Reyes didn't move for a long moment. She stood astride Jay's head, looking down the length of her own body at the face between her boots, and Jay could see her — the regulation skirt hanging open, the red panties dark at the gusset, the seam of her uniform jacket creased where she'd sat through a shift and a half of debriefings and one conversation she hadn't planned to have. Her knees bent, slow. Her weight came down.

The heat hit Jay's mouth before the weight did. Reyes's ass settled over her lips, soft and heavy and hot through the thin cotton, and Jay felt the shape of her — the split of her cheeks, the press of her cunt against Jay's chin, the small damp spot already soaked through the fabric. Reyes's hand found the top of Jay's head and held it flat against the rug.

"Kiss it," Reyes said. Her voice had dropped an octave, the captain's command stripped of its ceremony.

Jay kissed her. Right through the panties — a slow, closed-mouth kiss pressed to the puckered ring of muscle under the cotton, and she felt Reyes's thighs twitch on either side of her ears. She kissed it again. Then she opened her mouth and dragged her tongue up the seam of the panties, from the wet of Reyes's cunt all the way up to the tight little hole she'd been told to kiss, and Reyes made a sound — not a word, just air pulled hard through her nose.

"Again."

Jay licked again. Slower. She pressed her tongue flat and hard against the fabric and felt the muscle under it flutter, and this time Reyes's hips rolled forward without her telling them to, dragging her cunt across Jay's chin, leaving a wet streak that cooled in the recycled air. Jay's hands were still flat on her own thighs. She didn't move them. She'd learned, in a hundred rooms she'd rather not count, that the fastest way to be wanted again was to be exactly where you'd been put.

Reyes reached down and hooked her thumb under the waistband of the panties. She dragged them down her thighs, over her knees, and off one ankle, and they landed on the rug beside Jay's head — red, ruined at the crotch, still warm. Then she settled back down, and this time there was nothing between them.

Skin. Reyes's bare ass came down on Jay's mouth and Jay's whole body lit up the way it always did now, the primer's long fingers running down every nerve she had, but she held still and she kissed the bare hole — soft, reverent, the way you'd kiss something you'd been given instead of something you'd been sold. Reyes's hand tightened in her hair.

"Tongue. Inside."

Jay drove her tongue in. Reyes was tight — tighter than Jay expected for a woman who'd just come out of a week of debriefings and a career of command — and the muscle resisted for half a second before it gave, and then Jay was inside her, tongue buried to the root, breathing through her nose against Reyes's wet pussy. Reyes's whole weight came down. Jay's nose crushed into the wet heat of her cunt, and she couldn't breathe anything but Reyes — salt and musk and the faint chemical tang of ship soap — and she worked her tongue in slow circles, in and out, in and out, and Reyes began to ride her face.

It was deliberate. That was the thing Jay noticed, even with her mouth full and her air cut off: Reyes didn't grind like the men on Jones's ship, didn't rut like the clients on the Vixen. She rode like she did everything — with a rhythm she'd chosen and a rhythm she'd keep. Down, slow, until Jay's tongue was as deep as it would go and her nose was pressed flat to Reyes's clit. Hold. Up, just enough that Jay could drag a breath through her nose and taste the slick of Reyes's cunt on her lips. Down again.

"That's it," Reyes said. Her voice came from somewhere above Jay, low and even, but Jay could hear the effort under it — the way she clipped the ends of her words. "Right there. Don't stop."

Jay didn't stop. She found the rhythm and matched it, tongue fucking up into Reyes's ass every time Reyes came down, licking long and flat across her hole every time she lifted. Her jaw ached. Her neck ached. Wetness ran down her chin and into the collar of the white blouse and she didn't care. The second pulse under her pulse — the one Okafor had told her was hers and not a disease — was beating hard and happy, and Jay let it beat, and she gave Reyes everything she had.

Reyes's breathing changed first. A hitch, then a longer pull, then a rhythm that skipped. Her thighs clamped hard against Jay's ears and her hand fisted in Jay's hair and she stopped lifting, stopped the deliberate up-and-down, and just pressed down — full weight, cunt sealed around Jay’s nose, anus clenched around Jay's tongue — and Jay felt the muscle convulse in three hard pulses and Reyes came with a cry through her teeth, sharp and short, the sound of a woman who'd spent twenty years learning not to be loud and had just broken her own rule.

She held there. Jay held too, tongue still buried, mouth still working, because you didn't stop until you were told, and she was rewarded with one more pulse, one more clench, and then Reyes lifted off her face and Jay pulled in a lungful of cold recycled air and lay there blinking at the ceiling with her mouth open and her face soaked and her whole body humming.

