The Signal

Isla Park had been talking to Declan Marsh for fourteen months before she met him.

She hadn’t chosen it. The supply run to Meridian Station covered 340 million kilometres and a three-second transmission delay, and the lag made it the kind of conversation you had to think about. Most pilots used the automated dock protocols and checked in with Operations once per rotation. Declan Marsh had started calling on the long approach.

It had been practical at first. She was the station’s senior communications officer; he was inbound with Class 3 biological samples that required controlled atmospheric transfer. She had walked him through the dock sequence and he had asked about the tertiary pressure rings, and she had explained, and then he had asked about something else, and then they had been talking for two hours with the light-lag building a rhythm into it—question, pause, answer, pause, follow-up—that was its own kind of conversation, distinct from anything else.

Fourteen months. Forty-seven supply runs. Two hundred and something hours of transmission.

She knew his voice the way she knew the station’s rhythms: the pace of it, the way he went quiet before he said something he had actually thought about, the laugh that was different from his ordinary laugh when something genuinely surprised him. She knew he had been on supply routes for six years after a decade in the planetary survey corps. She knew he read badly-translated detective novels from the previous century to pass the transit time. She knew his preferred approach vector and his coffee order and the fact that he was better at goodbyes than hellos.

She had not let herself think about the rest of it.

“Meridian Station, this is Vantage, beginning final approach. Forty minutes to dock.”

She put on her headset. “Vantage, this is Meridian. Dock seven is clear. Welcome back.”

“Thank you, Meridian.” A pause—the transmission lag and then something else. “I’m going to be on station for seventy-two hours this transit.”

She had known this. She’d approved the layover request three weeks ago. “Noted. Anything you need from Operations?”

“Just one thing.” Another pause, longer than light-lag explained. “Can you meet me at dock seven?”

She was there when the lock cycled.

He was taller than she had imagined from his voice—she had made a picture of him over fourteen months, had revised it, and still had not gotten it right. Dark-haired, thirty-four, with the particular posture of someone who had spent years in small spacecraft and carried that awareness in his body. He was holding his kit bag over one shoulder and looking at her with an expression she recognised: the one she heard when he was deciding whether to say the thing he had actually meant.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said. “You’re different from—” He stopped.

“From what?”

“I hadn’t made a picture,” he said, which she understood meant he had.

The station corridor was empty at this hour—just the low hum of the environmental systems and the yellow dock lighting. She had approximately seventy-two hours and had been thinking about this moment for longer than she intended to admit.

“We should get you to quarters,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Or.”

“Or?”

He looked at her for a moment with the same pause he used when he had decided what he actually wanted to say. “I’ve been talking to you for fourteen months,” he said. “I’d like to stop talking for a while.”

Her quarters were deck seven, two minutes from the dock.

He kissed her in the corridor before they reached it. She kissed back immediately—it was the conversation they had been having on a different frequency the whole time, and it was nothing like what she had been rigorously refusing to imagine and also exactly like it. She pulled him through her door and it sealed behind them, and she dropped her communicator on the desk and turned, and they looked at each other in the way that happens when something that has been building for a very long time finally stops building.

He undressed her with unhurried attention—the same quality she heard in his transmissions, the kind of patience that was not passive. He stripped her uniform jacket and pressed his mouth to her throat, her collarbone, the place at the curve of her shoulder that she hadn’t known was significant until his mouth found it and made it so. She pulled him in and kissed him again, and then pulled his shirt away, and the warm weight of him was real in a way that was different from everything she had imagined: more specific, more present, more entirely there.

He walked her to the bunk and laid her down and worked his way down her body with his mouth—slow and methodical, every place he stopped staying long enough to matter. She lay back and let herself feel it, all of it, without managing the response or keeping it in any kind of containment. She was a senior officer on Meridian Station, thirty-one years old and fully responsible for her own decisions, and she was alone with him and there was nothing to manage.

When he settled between her legs and put his mouth on her, she was already wound so tightly from fourteen months of careful distance that she came quickly—faster than she’d intended, her hands gripping the bunk rails, his name said clearly and then said again, her whole body pulling taut and releasing in a long wave she felt from her spine to her fingertips. He worked her through it without slowing, his tongue moving in slow focused strokes through the full length of it, and then brought two fingers inside her and kept his mouth moving and worked them together until she came a second time, longer and harder, his name and several other things said into the recycled station air without any management or restraint at all.

He eased her down and came up her body, and she reached for him. She found him hard and entirely there, and the sound he made at her hands on him was nothing like his transmission voice—it was closer and rawer and she wanted more of it. She pulled him to her, and he pressed into her slowly, watching her face as he did—entirely open, none of the careful consideration she heard in his transmissions—and the depth and fullness of it was as overwhelming as she had stopped letting herself imagine, and she said so, quietly, precisely, because she had always been good with words.

He moved, and she moved with him, finding the rhythm in the first several strokes. His breath was rough at her ear. She wrapped her legs around him and changed the angle, and he made the raw sound again, and he kept that angle and moved into her at that depth—steady, purposeful, unhurried—until she was gripping his back and saying his name again in a register that had never been part of any transmission, urgent and unmanaged and entirely present.

She came hard, the orgasm moving through her in a long rolling wave, and felt his rhythm fail and break—her name said twice, urgently, and then differently—and then the weight of him settling against her, and she held him through it with both arms and felt the full solid reality of him: finally docked, finally here, finally not a voice across a frequency.

Afterward, the station’s environmental hum was the same as always.

She lay with her cheek against his chest. “Seventy-two hours,” she said.

“I put in for an extended layover,” he said. “One hundred and forty-four, if Operations approves it.”

She was Operations. “Operations approves it,” she said.

She heard the laugh that was different from his ordinary laugh. Outside, Meridian Station held its position in the dark between planets, and the supply manifest was fully logged, and the communications console was unmanned for the first time in fourteen months, and the frequency it usually held was very, very quiet.