"What happens next?" Inara said. Her voice had been a harsh, breathless whisper; through the comm, it had been almost unrecognizable.
"I'm not sure," he said, fighting to keep his own voice level. "But I felt that you ought to be informed."
"Come to me," Inara said. The words were hot with promise and regret – red and gold and dusk-colored, like an autumn leaf falling to the pale stones of a courtyard. "Whatever happens, Simon, I want us to be together."
He sat at her feet with his head in her lap, letting her stroke his hair. Music poured through the shuttle, describing arabesques of dread and longing. A woman's voice, silver and glittering, curved up to an unimaginable bliss and fell away from it gently, as if she were afraid to touch what she wanted most. Simon closed his eyes and let the music carry him, its swells and hollows rocking him gently away from the present and into the past.
He remembered meeting her on Serenity - the single moment of charged contact between their eyes, as she came, regal and gleaming, into the rusty expanse of the cargo bay. She had assumed an air of nonchalance and chill, with all the skill of a trained actress - for she was an actress, if she was anything - and had moved forward onto the catwalk, greeting Kaylee, greeting Mal. She did not even betray the fact that she had seen him. It was for all the world as if she had not brought him to Serenity, had not given him the signs to know her by.
She had promised him, before he came to her, that her ship would be safe. It was not. He had learned that quickly. Mal had tried to throw him off the boat on his first day. Inara had kept him there by promising to leave with him, tying him to Serenity with a threat. He wondered, now, if that slim tether would hold. It was unlikely that the captain would want either one of them, when he found out their affair. You'll ruin her, Mal had shouted, and Simon had stiffened, feeling the words hit home. Now, after a year of glances and swallowed lust, it seemed that the Captain's threat was finally coming true.
"I don't want to ruin you," he said, looking up at her, his mouth thinned with pain. "But I don't want to give you up, either."
"You won't," said Inara, firmly. "I won't let you do either one."
Simon rose from the floor to kiss her - chastely, at first, and then hot and fierce, his tongue flickering over her own in a way that made her gasp. She would not give him up; she refused even the thought. Their contract had been forged in blood and bone.
I gave the boy a free thrust, she had said, letting the truth pass, disguised as a lie. I will not be servicing you or any of your crew, she had said, and she had intended the words to be true. She had gone months without touching him, had spent nights crushing out the memory of his fine hands feathering over her breasts, his lips on her lips, the sleek lines of him, his gentle moans. But she had kissed him on the cheek, once, in a moment of weakness; when the life support had given out, and she had been sure of dying, she had taken his hand.
"How did we get here?" Simon wondered aloud, as he led her, gentle and eager, to the scarlet nest of her bed.
"I don't know," Inara said. "But I think we were always coming to this, whether we knew it or not."
He laid her on the copper satin coverlet, letting his hand pass over her lush, half-open lips. She kissed the tip of his forefinger, then drew it into her mouth, biting it gently. He shivered, and pressed his hips into her open thighs.
"This is right, Simon," said Inara. "No matter what happens, we are doing what we're meant to do. We fit; we interlock, lives and minds and bodies. No-one can take that from us."
"Are you sure of that?" Simon said.
"I am. Let me prove it," she said, drawing him down.