Reyes swung her leg over and lay down on the rug beside her. On her back. Breathing hard. Her skirt was rucked up around her waist and she didn't fix it. One breast exposed from beneath her uniform grey shirt. She stared at the ceiling for a while, and Jay stared at the ceiling too, and the two of them lay there shoulder to shoulder in the captain's quarters with the hum of the Warspite around them like weather.

"Now for the other hole," Reyes said.

Jay turned her head. Reyes was already looking at her — that open look from before, the one Jay had no name for, the one that didn't fit any of the faces people had worn while using her. Reyes reached over and wiped Jay's chin with the flat of her thumb, once, and then she rolled onto her back again and spread her legs, unhurried, and let her knees fall open on the rug.

"You know what I want."

"Yes," Jay said. Her voice came out rough. She hadn't used it in a while.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows and then onto her knees, and she crawled the short distance between them — the rug was thick and warm under her palms, and the deck beyond it was cold, and she stopped at the edge of the rug with her knees on either side of Reyes's thigh. From here she could see all of it. Reyes's cunt, flushed dark and slick, the inner lips swollen and parted, a thin shine of wetness running down to the crease of her ass. Her clit was hard and pushed out of its hood, and it twitched when Jay looked at it. Above it, the neat dark line of hair she kept trimmed, and above that the flat plane of her stomach, and above that the uniform shirt still buttoned to the throat but with three unbuttoned buttons between her breats and pulled to one side exposing Reyes’ left breast - for reasons Jay couldn't have explained — she was glad.

"Go on," Reyes said.

Jay lowered her mouth to Reyes's cunt.

The first lick was long and flat, from the bottom of Reyes's slit all the way up to her clit, and Reyes's hips lifted off the rug an inch and came back down. Jay did it again. Slower. She dragged the flat of her tongue through the wet, tasting her — salt and iron and something underneath that was just Reyes, just the smell that had been in Jay's nose since the first time she'd knelt in this woman's office — and then she closed her lips around Reyes's clit and sucked, gently, and Reyes's hand came down on the back of Jay's head and held her there.

"Fuck," Reyes said. Just that. The captain of the UNSS Warspite, flat on her back on her own rug, saying fuck like it had been dragged out of her.

Jay worked her tongue in circles around the clit, then down, then back up, then flat and fast, and Reyes's breathing went ragged. Jay could feel the pulse in Reyes's cunt against her mouth, could feel the muscle fluttering, could feel the wetness spreading across her own chin and cheeks. She licked down to Reyes's entrance and pushed her tongue inside, and Reyes's thighs closed around her head, hard, and Jay stayed there and fucked her with her tongue in the same slow rhythm Reyes had ridden her face with, and Reyes's hand in her hair went white-knuckled.

"Put your fingers in me," Reyes said.

Jay brought her right hand up. Two fingers, because she'd learned that much — she slid them along Reyes's slit first, wetting them, spreading the slick up over Reyes's clit so her fingers slid easy, and then she pushed both in, slow, all the way to the last knuckle, and Reyes's cunt gripped her like a fist and Reyes made a sound that was half gasp and half groan.

"Deeper."

Jay curled her fingers up — that spot, the one that made Reyes's whole pelvis tilt — and she found it on the second try and Reyes's heels dug into the rug and her back arched off the deck. Jay kept her mouth on Reyes's clit and her fingers working in and out, slow and deep and hard on the curl, and she could feel Reyes's cunt getting wetter around her knuckles, could feel the slick running down her wrist, could feel the muscle starting to flutter in that way that meant soon. With her other hand Jay reached up and layed it directly over Reyes’s vulva and pushed down, forcing the other woman’s pelvis back down to the rug and simultaniously driving her arousal to greater heights.

"Don't stop," Reyes said. "Don't you fucking stop."

Jay didn't stop. She sucked Reyes's clit and curled her fingers and pressed her palm flat against Reyes's mound so the heel of her hand ground into her clit on every stroke, and Reyes's breathing went from ragged to broken, and her thighs shook, and her hand in Jay's hair pulled hard enough to hurt — and Jay liked it, she liked it, the primer sang about it, and she pressed harder and faster and Reyes's whole body went rigid from her heels to her jaw.

"Oh — fuck —"

Reyes came. Jay felt it before she heard it — the cunt clamping down on her fingers in hard, rolling pulses, the clit swelling under her tongue — and then Reyes's hips bucked up off the rug and a hot gush of fluid hit Jay's chin and mouth and cheeks and ran down her neck into the white shirt. Another pulse, another gush, wetter, and Jay kept her mouth where it was and her fingers where they were and worked Reyes through it, tongue gentle now, fingers slow, until Reyes's hips came back down and her hand went slack in Jay's hair.

