sleep when the baby sleeps’ mantra, was dozing on the recliner, but even she wouldn’t have been able to resist, if she’d been awake: Julian was super ticklish. Always had been.
Xiù had neglected to think ahead, however, and this time he won the game of reflexes. His hand shot out like a lighting bolt and managed to grab both her wrists. Even at an awkward angle, she couldn’t resist his casually ridiculous strength and escape being pulled inexorably closer.
“You’re a naughty girl…” He grinned trollishly, then lovingly put one of his big hands on her belly. “We’ll have to commute your sentence, though…”
Xiù laughed. “You say that every time. I dread to think what you’re gonna do to me when you get the chance…”
“Oh, I’m gonna take a whole week of leave for that… Maybe learn to tie some special knots…”
Xiù laughed again, quietly, though there was no stopping both the blush and the way her teeth reflexively played with her lip… āi yā. He was way too good at that.
“Promise?” she asked.
He sat up just enough to kiss her. “…Maybe.” Thus delivered, he laid back and pulled Xiù up along his body, resting her head on his thick shoulder and chest so they could both watch Anna sleep. His head snuggled against hers, and Xiù would have loved to stay cuddled up like that forever, wrapped up warmly in his strength and his scent.
It truly was a deep blessing they had, despite everything. Julian was the type to heal up fast, both in his heart and apparently in his body, too. He’d done a number to his foot while he was out running but within a day it was mostly back to normal; it had probably just looked a lot worse than it really was.
Still, he’d had a persistent and worsening soreness that ran all up and down his left calf, so he was going to the doctor today to get it looked at.
Sadly, his appointment was approaching. “You need to get going, Mister Slab. Go get dressed! You’re expected in forty minutes and no running, remember? And if you don’t give Hoeff enough warning I think he’ll have a heart attack and explode.”
“Yes ma’am,” He chuckled “…Suppose I better go downstairs and extract him from the mancave…”
He sat up, and Xiù scooped Anna out of his arms before settling into the nice warm spot he’d left on the couch.
Julian thumped down to the basement and came up a minute later with a very thoroughly exercised-looking Hoeff, who nodded politely and prowled upstairs to the guest bathroom. Julian followed behind toward the master suite. A few minutes later they emerged, scrubbed clean and sans gym shorts, and both were dressed much more presentably. Hoeff had gone for some well-fitted cargo pants and a very snug polo, Julian in his habitual friend-made comfy jeans and snug black t-shirt. He was wearing the one she stole as a pajama top the night before, too; she could tell because it was still a big wrinkled mess, but that would disappear very quickly. What felt like an almost knee-length tent on her was nearly too tight on him, which…
That happy thought was dashed when she saw what he had clipped onto his waistband: a reactive personal forcefield.
Xiù hated the sight of the thing. She’d barely held it together when Julian’s protection team had brought him home a week ago, shaking and shaken and covered in blood, and thank God for Allison, who’d just gone fully into Practical Mom Mode and put the world back together.
Hoeff had been seething. Then, at some point, he’d vanished. There was something about that entire situation that absolutely screamed at Xiù’s instincts, because Hoeff’s entire attitude had gone from raw and aggressive to…absolutely, perfectly, murderously cold.
And then, there was the news a week later about the APA. When he returned he’d seemed…much calmer. More his usual habitually spiky and friendly self. She was pretty sure she knew enough about why to not ask any questions.
Julian on the other hand seemed a bit oblivious to it. Probably that was because he had fond blind spots for people he cared about.
Hopefully, that would never go away.
As for Xiù herself… once upon a time she would have hated herself for the sense of righteous satisfaction she felt when she considered what had happened to the so-called ‘Alien Protection Army.’ Years ago, she’d told herself she didn’t want to be the sort of person who was happy about such things.
But they’d hurt her family. Over and over again. They’d robbed Julian of his home, robbed Allison of a good relationship with her son, and now they’d tried to kill Julian. And when she looked at the little knot of hatred for them that she found in her soul…
It should have appalled her. Instead, what mildly concerned her was that it didn’t.
They’d dragged Hoeff in too, somehow. She knew it and had expressed that to him without actually saying the words. But she knew, and he knew, and she knew he knew. He’d hugged her fiercely and the two had never said a word about it since.
