From The Hip
Simon would have thought the leering would have stopped by now. It wasn't all leering, exactly, more like non-verbal flirting: eyes that trained on his backside as he walked away, bodies and breath that hung too close over him as they cleared the dinner table, chao xiao about the pretty whiteness of his hands that bore the subtlest suggestion of how they might be put to better use. The unnerving thing wasn't that it came from the men, but that coming from the kind of men who cleaned their teeth with knives, he wasn't sure what it meant. So he took it good-naturedly and tried not to look terrified when he edged away.
Jayne seemed to get the message after not too long, and he stopped making such a point of teasing. It might have been his way of showing shame. Or maybe it was that flirtation from Jayne didn't mean much: he did it with everyone, without prejudice or any apparent goal of conquest. It was, Simon supposed, his way of relating to people-- on the basest physical level, as with everything else. It seemed to be Jayne's strange way of showing that he hoped you liked him, or at least that you weren't making any specific plans to kill him. If so, Jayne had stopped flirting because he was resigned to Simon's anger and distrust. Simon was civil enough that he thought the lewd comments might return, but Jayne seemed permanently cowed.
Mal, though-- Mal confounded Simon with his persistence and with the inscrutability of his purposes. Unlike Jayne, who had smirked with self-satisfaction every time he tossed off a line about Simon's pretty mouth, Mal pretended he wasn't saying a thing out of the ordinary. And it was, as far as Simon could tell, out of the ordinary. He was the only object of those longing stares and double entendres, save for Inara, and what was directed at Inara came with barbs attached, meant to catch in her and sting. But when Mal took aim at Simon, it was with a gentle hand. That bothered Simon all the more, because he couldn't find any better justification for it than genuine affection and genuine desire.
Simon had no reason to react, and for a long time, he didn't. But there was one early morning, halfway through a long journey from one end of nowhere to the other, when Mal's hand brushed Simon's hip lingeringly as they passed in the hallway, and Simon felt the blood rush into his face. "Would you stop that?" he said. "Please?"
Mal gave Simon one of the slow, appraising looks that was exactly the problem. "Am I doing something bothersome that I ain't aware of?"
"Just stop... looking at me like that," Simon said. "Like you're imagining me naked. And the flirting, the touching me and then pretending it's an accident-- I get the message, and I'm not interested, so you should just... stop."
"I didn't mean for you to be interested," Mal said.
"Then what did you mean?" Simon said.
"I meant for you to take a compliment like a normal person," Mal said, his voice rising almost to the point of making a scene.
"Like a normal person?"
"That's-- I said that?" Mal said. He sounded remorseful, but Simon had seen him start a few bar fights. It was the kind of thing Mal said right before he cold-cocked men who held significant weight advantages over him.
"What do you want from me?" Simon said, like he was putting up his fists.
"Now," Mal said, "don't go getting all defensive on me just 'cause you're more skittish about your body than you got any need to be."
"I'm not 'skittish'," Simon said. "I'm private."
"So that's why you take your showers in the middle of the afternoon?" Mal said. "You want privacy?"
"Yes."
"'Cause people might get to thinking you had something to hide," Mal said.
Simon did: he had a thousand things that he filed under "propriety," which was a dingy, crypto-locked corner of his psyche. He'd left it unlocked a lot more often before-- before River, before Serenity, before running. Then, he hadn't had to prove to anyone that he was more refined than they were. "The water pressure's stronger in the afternoon," he said. He took off his sweater and threw it down hard onto the floor.
As he was starting on his belt, Mal said, "That ain't no way to get me to stop admiring you."
"Then what is?" Simon said.
Mal looked him over for a long time. It was like he was storing the image of Simon's body in his memory, so he wouldn't have to stare anymore. Mal turned his eyes away after what could not possibly have been less than five minutes, and he moved as if to walk past Simon. But he stopped, and before Simon could push him away or say something to deter him, they were kissing.
Simon briefly committed himself to resistance, but Mal's lips were firm and undemanding. It was hard to fight someone who was waiting to surrender. And Simon didn't want to stop kissing: it had been a while since he'd been kissed, and there was no telling when he'd be kissed again. Mal's warm breath pressed against Simon's lips. He opened his mouth to Mal's tongue and let himself be kissed.
Mal broke the kiss suddenly and backed away, looking at the floor. "That ain't gonna work neither," he said. He wiped his mouth and straightened his collar. "Put your shirt on," he said. "We got chores."