Jay pulled her fingers out. They came out slick and shining, and she didn't know what to do with them, so she held them up, and Reyes — still breathing hard, still flat on her back, still with her skirt around her waist — looked over at her and laughed. A real laugh. Short and surprised, like it had gotten past her.

"You're a mess," Reyes said.

Jay looked down at herself. Reyes's come was all over her face and neck and the sheer white shirt that now soaked was practically transparent, her bare breasts completely exposed through the fabric. Her own cock was hard and straining against the front of the short tartan skirt — she hadn't touched it, hadn't even thought about touching it, but somewhere in the last few minutes she'd started grinding her hips against the deck without noticing, and there was a wet spot spreading dark through the fabric where the head of her cock had been leaking into it. Her stomach was slick with her own pre-come where the waistband had ridden down. She hadn't come. She was so hard it hurt.

"I didn't —" Jay started.

"I know you didn't." Reyes sat up. She reached over and unbuttoned the top two buttons of her jacket, finally, and pulled it open, and Jay saw the undershirt beneath it was soaked through at the collar and between her breasts. Reyes looked at Jay's lap, at the wet spot, at the hard line of her cock, and then she looked at Jay's face, and something in her expression shifted — softened, maybe, or hardened, Jay couldn't tell which, and she'd been used by enough people to know that not being able to tell was its own kind of answer.

"Take it off," Reyes said, nodding at the skirt.

Jay stood up and got it down her hips and stepped out of it and stood there in the soaking white blouse with her cock standing up out of the untucked hem, and Reyes looked at her for a long moment — the small breasts under the shirt, the soft jaw, the fine new hair that had grown back in after Cassiday's first injection had taken it all away, the horseshoe tattoo Jay couldn't see but knew was there on her left ass cheek, the whole body that wasn't the body she'd walked into a bar with a year ago — and Reyes didn't say anything about any of it.

"Come here," she said.

Jay came. Reyes took her by the wrist and pulled her down onto the rug, and then she rolled Jay onto her back and straddled her thighs, and Jay's cock lay flat against her own stomach, hard and red and leaking, and Reyes looked down at it the way a woman looks at something she's decided to do.

"You didn't come," Reyes said. "On the deck. While you were eating me out. You didn't let yourself."

"No."

"Why not?"

Jay thought about it. The answer was easy and it was ugly and she said it anyway, because she was leaving in the morning and there was no point in lying to this woman. "Because nobody told me to."

Reyes's mouth did something — not quite a smile, not quite a wince. She reached down and wrapped her hand around Jay's cock, and Jay's whole body jerked like she'd been hit with a live wire, and the primer lit up every nerve she had and turned it all to pleasure, and she heard herself make a sound she hadn't meant to make.

"Then I'm telling you to," Reyes said. "Come."

She stroked her. Slow, from root to head, thumb dragging over the slick head on every upstroke. Jay's hips came off the rug and her hands found the deck on either side of her and her heels dug in and she tried to hold it because she'd been told to hold it, once, a long time ago, but Reyes's hand was warm and sure and the order was still ringing in her ears and she'd been waiting for it and she came almost immediately, spilling hot across her own stomach and Reyes's fingers, her whole body folding up off the rug and then falling back down, breath ragged, eyes shut, the second pulse under her pulse hammering hard and satisfied.

When she opened her eyes, Reyes was still straddling her, looking down at the mess on Jay's stomach with an expression Jay couldn't read at all.

"Well," Reyes said. "That's the last time I'll do that."

Jay didn't know what to say to that, so she said nothing. Reyes climbed off her and stood, and Jay lay on the rug with her own come cooling on her stomach, and Reyes walked to a cabinet in the corner and came back with a towel and dropped it on Jay's chest.

"Clean up. Then sit up. I want to talk to you about tomorrow."

Jay wiped herself off. She sat up on the rug with the towel across her lap. Reyes had pulled her skirt back down and buttoned her jacket up and was standing at the viewport with her back to Jay, looking out at the stars — the smeared white lines of the Warspite's cruise, the dark between them, the whole galaxy going by at a speed Jay couldn't feel.

"Starbase 12 is only a few hours away," Reyes said. "You'll be processed out with a civilian discharge. You'll get a transit voucher, a small settlement, and a clean record. Nobody on the base will know what happened to you aboard the pirate ship or the brothel. That's how the Service handles extractions. It's not charity, it's procedure."