“Okay! We’re ready to go. You want us to get anything? Are you still hankering for Nava paste?”
“I finished two tubes yesterday.” She’d taken to spreading it on toast with butter. It had a nice, salty, slightly fishy and slightly nutty flavor. Okay, so it was still a giant turd-looking bug’s roasted and pureed guts, but she’d got over that. Mostly.
Hoeff mugged at her gruffly. “Y’all are so gross. Damn weirdos.”
“I swear that’s your favorite insult, little guy.” Julian punched him on the shoulder with a surprisingly loud thwack. He was the complete and total opposite of a bully, but there was nobody more guy-like than Hoeff, and guy-friends seemed to bond by picking on each other.
“Eh, I’m not the creative type. That’s a weirdo kinda thing, if ‘ya ask me.”
Julian grumbled happily. “Whatever, midget.” He gave Xiù a kiss, and then a second softer one for Anna.
“We’ll get you some,” he promised. “Anything else?”
“I’ll add it to the shared list if I think of anything.”
“‘Kay. See you later, spacebabe!”
Hoeff grinned—genuinely, which really lit his face up from handsomely plain to something remarkable—and nodded at everyone. “See y’all tonight.”
♪“Bye!”♪ Xiù waved cheerily, and bounced Anna a little for good measure. A sleepy mumble from the recliner was Allison’s contribution, and…
Silence. Xiù carefully deposited the baby in her mother’s arms and decided that maybe she had a little time to enjoy herself before the next little moment of duty called…
But on the other hand…
She cuddled up to Allison, got a barely-conscious kiss and snuggle, and decided that there were worse ways to spend an afternoon than a well-earned nap.
After all. Before long there’d be a second baby to take care of and their work would double. Best to take whatever peace she could, when she could.
It was a rare enough commodity, after all.
Date Point: 16y7m2d AV
Ceres Base, Asteroid Belt, Sol
Drew Martin
Drew was the last of the ‘old guard’ left, and kept wondering why.
He had, over the course of a nightmare few weeks, lost his best friend, been the prime suspect in the theft of a nuclear bomb, been altogether much too close to said bomb’s detonation for comfort, and generally been at the core of a debacle that had cost the Hephaestus Consortium a mind-squeezing amount of money, not to mention access to the high-yield ordnance necessary to the kind of asteroid mining they wanted to do.
It had certainly cost Adele Park her job. After several loyal years, she’d been given a king’s ransom of an executive bonus package and quietly persuaded to retire. Drew kept wondering when the new boss, Rahul Panja, was going to heft that axe again.
Quite aside from being mystified as to why he hadn’t been given a polite but firm push out the door, there was the mystery of his own reasons for staying. Ceres was a lot of bad memories right now.
But it was also a lot of work. A lot of good work. The base had weathered the nuke pretty damn well, but the list of little things that needed attention had been naturally eclipsed by the list of big things that needed immediate action… with the result that the little things had naturally evolved into bigger and more urgent things as they were neglected.
They were gaining on the front of the treadmill, slowly. Maybe that was the answer to both mysteries. Drew didn’t want to go until the backlog was clear, and the Consortium needed him to get the backlog cleared.
Today, though, was different and Drew was not tending to the backlog. Today, Ceres was hosting some ET guests with some promising technology to sell.
Anything that got the mining ship HCS-501 ‘I Met God And She Booped My Nose’ out of mothball and back out among the belt where she belonged was a good thing in Drew’s book. The ship had depended on nukes to do its job, but the supply of those had dried up like spit on a barbecue the moment Hephaestus lost one. The ship wasn’t a cost-effective surveyor, and the Consortium didn’t even know where to begin researching an alternative, so the poor girl had been “landed” on Ceres’ ultra-low-gravity surface where not even her prodigious mass could do her any harm, and handed over to the accountants.
She’d paid for herself just in one rock. But Drew loved spaceships, and seeing one he’d briefly captained sitting out there on the asteroidal plain, abandoned and unused, was just an extra twist to the knife in his beer belly.
“So explain how these probes work?” he asked.
