As the night wore on, Simon crept to Inara's shuttle.
She let him in without speaking, already slow with smoke. Simon saw a shisha pipe burning on her tea table.
"Can you speak?" he said.
She shivered; his voice was velvet and gentle, almost tactile, frayed a bit around the edges with age and pain. Still, it was what she remembered; it was what she had craved, all day long.
"I can," she said, "if you want me to."
He smiled. It was like daylight, after ages of sunless space. She held his face in her hands for a long moment, then drew him down to her mouth.
"Does he know yet?" said Simon, as he pulled away. "Have you told him?"
Inara shook her head. Her dark eyes filled with regret. The captain was a fragile man; his bravado and swagger concealed a hurt vast and deep as the sea. After all he had lost, and all he had suffered, she could not bring herself to deliver one last blow: to tell him that, if she stayed on his ship, it would not be for him, but for a crewman that he tolerated with only half his heart.
"We're going to hurt them," Inara said.
"Yes," Simon whispered.
Simon drew her close and held her, surprised, as always, that such a lush, strong woman should be so very small in his arms. Her head nestled under his chin; he felt her lips at the hollow of his throat, pressing against his pulse. Her hair under his mouth was black and wild as smoke.
For the next half hour, as the ship turned toward dawn, they sipped tobacco from the hookah. The smoke was dark and vicious, flavored with syrup that tasted of apples. As they smoked, they drank black tea, heavy with sugar and mint, in enameled glass cups with copper handles. They had done this every night for a month, without fail or change. Although he had always deplored this particular vice, Simon had come to rely on it, to think of it during the day, in the moments that wore at the raw edges of his nerves. The sugar and smoke seeped into his blood, and numbed him from the inside out. The air of the shuttle was fragrant with vanilla and ash.
When the smoke was spent, he reclined back onto the couch. Inara studied his flawless profile, and the long, clean line of his throat. He had aged well, she thought, since the summer on Ariel – was it four years ago? was it five? – when they had first made love. She had given him a single night, free, honest, and lovely, and then she had gone back to her own life. Any longer or more serious liaison would have damaged her position in society. Nevertheless, Simon had wanted more. Inara knew that, and she also knew that her refusal had broken him, had given him his first taste of grief. Since that time he had sorrowed and scarred, but the wounds had given him a kind of nobility. He was no longer simply a beautiful boy, no longer a Renaissance marble piece, a perfect surface made to be caressed by gaze; he was a man of flesh and blood, flawed and needing. It seemed strange, that they should meet again in the wilderness; it seemed also fated. She had nothing left to lose by loving him, and she had nothing left to give him but the truth.
His collar was unbuttoned; his hair was disheveled, falling over his eyes. He looked bruised, exhausted. Inara could see the edge of a scar at his collar. She wanted him, wanted him more than ever now that he had learned to stand on his own; the thoughtless grace of his gestures, the innocence and honesty that shimmered in his pure grey eyes. She wanted to say this, but the words caught inside of her, mute and inadequate. And, so, she spoke to him in the poetry of flesh, which had become her only true language. She leaned over him and licked the dark, violet line of the scar; she let her tongue trace his throat until she found his mouth; she swallowed his moan.
"That's it," she whispered, her voice trembling, "that's what I like to hear."
She swung her leg over his hip, straddling him. The shimmering, rose-colored train of her gown settled over them, sighing as it fluttered to the ground like a wounded dove. Simon pulled away, slightly, to look at her; in his face, incredulity mingled with lust.
"W-what?" he said. "What did I do?"
"Your voice," Inara said. "The way you moan. You have a lovely voice. Especially when you lose control of it. I like to know that I can make you lose control."
Inara let her hand trail down his chest, savoring his taut, muscular body, and the way he squirmed, slightly, under her palm. She took his lip between her teeth, and bit it: gently at first, and then harder, bringing him to the raw edge of pain. He arched his back; she could feel his cock against her thigh, long, hard, and eloquent. They had come close, many times, over the past month; still, he had always refused her at the last minute. He wanted to be honorable; he wanted love to be formal and clean. But it never was. You're not getting away this time, Dr. Tam, she thought, as her fingers slid over the waistband of his trousers. You're mine.