"I understand."

"You won't have a berth on a Star Service vessel again. Not because of anything you did — because of what you are now, and the rules about it. Okafor told you that much."

"She did."

"Good." Reyes turned around. Her face was the captain's face again — lined, calm, the face Jay had seen on the bridge and in the debriefing room and across a desk a week ago when he'd asked her about a free-use policy and she'd said no. "So here's what I can do for you, and here's what I can't."

Jay waited.

"I can't get you a berth on a Star Service ship. I can't put you on a crew roster, I can't issue you a uniform, and I can't pretend I didn't do what I just did with you in this room. That last one is for my conscience, not yours." She paused. "But Starbase 12 has a civilian side. Independent haulers, freight lines, mining outfits, salvage crews. They dock there, they hire there, and they don't ask Star Service for references. A woman with your record — clean discharge, no criminal history, a mechanic's certification that's still valid on paper — can walk onto the civilian concourse and find work. If she wants to."

Jay looked down at her hands. The towel was damp under them. She thought about the yard at Starbase 12, the way she'd pictured it on the shuttle out, the way she'd pictured walking up a gangway with a duffel on her shoulder and being told what to do for the rest of her life. She thought about the second pulse under her pulse, and about what Okafor had told her, and about the fact that her body was never going to stop wanting what it wanted.

"I want to," Jay said.

"Then there's one more thing." Reyes walked back across the room and stopped in front of Jay, looking down at her, and Jay knew that stance — had knelt under it, had lain under it, would probably spend the rest of her life recognizing it in her sleep — and Reyes's voice dropped. "The ships that dock at 12 aren't all Star Service. Some of them are registered, some of them aren't. Some of them have crews who'll take a woman aboard and use her, and some of them will tell her that's the berth and mean it. You know the difference now."

"Yes."

"Do you care about the difference?"

Jay sat on the captain's rug with a towel across her lap and her come drying on her stomach and the taste of the captain still in her mouth, and she thought about the question for a long time, long enough that the hum of the ship filled the room and neither of them spoke. And then she answered it.

"No," she said. "I don't."

Reyes looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, the way she nodded at the bridge when a report came in and she'd already decided what to do about it.

"Then get dressed," she said. "And be at the mess at 0600. There's a freighter captain on the base roster I want you to meet before you walk onto the concourse cold." She turned back to the viewport. "Her name is Halvorsen. She runs a mid-range hauler, the Kestrel's Weight. She's short a hand and she doesn't ask questions." A pause. "She also doesn't tolerate crew being used without her say-so. Which is the closest thing to a guarantee I can give you."

Jay stood up. She pulled the skirt back on over the wet spot and tucked the shirt in and looked at the red panties still on the rug by the viewport, and she didn't pick them up, and Reyes didn't ask her to. She walked to the door and stopped with her hand on the frame.

"Captain."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

Reyes didn't turn around. "Don't thank me," she said. "I got what I wanted." A beat. "So did you. That's not gratitude, that's a transaction. If you want to thank me, be on the concourse at 0600 and don't make me look like an idiot for recommending you." Reyes paused for a moment. “One more thing. Once you are out there… take care of yourself Jay, stay safe.”

Jay opened the door. The corridor was empty and cold and the deck plates were hard under her bare feet — she'd left her boots somewhere inside, and she wasn't going back for them — and she stepped out and let the door close behind her and stood there in the hum and the recycled air with the captain's taste still in her mouth and the wet spot on her skirt going cold.

She walked back to her quarters with her chin up. The lights were dimmed for ship's night and the corridors were empty and her bare feet made no sound on the plates. When she got to her cabin she sat down on the edge of the bunk and looked at the wall for a while, and then she lay back and put her hand on her own stomach — flat, over the place where Reyes's come had been — and let herself feel the second pulse beating under her pulse, steady and patient, the way it had been beating since Cassiday's first injection, the way it would keep beating until she died.

She didn't cry. She'd done that already, a week ago, in this same bunk, when she'd touched herself for the first time since the rescue and understood that the wanting was hers. Tonight there was nothing left to understand. Tomorrow she'd meet a freighter captain named Halvorsen and walk onto a civilian concourse with a clean record and a mechanic's certification and a body that wasn't the body she'd started with, and she'd find a berth on a ship, and she'd offer herself to the crew, and one of them would say yes.

That was the plan. It was a good plan. It was the only plan she had.

She rolled onto her side and pulled the blanket up to her chin and closed her eyes, and the last thing she thought before she slept was the captain's voice saying come, and the second pulse under her pulse beat once, hard, in answer.