The ET guest was a Locayl named Ernud, clad head-to-toe in a hazmat suit for his own protection. Ceres wasn’t designed for nonhumans, they didn’t practice even the basic germ safety that everyone living on Cimbrean was used to. No Frontline, no biofilter fields, just good old-fashioned soap medicine and disease screening. It had kept the station free of STIs at least.
By Drew’s admittedly low standards, no Chlamydia meant all was well. But from a Locayl’s perspective, Ceres Base was a seething plague pit full of some of the most aggressive bacterial and fungal pathogens in the known galaxy. Drew couldn’t blame him for wrapping up in his own personal clean room.
“It’s an interesting application of stasis technology,” he explained, via the translator he wore clipped tight around his throat like a choker or dog collar. “We were inspired by the safety hazards present in Human-designed jump arrays. Three probes maneuver into position, generate a stasis field between them, and the result is a neat plane that should cut cleanly through basically anything.”
“…So the swarm just dices the rock up into manageable chunks,” Drew surmised. “I like it. I take it you have some improved power technology in there? We couldn’t make a drone that could generate a stable field with enough range and maneuver around and that had a decent battery life and was small enough to fit in the ship.”
“This one, I believe, will satisfy on all four counts. You’ve already seen for yourself that they fit in the ship’s launch tubes…”
Drew nodded. Boop had headed out to trial the new probes a couple of hours earlier, bound for a nice high-value Ruthenium-rich object that had been on the survey chart for years but was much too difficult to relocate to near Ceres and break apart the way they usually handled the smaller stuff.
The telemetry took a couple of minutes to reach Ceres, but that didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that Boop was flying again, and if Ernud walked his talk then Hephaestus was about to own enough Ruthenium to drive the price down from hundreds of dollars per troy ounce to a couple of cents. The Consortium had to be extremely careful about how slowly it released material onto the market in these situations to avoid shocking the global economy.
But as a way of getting investors enthusiastic, bringing in a medium-sized nation’s GDP in an afternoon took a lot of beating. And right now, Hephaestus needed the investors.
“Well, let’s see how it goes…”
They watched, and Ernud talked Drew through each step as Boop nosed up to the asteroid like a dolphin playing alongside an oil tanker. The trio of drones sailed out of her launch tube without incident, and quickly vanished into the distance until they were far too small for the ship’s cameras to pick out. White target reticles indicated their positions as the spread out into an equilateral triangle around the rock and…
It was hard to make out the perfect black of a stasis field against the perfect black of deep space, but the way most of the asteroid seemed to blink out of existence seemed like pretty telling evidence that it was working. The drones fired their thrusters, briefly dazzling the camera as they applied full thrust, and then when the field flickered off, an irregular pie crust of stone was tumbling slowly away from the rest of the object.
The drones slowed, boosted back, took up position, and did it again. And again. In less than five minutes, they’d carved off three thin plates, which Boop reached out and grabbed with her forcefields, then snapped in half like Drew would have broken a cracker before drawing the broken bits into the rock smasher along her belly.
It was a lot neater than mining with nukes. A lot safer, too. No hurtling high-energy debris to survive, dodge or chase, just little biscuits of rock that Boop could snack on at her leisure.
Ernud turned to Drew, and looked smug through his suit’s transparent faceplate. “Sold?” he asked.
“That’s not up to me,” Drew replied. “But strewth, I like ‘em. I like ‘em a lot. I’ll tell Mister Panja he should buy ‘em.”
“Good.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, though, why come to us? We aren’t exactly the biggest mining operation in the sky.”
“You’re the biggest in Sol. Indeed, you’re the only in Sol,” Ernud replied. “And this system is unique for the time being, in being both a species cradle and effectively pristine. Every other cradle system was rapidly developed by Dominion mining interests when the natives invited them in, but Sol of course was quarantined early on. The end result is that you are small now, but likely to grow into one of the largest mining corporations in the galaxy over the coming centuries. We thought that… what’s that term of yours? We thought ‘getting our foot in the door’ was a good idea.”
Drew couldn’t knock that reasoning, really.