"But--" Simon said. Mal looked at him sternly, back to being the captain. Simon put himself back together and went to the infirmary.
River was waiting there, sitting on her hands and humming tunelessly. As grateful as Simon was not to have to endure a tantrum, not to have to lift her over his shoulder and carry her from her hiding place while she kicked his ribs and cursed at him, he was perturbed to see her waiting blithely on the examination bed, swinging her feet. It wasn't clear how much she could perceive, but that morning, it was obviously enough that she knew she had something to goad him with. "Time for my medicine," she said.
"Yes," he said. He filled a syringe with the drug cocktail that at least seemed to be calming her down and reducing her psychotic episodes. She didn't resist when he swabbed her arm and injected her.
"You don't fight either," she said, "and look where it gets you."
He spread some liquid bandage over the injection site and pretended not to hear her. She'd be more coherent when the drugs kicked in; without them, she often didn't seem to notice whether she was being responded to or not.
"Don't kiss too much," she said, poking the smooth patch of bandage. "Your lips will rub off on him, and you've hardly got any to begin with."
"I'll keep that in mind," Simon said.
"And don't be a boob again," said River. "I have to hear when you think you're consoling yourself, you think but you're all mixed up in lonely and self-flagellation, beating down and harder and even when your hand's over your mouth I have to hear." She jumped down from the exam bed. "So don't be sa gua like usual."
He blamed her that night when he stood outside Mal's bunk, poised to knock but, well, being a boob. He almost hoped River had a bad night, because if her head was together, he'd be in for it when he came back. It was hard to look at her when he failed like this. She embodied the only brave thing he'd ever done.
He knocked. "It's Simon," he said, as if that mattered.
"It ain't locked," Mal yelled back.
Simon pictured himself dashing back to the safety of his bed, and he didn't like the way he looked in his imagination. He raised the hatch and climbed down. "You kissed me," he said.
Mal was sitting shirtless in a wooden chair, polishing his boot. "Is that so?" he said.
"This morning," Simon said, as if it was Mal's memory that needed a shove.
"I thought you wasn't interested," Mal said, "and reckoned you'd want to leave it at that." He scrutinized his boot like it was of more pressing concern than Simon was. "Are you saying I reckoned wrong?"
"It was a good kiss," Simon said. "Didn't you think it was a good kiss?"
"It don't matter," Mal said.
"Of course it matters," Simon said. "That's what matters. I felt something between us, and it wasn't something I could let go of as easily as you... apparently can."
"I ain't letting go of it 'cause it's easy," Mal said. "I'm letting go of it 'cause I gotta."
"Because I'm a man."
"No, 'cause I got one hell of a mechanic in my engine room, who you might have noticed has taken a shine to you," Mal said. "And I ain't stepping on her toes no matter how good a kiss it was."
"I'm not hers," Simon said. "That's-- I think it's pretty clear to both of us that we're not that compatible."
"Too bad," Mal said. "She's a sweet girl."
"She is that."
Mal put his polished boot on the desk and came up to loom close over Simon, not touching him but breathing warmth onto his neck. The invasion of space had unnerved Simon before, but now it felt like a prelude to the kind of intimacy he hadn't found with Kaylee. "You know if this starts, it ain't gonna end pretty," Mal said. "There's gonna be some hurt feelings even if you and Kaylee got the understanding you say you got."
"But you're willing to risk that."
"I'm willing to risk a hell of a lot for you, it looks like," Mal said. He bowed his head so his lips were a fraction of an inch from Simon's. Simon closed the gap. He felt the same intensity as the last time, the heat in his fingertips and the swell in his groin. He wanted to feel guilty about Kaylee, but he'd done his best with that and not gotten close to a kiss. He'd never felt this sure with her.
"We'll take this slow," Mal said. "Not get ahead of ourselves."
They'd kissed so long and so forcefully that Simon's tongue felt cottony. "I should go," he said. "Check on River." As he climbed out of Mal's bunk, he felt Mal's eyes on him. He wanted them to be Mal's hands and lips, or Mal's cock, which he'd felt rising against his hip as they'd kissed. Mal was right about exercising caution, but Simon's body was begging him to get ahead of himself. He leaned against the cool metal of the bulkhead, tilted his head back, and exhaled slowly. "Biao zi de ma," he said, counting pulse beats and breaths, counting down his erection and his emotions, counting his head back together.
