The turn of her heel, the nape of her neck.
Written as a part of my belated birthday gift to Mia, and to the tune of the prompt "morning alarm". The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for August 24, 2008.
Sometimes, when the pressure of being captain to a ship full of strange and often contradictory personalities or when the realization that he's in a tin can full of beleaguered, sometimes stinking mercenaries hits him full in the gut, Mal finds himself looking forward to the rare times that Inara steps out of her pod, to stretch her legs and check up on how everyone was doing. He doesn't really know why it matters to him (or maybe he does and he's in vehement denial of it): it might be the sight of her face (always clean and fine, a jarring difference from Kaley's dirty cheeks or River's blank stare), or the fact that in every shift of her limbs there are a hundred tiny little movements that he cannot hope to track but finds himself trying to anyway, because it fascinates him. She favors light, subtle fragrances; he catches a whiff every time she passes close enough, and even though his sense of smell has been beaten black and blue by a life of sensory overloading, he never fails to recognize it as a new scent, her scent.
They don't really talk when she's out on one of these walks. He's promised himself that he's never going to take a step in her direction, even if it turns out that that happens to be exactly what she wants. He is, at least for the moment, content with their unique sense of awkward, and the unexpected pleasure of having beauty on his ship.