“Well then,” he said, as he watched Boop chew up another giant rocky biscuit and draw the resulting gravel into the rock-smashers in her belly to be chewed up and wormhole jumped back to the processing facility on Ceres, “here’s to a prosperous future.”
“For us all,” Ernud agreed.
Date Point: 16y7m2d AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Nofl
“Well, your doctor is absolutely correct, my dear. This is a most unusual case of inflammation. I can fix it of course…”
“…But?” The big explorer tilted his head in a quizzical expression so like what Bozo used to do, Nofl felt a momentary pang of some unidentifiable feeling. He didn’t much like it.
“…Well, the fix isn’t too bad, I’d just need to remove the implants. However, you’ve put this leg through some ridiculous stress, dear. Or at least… I thought you had…”
Julian quirked an eyebrow bemusedly. “Nofl, not too long ago I watched you grow a foot and then attach it to my leg. That sounds pretty traumatic to me!”
“It is! So, long story short, I’m going to need to take a closer look. The scanner just isn’t helping today. Permission to slice apart your leg and rummage around in there, dear?”
Julian gave him a complex look. “You don’t sugar coat it, do you little fella?”
“So…permission granted?”
Julian snort-laughed. “…Fine. Yeah. If I can’t run, I’ll be useless. Let’s fix it before I wimp out.”
Nofl clapped happily and spun through the usual preparatory works, which included a review of all of his voluminous medical notes before the procedure.
Human doctors were remarkably competent, thorough, and highly observant, despite their alarmingly primitive medical technologies. With Julian they never skimped on the bloodworks; he was, after all, an utterly peerless physical specimen and a “normal” civilian to boot, and such things never failed to arouse suspicions among those paying attention. Not once had they ever found anything concerning of course, impressively elevated testosterone and related hormonal signaling aside. Julian had always been open and honest, and that had slowly earned their trust.
But this time…
This time, they found some highly unusual metabolites in his blood. They had no idea what they meant and had flagged them for Nofl’s attention; their working theory was his gut microbiome was acting up and might be the root cause of Julian’s symptomatology.
Nofl took one look at the report and almost choked on his decaffeinated ristretto. The doctors had no idea how right they were. He knew exactly what those bloodworks meant, which left him with a mystery to solve.
Why hadn’t the Directorate been honest with Nofl?
It wasn’t much of a mystery. The Directorate wasn’t honest with anybody, least of all a lowly banner such as him. But surely this wasn’t a thing they’d imagined would remain a secret!
…Was it?
Well. Before Nofl could do anything about it or broach the subject, first he had to confirm his suspicions. Any additional therapy to address Julian’s rather unique condition would need special consideration, depending on what, exactly, had been done. After all, it wasn’t as if his health was in any danger. Rather the extreme opposite, in fact.
Which, in the end, was going to be a Very Big Problem.
The procedure didn’t take long. He opened Julian’s robustly over-muscled calf up to the knee and narrated his work for the big man’s reassurance, swabbed the inflammation sites, and zipped the dense flesh closed again as though it was a Ziploc bag—what a marvelous invention those were! Once done, Nofl wrapped an entirely superfluous dressing around it as a placebo for the patient, sent Julian on his way with a stern admonition to come back the next day for a follow-up, and then buried himself in his lab equipment to confirm his suspicions.
Confirming them didn’t take more than a minute or so.
…Oh dear.
Nofl’s work on Cruezzir had been a conflux of unique serendipity, coupled of course with his own rare genius. He had, through sheer brilliance far in excess of the usual drudgery his caste produced, managed to secure a bottom-level lab assistant role in a xenobiology college operating out of City Three on the planet Perimeter. There, he’d found himself handling, cataloging, isolating, cultivating and generally -inging a steady stream of interesting samples, data, specimens and reports from field xenobiology units.
And, in his spare time, because it wasn’t explicitly forbidden by his role, he’d experiment.
Cruezzir had begun life ignominiously as the gut secretions of a species native to the Celzi homeworld. The critter in question would have been vermin, except the Celzi happened to find them rather tasty and tended to trap them. There was no need to farm the things, just wash them carefully when they inevitably blundered into the traps. It was as though rat was a staple of the human diet.