Taking things slow was excruciating. At university and medacad, and as a junior surgeon-in-residence afterward, Simon hadn't had time for anything but disposable affairs. As Mal grew more and more familiar, the situation became less and less so. But in their long evenings of talking and kissing, that dizzy enamored feeling kept renewing itself. Simon was getting attached to that rush of adoration; he doubted it was a healthy way to combat the anchorlessness he'd felt since he'd started searching for River, but it was something to hold him in place.
Mal seemed torn between chivalry and desire. He was uncertain about being with Simon for reasons that Simon couldn't pin down: he'd move in on Simon or say something terribly sweet, then catch himself and retreat. But Simon was afraid of saying the wrong thing and frightening Mal away, so he kept himself patient and agreeable.
He did the same with Kaylee, because he didn't know what else to do. He spent long nights talking with her, while she inched closer and he shifted to avoid her lips. He was afraid to say that nothing would come of all the effort that both of them had exerted. And it meant acknowledging, to an extent that he was far from comfortable with, that he didn't lean toward women at all. So he humored her and his own fear, and he pretended he didn't see the isolation in Mal's eyes when Mal caught him laughing in the engine room.
He wondered how she didn't know about him and Mal. Perhaps she didn't want to see, so she kept herself blind; perhaps she was so sure of her progress with him that she refused to entertain the possibility that she might be losing him.
But she didn't notice that Mal dropped by Simon's bunk or the infirmary more nights than not. Mal pretended not to want anything, but they always wound up shirtless and kissing. He took to bringing back small gifts from planets where Simon had to stay aboard Serenity: food, most of the time, but any food that wasn't microprotein or canned was cause for a small celebration.
Mal came back unusually pleased one night, presenting two packages wrapped in brown paper. Simon tore open the smaller one first; it contained six precious strips of raw bacon. "Don't you take that to the kitchen just yet," Mal said. "Open up the other one."
It was a gun. A semi-automatic handgun, loaded, plus a spare clip.
"Why're you looking at it like that?" Mal said. "That there's a good quality piece. Light, has a nice feel to it. You oughta practice with it when the rest of us are away."
Simon thanked him awkwardly, folded the brown paper around it, and secreted it in the one padlocked box under his bed that River hadn't yet figured out how to break into. "It won't do anyone any good if my sister gets hold of it," he said.
"She'd probably up and chase me with it," Mal said.
"Funnily enough," Simon said, "she's been encouraging me to-- um, with you."
"She been spying?"
"Does she do anything else with her time?" Simon said. "But she knew from the first. Don't ask me how."
"That's why I never took up with crew before," Mal said. "Everybody's watching. It shifts people's loyalties around."
"But you made the exception," Simon said.
"Your loyalties are stronger than that," Mal said. "And there's also the problem of how I can't seem to stop kissing you." That sounded to Simon like an invitation to stick his tongue in Mal's mouth, something he was no longer wary of doing. It seemed strange to him that, for such significant stretches of his life, kissing had not been a daily event. That he had survived without this casual pleasure and assumed he wasn't missing anything that didn't fall under the greater frustration of not having any sex. But these days, when they parted ways, Simon had the memory of intimacy to revisit when he masturbated afterward, and the anticipation of more.
That night was more intense than usual; Mal's hands were busy and forceful under Simon's shirt, and he kept biting at Simon's throat in a way that made Simon's breath shudder. Instinctively, Simon pressed closer against Mal's body, grinding against him. Mal unzipped Simon's pants and put his hand through the gap; fleetingly, Simon thought of resisting him. But the warmth of Mal's hand rubbing through the soft fabric of his shorts was keeping him from thinking of much other than how hard he was, how close, how good.
He came stickily into his shorts, surprised to find himself still standing. He'd been barefoot when Mal had come in, so it was a matter of no great effort to strip from the waist down and wipe himself off. Mal watched him keenly, and Simon made no attempt to dissuade him. Those stares felt like Mal's tongue was all over his body.
"I wasn't planning on that," Mal said.
"You weren't?" Simon said, sliding the door closed, not that it mattered now.
"I thought we were gonna take more time," Mal said. "Not jump into... that stuff."
"What stuff?" Simon said. "Hand jobs?"
"Them, and the category surrounding them," Mal said.
"You should probably go back to your bunk then," Simon said. "And you can-- we can forget this ever happened and go back to whatever stage in the relationship you think we should be at. Hai hao?"
