[Author's note—I rarely do dedications, but this entry is for LASOS for inspiring the first bit, and to the song "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys. Come on, you know it's catchy—I bet you're singing it right now.]

38.20.4315

Why doesn't this surprise me? Remember that little boy from school I keep mentioning? (His name was Roddrik, and…well, that's all by the by now.)

Anyway, Han has started writing now, too. Goddess only knows what he's writing about, but he's sitting across from me at the holochess table right now, half the time with his head buried in what appears to be a much more modern datapad (no doubt with a thumb scan!) and the rest of the time staring off into space or at me.

If he's doing this just to drive me crazy, I won't give him the satisfaction. I was a member of the Imperial Senate — there is NOTHING more insanity-inducing than that. If he's doing this to escalate matters, he's picked the wrong woman because I can escalate the HELL out of things! I'm just saying…

Besides, I'm sure he's just writing a detailed step-by-step technical manual on how to swap out power cells without…

He just asked me how to spell "succulent."

I'm going for a walk.

…

Chewie is cooking something that smells divine. I don't know what it is, but it's permeated the entire ship. Han and I just spent the last few hours remounting — ugh, let me rephrase that! —SECURING the cooling fluid conduits that broke loose during all that rough flying a few days ago.

I don't know how he does it! Maybe it's through some subconscious body language he has, but Han has this ability to make innocent things around the ship sound suggestive: Remounting? Flux coupling? Tongue-in-groove joining? Male and female jacks? (Well, okay, that one's no challenge.) Cockpit. Joystick. Grease nipple. Petcock.

All right, so maybe there ARE a lot of words that sound that way already without his help. My point is, how, in all the hells of Kessel, does he manage to make "rack and pinion" sound sexy?

It's no wonder I'm finding it harder to work with him now. While I'm struggling to concentrate because he's standing so close, he's purposefully distracting me with that sort of nonsense. Not only does he take advantage of the situation to touch me whenever he can, even if it's just my hand when we swap tools, but he's constantly talking about this or that and sometimes I start zoning out because it's usually about his ship and I'm watching his lips move or maybe I'm just watching his hands and thinking about how they felt on me or I'm daydreaming about a day when this war is over and the next thing I know I've agreed to something he's said and he's laughing or giving me The Look and I don't know whether to run and hide again or just give up and burst into flames.

I'm rambling again. See what I mean? I don't know where my discipline has gone, but it's probably a good thing there's nobody else around to witness my complete breakdown. I should have plenty of time to get things back in order before we arrive on Bespin. Frankly, I HAVE to, because this won't do. I can't BE this…this stereotype of a love-smitten space-case who forgets everything she was before some man came along. There's just too much at stake, too much history. I can be a lot of things — I'm WILLING to be a lot of things — but it still has to meet my terms. Does that make sense? I don't know. I hope it does.

Anyway, the odor of dinner was the final blow and we gave up working for the day. Now I'm sitting at the holochess table again and Han's fiddling around on the ship's computer over at the engineering station, trying to find some music to go with the upcoming meal. So far it's been hit or miss, but at least he's asking my opinion. He'll start a selection, twist around in the chair to look at me, and I'll give him a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on each one. Efficient and democratic, it's everything the universe should be.

Some of the songs are making me laugh and he's doing that on purpose, but some of them seem to come complete with built-in memories for me and they catch me off guard.

For example, he just played one song that was a big sensation right around the time I started at the university. You could hear it at every party or while walking around campus. It was such a catchy tune, teasing your senses with exotic and romantic destinations that we'd all heard about but never visited yet, and you couldn't help but get drawn into it. I was in the middle of writing this entry and didn't even realize I was singing along until something in the song made me look up and over at him, and I caught him giving me The Look again.

Maybe it's because he's never heard me sing before? He should count himself lucky.

I'd better stop now and go help Chewie serve dinner.

…

I can't believe I wrote the word "cock" twice in this journal (now officially three times!). Let's hope this never becomes part of my memoirs or I may cause a few gasps of shocked outrage amongst the upper sets… Then again, that may be worth keeping it in.

The food was as good as it smelled, the music lifted the mood a bit, and the conversation ranged all over the place. Actually, it was probably the music itself that brought up one topic that I was surprised to learn we had in common.

I don't know what made me bring it up, but I mentioned that I'd met the members of this one particular band that had been quite popular back in the day. There were certain benefits to being a princess, after all, and that included being able to indulge a whim on occasion. I didn't do it often, so Bail was a little more inclined to agree when I did ask.

I'm not going to name names here (I'll protect the not-so-innocent), but this band's lead singer was rather scruffy-looking, if you get my meaning. For a less-than-charitable reason, I suggested to Father that he add them to the line-up at a charity event that he was hosting. He agreed since they could draw in both a great deal of credits and appeal to the younger citizens. Naturally this would mean several conferences with the lead singer while we worked out the details.

Long story short, the concert was a great success. But nothing else happened and he wasn't quite what I'd expected. I'll admit now that I don't know what I WAS expecting to have happen — I wasn't exactly the type of fan he was used to dealing with, and I wasn't even considered of legal age yet in half the Core systems. Mostly he just dismissed me as a little girl. Still, I guess you could call it one of my first big crushes, and I was left a bit extra-crushed after that incident.

I still wonder if Bail ever suspected my ulterior motives…

Anyway, as Han was listening to my entire drama unfold, he began to wear this big grin on his face, looking like a gundark eating stinging creepers. He waited until the end, and then he said that he'd met the band once, too, but under entirely different circumstances, of course. Evidently, he was in some lower-level nightclub on Coruscant in-between commissions when in walked the lead singer and a few others, all of them already three-engines at full throttle on jet juice, and it wasn't long before they started picking fights with the other patrons. (Let me insert here that Han has never been afraid to start something that his friend Chewie can't finish.) Suffice it to say, their encounter that night explains why that lead singer now has a noticeable notch missing from his right ear, and had to wear a bacta-cast for a week.

Funny how the universe works sometimes, isn't it?

Oh, and Han walked me back to my cabin door tonight and gave me a goodnight kiss. He said it was a thank-you for helping out today. While I would not qualify that kiss as innocent, it could have been a lot hotter.

No, really. It could have been. A lot.

Yes, yes, I know, I know. I clearly have a type.