So. The gut secretions of vermin. Not a promising starting place for a miracle medicine, but Nofl had noted a few unusual things about the creature’s life cycle and found it oddly fascinating. He’d biochemically picked it apart, and then started to, well… tinker.
That had kind of been the trajectory of his career, in fact. Tinkering with the overlooked details in the background, while the more important and pompous higher-banner professors dedicated themselves to whatever it was that had drawn their lofty attention. They’d sneered at him at first when he’d brought the prototype Cruezzir formula to their attention… then grown vaguely interested. Then fascinated. Then rather embarrassed.
Nofl, of course, had been much too carefully diligent about documenting his findings for them to ever steal the credit. The downside to that of course was that the Directorate knew exactly how Cruezzir was produced. It was a hideously complex, multi-stage nanotechnological and biological synthesis that defied any easy streamlining…
But it did have precursors that were potent regenerative medicines in their own right. And Julian, Nofl’s favorite patient, was producing a number of them in spades in that ferocious gut microbiome of his.
Normally, the precursor compounds were generated in such tiny trace amounts and reabsorbed so rapidly that detecting them was effectively impossible, but this time…
Oh dear oh dear.
Nofl sighed, scooted over to his lab’s private wormhole router station, and opened a link to Origin.
…And once again waded into politics far, far above his station.
Date Point: 16y7m1w AV
The Pinkwood Michelin star restaurant, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Doctor Claire Farmer
Hoeff cleaned up good. In fact, he cleaned up so good that he almost managed to look like a Daniel. Almost…but not quite.
For starters, Daniel was a friendly sort of name for a guy. Hoeff…didn’t quite fit the bill. He was much too rough and tumble to ever quite come across as a mild-mannered sort of man. He had an intense look in his eyes and his glance tended to bore right through people, right through to their very cores. A Daniel probably had a nice, clean-cut pile of hair on the top of his head. Hoeff had a military fade so perfectly executed, it looked as if it were actually sharp to the touch.
A regular Daniel had probably played baseball or ran track for his high school. He sounded like a nice civilized boy next door, with a decent scholarship to a good state college and a modest athletic career in his youth. He probably gracefully went to seed sometime in his thirties.
Not Hoeff. He had no time for college and didn’t even bother to apply. He was an intensely physical man, and had played varsity football and rugby and wrestled all the way to four state championships. He then enlisted in the Navy and went straight into the SEALs…at seventeen, having graduated early and taken every AP course he could find time to take. Hoeff was probably a lot smarter than Daniel, too. Nor had that fundamentally kinetic quality of Hoeff’s ever dimmed. Rather than go to seed he’d kept at it with full intensity, so he still looked like a young and lean fighter of a man, and had a bullneck thick enough to shatter a baseball bat against.
No, even at his most well-groomed and in his civilian best, Hoeff was still very much a Hoeff… and Claire wouldn’t trade him for any pencil-necked average-man Daniel out there.
The hungry way he looked at her was all part of the appeal. Claire had always thought she preferred ‘nice’ guys, but the thing was…
…The thing about it, was that the Nice Guys were, well… too nice. They didn’t know how to make her feel desired. Any random Daniel would probably go out of his way to be polite and accommodating, always afraid of her shadow…what kind of fun was that? Her Daniel, her Hoeff, very much gave the impression that he was consciously restraining the urge to throw her up against the wall and take what was rightfully his. Hoeff was a dangerous man, and some part of her thrilled at that like she’d never imagined she’d do. That she interested him.
That he was also unfailingly polite and mild-mannered…well, in public anyway…
The cherry on the top of it all, though, was just how good he cleaned up. He had a stylistic flair too, sporting a deep-black, very well-fitted linen shirt with a mandarin-style collar. He matched it with a nice pair of athletic-cut chinos and shoes so glossy-black, they were practically mirrors.
She was used to seeing him running around in a steamy jungle in skimpy shorts and not much else. Which…hot, to say the very least. But somehow, now that he was properly dressed up…
They met at his apartment, and he welcomed her with a genuine smile. It was definitely a spartan bachelor type of place, but it looked and smelled fastidiously clean. That was certainly not a bad thing, in her book.