"Hai hao," Mal said, but he didn't move. Instead, he looked at Simon, the same way he always seemed to be doing, except that this time, he seemed to be fighting to keep his eyes fixed on Simon's face and not on his penis. Feeling suddenly silly in nothing but his shirttails, Simon found himself unable to stifle a smile.
"What was you gonna do to me?" Mal said. He sounded both eager and anxious, and in that confluence of emotions, his hesitance began to make sense.
"You've never had a boyfriend before, have you?" Simon said.
"A boyfriend?"
"Well, whatever you want to call it," Simon said. "You've never had an intimate relationship with a man." The polysyllables made it sound even more insulting, and he bit his lip.
"You ain't the first boy I been sweet on," Mal said.
"But this is the first time you've acted on the attraction?"
"They didn't never seem to be interested," Mal said, "and it was always too much trouble anyhow. You gotta understand, it ain't that I--" He cut himself off. "Have you? Had 'boyfriends'?"
"When I was at university. Nothing serious, only-- It was what you did at university. Fooled around, experimented. Woke up on the wrong side of campus in bed with someone whose name you couldn't remember and realized you had an exam in half an hour..."
Mal chuckled. "I wouldn't have figured you for that," he said. "Always assumed you were studious and proper."
"I was a different person back when I thought I owned the 'verse," Simon said.
Mal was silent, like he didn't disagree but wanted no further elaboration. Or like he thought he couldn't hope to understand. "So," he said. "What were you gonna do to me?"
" I don't know."
"Niu shi," Mal said. "You're an experienced man."
"When I said I wasn't interested, it wasn't because I wasn't--" He took a deep breath and started over. "You have a physical advantage over me. And on top of that, you're the captain of this ship, and I'm-- I was worried. That you'd take advantage somehow, that I wouldn't be safe. But you've done everything you could to make sure that wasn't the case, and I shouldn't have doubted you."
"You thought I was gonna hurt you?" Mal said.
"You hit me twice the day we met," Simon said.
"Different circumstances," Mal said. "I wouldn't do the same to someone I--" Mal cut himself off, like he'd caught his voice on something, and his refusal to finish the sentence made Simon all but sure that the last word was "loved."
He kissed Mal's lips softly, partly to show he understood and partly to distract him. Mal's arms were steel ropes of tension, and his muscles only went more rigid as Simon kissed his neck. "All right," Simon said. "Take your clothes off."
"What?"
"It's too hard to examine you with your clothes on," Simon said. "They'll have to go."
Mal disrobed methodically and obediently, never breaking eye contact with Simon. The tension was visible in his jaw and in the tendons of his neck.
"Lie down," Simon said. "Close your eyes."
Mal rolled his eyes and opened his mouth to object, but Simon looked at him unyieldingly, and he obliged. "Now," Simon said, surprised at how well he could maintain his doctor voice, "I'm going to have a look at you and see if we can't figure out what is making you lock yourself up like that."
Mal grinned like he was letting slip that this was what he'd been hoping for all along. He made a nest of his hands behind his head and looked up expectantly at Simon. He was beautiful, laid out like that, and Simon could have gone to work at his cock right then. But he'd committed himself to a full examination.
He started at the crown of Mal's head, kissing his hair and grazing his scalp with gentle fingernails. He kissed Mal's forehead and eyelids, the bridge of his nose, his cheekbones. He tangled his tongue in Mal's mouth for a moment before moving on to his neck, the jut of his Adam's apple and the tendons that were no longer straining. He took a brief detour to suck on Mal's earlobe, which elicited a validating sigh. He lingered at Mal's shoulders, leaving dark marks on the freckled skin, hardening a nipple between his fingers. He was kissing his way down Mal's ribs when Mal groaned, "Ren ci xing de fo zu, Simon, the problem's lower down."
Simon considered diving for Mal's toes, but he feared that might be rewarded with a kick in the face. And, he realized, he was as ready as Mal was. He wanted Mal's cock in his mouth, wanted to know the taste of it, wanted to feel him hard and pleading.
