Careful
He stood in front of the door to her room, arm raised, ears strained to detect any noise from within. The corridor was quiet, the hum of the single fluorescent light filling the void. The night was hot and sultry as always. Maybe he shouldn't have come.
He knocked and heard a muffled sound like a chair scraping over the floor. A few seconds later the door opened.
At first he didn't say anything, momentarily stunned that she was in front of him, fully awake, hair meticulously arranged as usual. When she continued to look at him questioningly his reflexes finally kicked in. "Uh. Hi."
"Hello," she responded pointedly, as if she were the one catching him off guard at this time of night.
Before he could come up with something else to say, she backed away from the door in invitation. He stepped inside, the size of her room a surprise even for someone of her station. Big enough to nearly qualify as a suite. It was hot, though, hotter than the corridor. A small fan sat on a desk futilely venting out stale air.
"Drink?" His eyes found her hand resting on a shelf that contained a row of bottles. He raised his eyebrow at the number of them. "That's quite the stash you have here."
She pulled a bottle down and unscrewed the cap. A mid-shelf whiskey brand: not great, but not terrible either.
"I inherited it from the previous occupant," she replied, pouring two glasses half-full.
"What happened to him?" He wasn't sure why he assumed him. Maybe unconsciously he was trying to ascertain if other men had come to her room late at night, if she had given any of them a drink. It didn't seem likely. But then he was here, wasn't he?
Focused on his musings, he almost missed her look of incredulity in response to his question.
"Oh," he muttered. "Right."
Death stalked all of them these days, just out of sight. The heat of this humid swamp was perhaps a foretaste of hell, as if they were circling the rim of the fiery furnace trying to evade the ever-patient presence by running faster and farther than the day before. He was used to it, he supposed, numb to the uneasiness and uncertainty that accompanied his lifetime of illegal activities. But most of them were young and new to this life of rebellion and war. Except her. He figured that she had some experience with the vagaries of existence even prior to her captivity, some knowledge of the way your life dangled in precarious balance entirely out of your control, vulnerable to the shifting currents of fate.
She handed him a glass, her body a careful distance from his own.
Careful. That wasn't a word he would have used to describe her. She who had flounced around the Death Star like she owned the place. She who had taken his hand and placed it on her breast.
He wouldn't have described himself as careful either. But here he was, taking small sips of his drink, gauging her mood, trying to land on a topic of conversation.
He nodded at the desk. "You working?"
She looked at the datapad and papers strewn on the surface. "A little."
Her motion turned her head into the fan and caused the hairs around her forehead to dance in the breeze. It was a miracle she could get anything done in this heat.
He cleared his throat. "Is your A/C broken? I can fix it. I've fixed ones before. Not here," he added hastily, "but in other places."
She took another sip of her drink. "It works some of the time. I don't always mind the heat. Sometimes I prefer it a little hot."
He must have been distracted by the dew of moisture on her shoulders and chest because her words didn't fully register with him. Later when he replayed the scene in his head he would smack himself for missing such an obvious cue.
Or at least he thought it was a cue. Any other woman, it certainly would have been.
"Did you —." He stopped and started again. "Did you find out what happened with the exchange?"
Her brow furrowed in confusion before she recalled. She had obviously moved on to other priorities. "Yes. Our contact was compromised. As was the original one." She stared into her drink. "The Empire appears to be cracking down on anyone with questionable allegiances."
He nodded. "Hope you didn't get — blamed for it." He didn't mean it harshly. Just remembered what she had said about losing status in the hierarchy.
She looked at him steadily. "I didn't. Not this time."
He took a last long sip from his glass and set it on the shelf next to the bottles. There was nothing doing, apparently. Nothing he could say and nothing she could say. The topic they were circling stayed determinedly out of reach.
She set her empty glass next to his, the rims nearly touching. "Did you get what you came for?"
"What I came for?" He could only stare blankly at her. At her bare arms and shoulders and neck and the perfect features of her face.
"The drink." A smile almost reached the corners of her mouth.
"Uh, yeah." Smooth as always. "I, uh, just wanted to see how you were doing."
The smile hovered on her lips. "So how am I doing?"
Without thinking — which was par for the course this evening — he raised his hand and drifted his fingers across her temple, smoothing behind her ear the stray hairs agitated by the fan. "Your hair," he murmured, and then he did it again, tracing the half-circle to make sure he had caught all of the strands, so that they rested together behind her lobe instead of splaying on her cheek. If you're going to do something, do it right, one of the few lessons from childhood he had retained if not always followed.
His hand curled behind her ear and drifted down her neck, the skin silky and yielding under his knuckles. A current of desire coursed through him as he recalled the heat of her body against his and he nearly buckled at the knees. Inhaling to steady himself, he trailed his hand down the side of her neck and across, navigating over the ribbed fabric of her tank top and stopping to rest on her shoulder, cupping it gently.
He might have imagined a slight shifting of her body, her skin molding itself to his palm, as if exhaling a long-held breath.
Through the fog of his heat-addled brain, he brought his other hand up to her cheek, cradling her jaw. Her lips were barely parted and he couldn't stop staring at them, the lips that had started invading his dreams, doing things that would come rushing back to him during the daytime with a staggering vividness, things that if the higher-ups in this place somehow found out about would surely result in him being asked to leave, to take his dusty ship and his meager credits and his co-pilot with a life debt and find some other doomed effort in which to disappear.
He brushed his thumb over her lips.
Her eyes fluttered shut, longer than a blink, and when they opened they were darker and lacking some of the carefulness of before.
His gaze flitted from her mouth up to her eyes and back down. Slowly, with a slight pressure on her shoulder to draw her to him, he leaned down, her lips parting more now, and —.
A crackle. Originating from somewhere else, surely, not anywhere in this room.
"Princess?" Her comm. On the desk. "Are you there?"
She backed away from him, his hands frozen in mid-air before falling down to his sides, and withdrew her comm from under some papers. "I'm here."
"A situation has arose that requires your involvement. Can you meet us in the briefing room?"
He watched her eyes close, longer than a blink, and then open with a muted weariness. "I'll be right there."
Maybe her star wasn't falling after all. Maybe she had exaggerated when she was venting to him that night. Or maybe her superiors were just pricks who roused her at all times of the night to prove they could. He could certainly relate to that.
He took a step back to give her more space. She was digging around the pile on the desk and then reaching over to the bunk to grab something. A blanket. No, a shirt.
"I'll, uh, let you deal with this." It was a reminder that he was never needed for anything at this time of night, or really at most other times; never needed by anyone these days other than a heat-cranky Wookie and some bored pilots eager to test their sabacc skills against him.
She nodded at him and when she didn't say anything and didn't move either, his heart jumped in his chest. But then he realized that she was waiting for him to leave, that she needed to change her clothes.
He headed for the door, his eyes falling on the shelf of bottles. "If you ever —." He turned around to face her fully. "If you ever get through these, I always have something to drink on the Falcon."
A shadow of a smile. "All right."
An unexpected sense of relief infused him as he walked back to the hangar. When had he ever felt relief instead of annoyance or disappointment when he didn't get what he wanted? And gods, he wanted her. That much was obvious to him. But perhaps that action, the getting of her, would be complicated and his life was complicated enough. Maybe simple was better. He would go to his ship, ignore the hollers for a drink or a smoke or a game if anyone was even still making those demands at this time of night. He would go to his cabin, lay down on his bunk, and take care of himself as he always did.
Better. Uncomplicated. Careful.