Hoeff meanwhile only had eyes for her. “Lookit us, all pretty and stuff!”
She must have cleaned up pretty well too, given how he was eyeing her. “Well, if you’re going to spend some time in civilization…”
He grinned and wrapped his arms around her waist. They were much the same height, but that just made it easy to trade a welcoming smooch and a nicely possessive nuzzle.
“…Nice necklace!”
Claire fingered the intricately chunky tangle of antler and colorful stone beads around her neck. “Thanks! The Singer made it for me.”
“You wouldn’t think they could be so crafty with those shovels they have for hands, huh?”
“Yours aren’t exactly dainty, and you can work some minor miracles with them…” She gave him a filthy grin she’d never known she had in her, then took his hand and led them toward the cab.
“I’ll have you know, it’s taking an immense amount of self-control to be polite just now…”
“M-hmm. I can see the way you’re looking. But I’m hungry and when I left Akyawentuo it was breakfast time. And it took me all morning to get my fingernails clean.”
“Well fuck, let’s go eat, then!”
“Where did you pick?”
“Little place an old friend treated me to last week. Michelin star.”
Claire felt her eyebrows and her jaw do their level best to get away from each other. “…I’ve… never eaten at a Michelin star restaurant before…”
Hoeff grinned. “Kinda fancy, but the food’s… you’ll see. Also, I know you only drink decaf and theirs is so good I couldn’t tell the difference. Think they get it locally, from an ET.”
“High dining? Decaf coffee? Who are you, and what did you do with Hoeff?”
“Naw, it’s me. I’m not all grunt and murder, y’know. Sometimes I like to eat a fancy-ass steak.”
“Riiight! Steak! There you are again!”
They bundled into the cab, and Claire smoothed her dress down under her, feeling a little self-conscious. She was used to hard-wearing waterproof work pants and flannel, attire appropriate for the bottom of a muddy hole in the ground. Not a knee-length black number with a cute wide pleat down the front of the skirt.
Hoeff did the nicest possible thing and leaned his head against her shoulder. “I could honestly just do this all night.”
Claire’s stomach replied for her by growling, and he chuckled along with her own self-effacing laugh.
“…But you couldn’t,” he added.
The restaurant, when they reached it, was fancy, but tastefully so. Rather than intimidating her with glitz and ritz and snootery, it was… tasteful. Crisp white tablecloths, comfortable black leather seats, and a long curved slate wall with water trickling down it behind the bar. It would have looked stark and minimalist, but the lighting was warm and the wood floor was subtly patterned with wavy lines that softened the hard edges.
Still, they were seated immediately at a small table for two, which had their names written on cards on a very large plate. There was a folded cloth napkin, a menu that had no actual choices on it, a goblet of water…
And nothing else. Not silverware, nothing.
“This is something like nouvelle cuisine so they’ll bring out everything as you need it. The big plate in front of you is a charger, they put other plates on it for you. They’re gonna serve us a bunch of small dishes and a hell of a lot of wine. You can ask for more, but don’t. I think there are, uh…seven courses tonight? Plus probably an amuse-bouche.”
“A…what?”
“Fancy french word for basically a clever little snack the chef makes for us right away. They’re never listed on the menu and you don’t always get one—there it is.”
What arrived was an impeccably dressed waiter, bearing two small plates. The treats they bore were tiny, just a single bite-sized dome of goat’s cheese topped with a coin of some kind of red jelly and sprinkled with finely-chopped green stuff that Claire guessed might be chives.
Another waiter followed behind, bearing wine glasses and wine.
“Eat it in one bite.” Hoeff nodded politely at the waiters, then popped it into his mouth. He didn’t chew it, just let it sit there, so Claire did the same.
A few seconds later, as the waiters were taking the tiny plates away, she had to do her best not to splutter and giggle. The amuse-bouche was delicious, she’d never known goat’s cheese could melt on the tongue like that, and the jelly really set it off but…
But her traitorous brain had just supplied her with the mental image of a Ten’Gewek trying to make head or tails of this strange ritual.
She finally succumbed, and rather than chewing it she kind of squished it against her palate with her tongue and swallowed. Honestly, she could have eaten nothing but those the whole night and been happy.