He kept up the game of working methodically, barely touching the tip of Mal's cock with his lips at first and taking in a little more with each pass. It was half a ploy to drive Mal crazy and half a calculated precaution against gagging. Mal swelled in Simon's mouth, straining, jerking his hips too forcefully. Simon held Mal's pelvic bones down and, recalling distant undergraduate lessons, very carefully deep-throated him. Mal made an incoherent noise somewhere between a shout and a growl. Convinced that he wasn't about to choke, Simon realized how good it felt, Mal's hard cock rubbing against his palate, slick across his lips. It was pleasurable for the same reason that kissing was: the warm rush of desire and the sensitivity of tongues. Simon let Mal's cock soften in his mouth after Mal came, hanging on to that intimacy.
Simon climbed on top of Mal, straddling his chest. He caressed Mal's face. Mal's eyes were still closed, and he was smiling, satisfied. Mal raised his head just enough to meet Simon's lips. "That what I taste like?" he said.
"More or less," Simon said.
"I wish I could give you as good as that," Mal said.
"Later," Simon said.
"You sure?" Mal said. "'Cause all you got was half a hand job, and I--"
"It's not a zero-sum game," Simon said, "and I'm so hungry and exhausted right now that no matter what you do to me, I'll mostly be thinking of that quarter-pound of bacon on my dresser."
"You're a gorram tease," Mal said. "I shoulda known."
"I am," Simon said, kissing Mal lightly, "a man who has not eaten anything but textured protein for a week and a half."
Mal pressed his lips into Simon's. "Reckon you're gonna need some help frying that up?"
"I might," Simon said, getting off him to find a clean pair of pants. By the time he'd retrieved a pair, Mal was dressed from the waist down; he'd pulled his suspenders over his bare shoulders. Simon wanted to run his fingers over Mal's chest. He felt his cock begin to stir and reminded himself of how long it had been since he'd eaten anything that had once been a real live animal.
Mal followed Simon into the kitchen. Simon had barely laid a few strips of bacon into a hot pan before they'd gone back to kissing. Mal reached down the back of Simon's pants and kneaded his ass. "Shouldn't we wait, maybe?" Simon said. "Till we're somewhere more--"
"See this?" Mal said, patting the wall. "This is my spaceship, bought and paid for. And that means I can do whatever I want, in whatever room of her I want."
Simon kissed him and kept kissing him as the aroma of frying fat filled the kitchen.
"Ooh, what smells good?" someone said. Simon retreated in panic and wheeled around just in time to hear Kaylee curse and fly out of the kitchen. He called out her name and took off after her. When he'd cornered her in the doorway of the engine room, he opened his mouth like a perfect apology might come out of it.
"So," she said, bracing her arms in the doorframe and blocking him from entering. "How long've you been fucking him?"
Simon could feel himself blushing. "I'm sorry. I meant to tell you, but--"
"But you liked having me follow you around like some tian sha de puppy? You liked watching me make a fool of myself when I didn't have a chance at you? You shoulda told me right off you was sly, saved us both a whole heap of embarrassment."
"I know," he said. "I know now. I honestly thought-- you liked me so much, and--"
"And so you led me on," Kaylee said. "You know, that makes a girl feel real special."
He wanted to let her kick him until she felt clean. He wanted her to be sweet little Kaylee, the way she was with everyone else, not this angry woman who had expectations of him that he could never meet. And although he was failing her partly because he never seemed able to say the right thing to her, he realized that even that was part of the larger problem. As much as he'd enjoyed her company, her laughter and her affection, he'd never wanted to touch her. When he breathed in the scent of Mal's skin, he had to fight to keep himself from getting aroused too fast, but all the time he'd spent holding Kaylee's hand and kissing her cheek, his body hadn't reacted at all.
"If there was going to be a girl," he said, "it would have been you."
"You couldn't have made one rutting exception once you saw where things were headed?" she said.
"I tried. You saw me try."
"But you like cock, and I ain't got one," she said.
"You could put it that way."
"So I s'pose I oughta thank you for the effort and get on with my life," she said.
"That's more than I expect," he said.
"Good," Kaylee said, "'cause no matter what I do, it's gonna be a long time before I ain't mad at you."
"I'm sorry," Simon said again, wishing for better words.
"It don't change nothing," she said.
"I know," he said. "I... know." He wanted to keep apologizing to her until his remorse erased every encouragement he'd ever given her, but there weren't enough apologies in the 'verse for that. And he had a pan full of bacon either congealing or burning, and a lover doing the same. "I'm sorry," he said for the last time, and he went back to the kitchen.