“Can you imagine Yan doing this?” She asked, fighting to keep the giggle out of her voice.
“…That would be a hell of a show. Especially after the fifth glass of wine. Speaking of…drink!”
Claire picked up her glass. “Should we toast, or…?”
Hoeff grinned. “Sure! Lotta things to toast, y’know? Where do we start?”
“Let’s start simple…” Claire leaned forward and offered her glass. “To a good evening.”
“To a good evening,” he agreed, and their glasses met with the kind of lingering chime that only real crystal produced.
It was a good evening. Maybe living in the jungle and eating mostly ration packs and campfire roasted meat had starved Claire’s palate for stimulation, but every course seemed even more delicious than the last. None were large, but all were perfectly formed and she’d never really appreciated what was meant by a wine ‘accompanying’ a course before.
Small though the glasses were, she still got a little buzzed, and couldn’t quite let go of the mental image of her favorite cavemonkeys in this refined environment. “We gotta invite Vemik to this one day. Him and Tilly!”
Hoeff grumbled amusedly under his breath. “Assumin’ they don’t fuck each other right on the table…”
“Language!” She gave him a light slap on the arm. “I mean, you know I don’t mind, but here?”
Hoeff’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, you’ve clearly never rubbed shoulders with high society, if you think they’re anything prim and proper. And remember, the most famous chef in the world is Gordon Fucking Ramsey.”
Claire had to give him that one, and it led to the weirdest toast she’d ever made: to swearing.
Sometime after the dessert and about the best cup of coffee she could remember having, they decided to walk home. Ordinarily, Claire would have worried about walking around an unfamiliar city at night, but…
…But people got out of the way when they noticed Hoeff. A lot of the time, they didn’t even look like they were doing it consciously.
…Damn.
They had earlier conspired to visit the local art museum, but…she was feeling full, and content, and honestly, seeing the way that shirt just clung to her date and enjoying whatever energy it was he radiated that cleared a path for them like that…
…Maybe she was feeling some of that jungle spirit anyway.
“Y’know what?” Claire wrapped her arm under his, and felt up that massive knotted bicep which kept threatening to rip his shirt. “I think the museum can wait for another day.”
Hoeff leaned in and waggled his eyebrows. “Hey. I’m not really an art guy anyway…wanna go back to my apartment an’ do the no pants dance?”
Claire burst out laughing. “Hoeff! I’m going to take that literally!”
“Fine by me! Too bad I ain’t got a pole or anythin’…”
“…Wait, what?”
“You heard me!” The shit-eating grin of his that turned his face from merely kinda-handsome to heartbreaker put in an appearance. “I danced at a strip club when I was young!”
“What? When?!”
“Moonlighting job at my first station! Command never found out, neither!”
“You’re bullshitting me!”
“Naw! You have any idea how much cash you can make doin’ that sorta thing?”
“Hoeff!” Claire felt herself a bit scandalized.
“What?! A buncha horny bachelorettes wanna pay me to wave my big dick around? Why not?!”
“Hoeff!!”
He had her, and they both knew it. “Y’know, I bet you’d like a demonstration, huh?”
Claire didn’t quite know how to react to that, but that only seemed to egg him on.
“Well…okay. I’ll dance ‘fer you. But only if you promise you’re gonna be grabby as fuck.”
…Well.
“I think I can manage that,” Claire said with some bravado.
“Good!” Hoeff scooped her up and charged back to his apartment at a frankly breakneck pace, much to her giggling protests.
He didn’t pause when they arrived, hardly a minute or two later. Without missing a beat, Hoeff took the stairs three at a time, kicked open his front door, pushed her down onto his couch and gave her the most predatory look she’d ever seen.
“Alright.” He kicked off his shoes, stood in front of her, undid his collar, and…oh. Oh. Damn.
Claire found herself nervously unable to speak as he undulated sinuously in front of her, holding her effortlessly pinned to the couch as a captive and entirely willing audience. Suddenly, he grabbed her hand and ran it up and down that rippling teak-hard leg of his. “Now I’m gonna give you a show, Claire, and you’re gonna put those strong archeologist hands of ‘yers to use.”
He did.
And so did she.