Mal had put the bacon on a plate and washed the pan. He didn't ask any questions. Lukewarm, the meat still tasted like heaven, and Simon ate it more quickly than he'd meant to. When he finished, Mal sucked the grease off of his fingers, then moved in on his lips. Simon had a thousand objections, but Mal seemed intent on erasing them. Mal pushed him back onto the table with a happy recklessness that Simon had only seen him affect in acts of violence. Simon wished that Mal hadn't been so reluctant to give in to that joy, but then, Mal wasn't the only one of them who feared abandon.
Mal was the one who feared it less. Simon had been afraid of getting caught and afraid of hurting Kaylee; both had happened in the worst possible way, and the sky had not fallen. His instinct told him that all he had to hold on to were his inhibitions and his boundaries, but every time he relaxed them, he felt safer. When he wasn't afraid, there was less to be afraid of.
Greenleaf didn't have any real transport docks, and Wash had landed Serenity in a broad meadow a few miles outside of town. Simon had lugged a few empty cargo containers into the open meadow, lined them end to end, and placed a row of tin cans along them. The feds on Greenleaf had better things to do than search for dangerous fugitives like Simon, and the rest of the crew had dispersed-- even River, whom Kaylee had volunteered to take walking through town. Simon had to keep half an eye on Serenity, but a man taking target practice out back was a fair deterrent against most kinds of trouble. Nobody was likely to get close enough to see that he couldn't hit a tin can at twenty feet.
Simon loaded the clip and aimed at the first can, holding his gun steady and centered with both hands, trying to calculate the angle and the recoil. He pressed his finger into the trigger without squeezing it, felt his heart surge with insecurity and panic, squared his shoulders, and aimed again. As he prepared to fire, the mule roared up: Zoe, Wash, Mal, and twenty crates of contraband powdered milk. Simon tried not to let himself get distracted, but Mal came up from behind, admonishing, "No, not like that. You want people to know where you came from?"
"Apparently not," Simon said.
Mal put his hands on Simon's waist and turned him. He adjusted Simon's shoulders and chest, his stomach and his backside. "Loosen up," Mal said, "or the recoil'll take you off your feet." He lifted Simon's left hand from the gun. "Drop your hand to your side," he said.
"I'm supposed to aim one-handed?" Simon said.
"It's harder at first," Mal said, "but it gives you more freedom to move. Two-handed, you gotta plant your feet, you gotta look straight ahead, but from the hip--"
"It becomes part of your hand," Simon said. He remembered his nanosurgery rotation at the medacad, the controls so far away from the patient that it seemed impossible to affect anything, but he'd learned to look at the monitors and feel his own fingertips moving the tissue, severing and repairing.
He lined up his shot as well as he could and commanded himself to stop thinking. The bullet sailed an inch over the top of the can.
"Not bad," Mal said.
"I missed."
"If that can was a man's heart, you woulda hit him in the shoulder, and he woulda gone down," Mal said. "This ain't surgery." He put a hand on Simon's backside to adjust his stance again, but this time, it felt less like a lesson and more like a grope. "Try again," Mal said. "Aim a little below your instinct."
Simon fired. He clipped a corner of the can, and it leapt briefly, landed on its side, and rolled into the grass.
"Two more, and you win a prize," Mal said.
Five shots and two mortally wounded tin cans later, Mal was sucking on Simon's neck. "A hickey is not a prize," Simon said.
"There's a stand of trees yonder," Mal said. "The prize is that way."
"There's also a spaceship behind us. With beds on it."
"Who said it was that kind of prize?" Mal said. But as soon as the woods got thick enough to hide in, Mal pushed Simon against a tree, dropped to his knees, and went for Simon's belt. "I never said it wasn't that kind of prize," he said.
Mal got Simon's pants down around his ankles and started licking Simon's balls in slow circles. "Spaceship," Simon gasped. "Bed." Mal tortured Simon by degrees, running his tongue around the base of Simon's cock and up the underside, making Simon concentrate on not coming yet. Mal teased the tip of Simon's cock, over and under Simon's foreskin, sometimes threatening to take more than an inch of Simon in his mouth but never making good. "Please," Simon said, and Mal put his mouth over Simon's cock but sucked languidly. Simon grabbed Mal by the hair, pulled his head forward, and said, "I want... my prize... now." That was enough to get Mal to go all the way down on him, and Simon came hard in return.
"I didn't know you were so fond of the great outdoors," Mal said, still on his knees.
"Adrenaline," Simon said.
"Shen me?"
"I get off on adrenaline," Simon said. "On being somewhere new, on the fear of getting caught-- you hadn't figured it out?"
"Not so much," Mal said.
"It's why I'm a trauma surgeon, and not-- There's a lot more prestige and a lot more money in neurosurgery or cardiology, but they're not as much fun as pulling a bullet out of somebody. They're like shooting at tin cans. The target's not moving, and after a while it's just procedure."
Mal looked quizzical and deflated. "Is this some kind of way of breaking up with me? Am I boring you?"
"No. No. You're not-- I'm not-- Why would you think that?" Simon said. "I was going to say I thought it was something we had in common, so--"
Quicker than Simon could react, Mal put his arms around Simon's waist and pulled him down sideways into the soft grass. "So," he said.
River was sitting on the catwalk above the cargo bay, knitting. Inara had taught her a few stitches before it occurred to anyone that it might be less than wise to put sharp objects into River's hands. But so far, she'd used the needles only for their intended purpose, and she seemed content, surveying the action below as she added orderly stripes to the endless scarf that she let dangle over the edge of the catwalk. The patterns calmed her, Simon thought.
"Good morning, Madame Defarge," Simon said. "Time for your medicine."
"The guillotine won't find me," she said, letting her body go slack so he couldn't move her. "I'll pose as a commoner and wait out the Revolution."
"I know," he said, dragging her upward by her armpits. She kicked the air and shook her head. He said, "River. Come on. You've been so good all morning, don't--"
"Don't hurt your hands," she said. "All your power's there."
"What am I supposed to use," he said, "if you don't move?"
"They told you and told you it was all in your head," she said. "Pass the exams, repeat and recite, smother it to death with codes. But they put an apron on you and there were edges and conduits and a blade in your hand, and they saw that they should have cut off your thumbs." She reeled in her scarf and clutched the knitting to her chest. "Fingertips are harder to blunt. Precise. You can hone them into weapons and still pretend to listen. By the time the lecture is over, you have talons."
He half-carried her into the infirmary; she squirmed and struggled, but she didn't fight hard enough to free herself. She didn't want her medicine, but she wanted him to listen. "It's why he likes you," she said. "He puts them in his mouth and he feels."
The night before, Mal had raised Simon's hand to his lips and started kissing Simon's fingers. He'd run the tip of his tongue along the cuticles and the ends of his nails, sucked on the knuckles and the webbing between the thumb and forefinger. Then, he'd taken three of Simon's fingers deep into his mouth and sucked rhythmically, caressed the palm side with his tongue, gripped Simon's wrist and dragged them back and forth past his lips. Simon's erection had risen, in sympathy or in envy, and they'd made love spiritedly, with Mal still holding onto Simon's hands. Simon wondered, and didn't wonder, how River knew.
"Sha zi," she said. "You know I'm happy when you're happy." He suspected that she meant this literally, that even when she wasn't consciously eavesdropping, she felt what he felt. And not just him: he doubted that anyone on Serenity had sex alone, even when they were by themselves with a sock and a dirty fantasy. But nobody fought alone, either, or cried, and perhaps that was more of a blessing than an intrusion.
"Not Madame Defarge," she said, seating herself in a corner of the infirmary and resuming her knitting. "Ophelia. My hands are full of rue and love-in-idleness."
"Ophelia didn't knit," Simon said.
"Madame Defarge didn't go mad," River said. She put down her scarf and approached him in measured steps, clutched his wrist and held it up to the blue light. "You can see inside them. Hands of blue fight hands of blue: like destroys like." She kissed his cheek. "You have your Horatio; he'll close your eyes," River said. "They're only blue in certain light."
Simon studied his hands; they looked like skin and nails to him. He was getting calluses on the heels, and the pads of his fingertips were thickening. Too rough to be patrician, now, but too soft for the work he did. He was nothing anymore.
"The Kojimas' Christmas party," she said. "The empty bottle made the matches, but your heart said stop, stop, and the bottle obeyed. Seven minutes in the linen closet with that brown-haired boy. So, you see, it's nothing new. Nothing, nothing..." It turned into a singsong, then a melodic figure: a whole song of nothing. She slumped in his arms as he slid the needle under her skin, and she sang louder and louder until he released her.
"Something now," she said. "Something else you can't bring home. But he'll light you, he'll light you."