A/N: I'd like to extend a genuine thank you to all those who reviewed and critiqued my first chapter. All of your input is wildly invaluable, and I truly appreciate it all. Thanks very much. I tried to appeal to my own love of language with this chapter, but revised it numerous times in an effort to make it more accessible to others, as well. I hope that came across without demeaning the work itself, or all of you.
Disclaimer: I don't intend to generate a profit from the characters or storylines I've used in the following work of fiction. Anything reminiscent of the Star Trek lore or reality is purely coincidental and does not, by any means, belong to me.
Forty-three minutes had elapsed before Uhura hastened over her dorm room's threshold and into the slough of humid air and the muffled sound of an exacerbated showerhead. She glanced about the room, eyes catching on the solitary lamplight left on the nightstand between Gaila's bed and hers. Sighing, the woman dropped her satchel to the floor and lobbed her shoes beneath her mattress as she forayed ever further into the entrails of the largely unlit chamber.
"Damn, Uhura," resounded a coarse and distinctly male voice from the interminable darkness. A shorthanded command later, the lights were activated and revealed a half-nude man strewn casually across the neighboring bed. "I didn't peg you for the kind to skirt curfew."
The cadet seethed through grated teeth, but collapsed unto her bed instead of openly confronting the bronze haired nuisance. "Of course you're here. How'd you get her to take you back this time?"
"Honestly?" He loosed a broken chuckle from the depths of his chest and rolled onto his side to face the woman prone across from him. Uhura furrowed her brows and glared pointedly at the ceiling. "I just showed up."
The infamously ambitious boy was met with aggravated silence. Still, his grin persisted.
"So, where were you?"
The woman's breath hitched quietly in her throat. Her eyes closed and she chased the memories of the commander's lips pursed measuredly against her own, the feverish smolder of his skin and the sensation of his fingers tautening against her back. She threaded the digits on one hand through her dampened curls and imagined how the sensation might have differed, had it been Spock's hand instead.
"Uhura," He roused her from her wistful thoughts.
She smiled despite herself. "I don't really see how that's any of your business, Jim."
He cupped his chin in the callous palm of one hand, arm protracted on a disheveled pillow. His naked chest shuddered in accordance with his own incredulous laughter and bemused creases appeared at the corners of his eyes and mouth. The merriment perished after a few prolonged instants and an errant rove of his eyes over the xenolinguist's physique. The wary glare she belted at him went either unnoticed or ignored. She hadn't expected more.
"Oh, come on. We're friends," he exclaimed. His vertebrae aligned slightly as he relegated his weight unto his hips and pitched forward. "How many sleepovers have we had since you've known me?"
She gave a vitriolic cinch of the flesh about her eyes. "None."
Jim spliced the air with a wayward index finger. "That you know about."
"That's discomforting."
"Well, what's his name?"
The woman held her silence with an imperceptible desperation, although she was tempted to sing Spock's name like a hymn. If only to savor the taste of ownership on her tongue, she wanted to relay to man reclined across from her the truest extent of the emotions she harbored for her commanding officer. She wanted to struggle through her sentences, to rack her vocabulary for the most lurid words she knew – in any dialect – to describe the surface of his inner hand slaking across her skin, the reticent way he'd provoke her kiss. She wanted more than anything, she thought, for her own masterful comprehension of language to fail her in every facet, in only the way Spock could incite. Desperately, she wanted to tell Cadet Kirk just how frightened she was to be incomparably and irretrievably in love.
"Most people can't pronounce it," she told him instead.
Kirk bore his teeth in a boyish leer. "I'll just have to make one up, then."
Uhura indulged an amused smirk and lolled about to face him. "We've had this conversation before."
"And I still don't know your first name," he groused.
She searched his face fleetingly for the answers that could never seem to surface in herself. His flesh was coated in a film of perspiration, the origins of which she had no interest in pursuing, and his cheeks were strained by the looming and consistent presence of a grin. Mirth streaked the skin just beneath his eyes as he watched her in retaliation, and it was almost refreshing how easily she could decipher the emotions contorting his features and stewing in his head. A puckish satisfaction was laying there, not haunted by needless obstruction or control. Jim Kirk was by no means Commander Spock, and for that, she was at once gracious and cruelly disappointed.
"How long have you been together?" she watched him say.
"It'll be a year in September," she expounded quietly, although pride disfigured her voice into another entity entirely.
He expelled a disgruntled breath, though a smile still stained his face. "Wha – a Terran year?"
"I thought that was implied, yeah."
"And you're still not spending the night?" he sputtered, "What, is he a Deltan or something?"
She shook her head, snickering. "No, he hasn't taken a vow of celibacy."
"Does his species reproduce asexually, then? That's the only reason I can think anyone wouldn't wanna –"
"Want to what?" Uhura nearly spat.
The lavatory door slid open, then, with a machinated wheeze. Billows of ashen water vapor spilled into the room and aggravated the already insufferable humidity therein. A green leg forked the dispersing fog and a woman traipsed into the room with unparalleled ease. Clad in a robe, she regarded the woman across the room with a familiar glance though she geared a cautionary frown in Kirk's direction. She fell gracefully to the foot of her bed and buried her fingers in the mess of scarlet tendrils falling triflingly into her face.
"What about asexual reproduction?" she posed affably to a room suddenly devoid of conversation. "Hey, Uhura."
She nodded her salutation. "Kirk was just getting way too involved in my personal life, that's all."
"You're talking about the sex thing?"
"Gaila!"
"What?" she countered, "You've been dating forever. Emotionless android or not, you can't just keep going on this way when you obviously want something more. There's taking things slow, and there's dead on arrival, Nee."
Uhura kneaded her fingers in the quilted mounds of her bedspread and contemplated the small woman with a frown. She couldn't have expected her to understand the complexities of her relationship with the commander. It was an alien perpetuity, having to keep their bond secret. The Orion girl would never concern herself with quiet affection, nor would she ever know the comfort in a clandestine hand finding her own beneath a tabletop. Gaila would never have the privilege of getting close enough to a man to decrypt every diluted gleam that spattered his eyes. She would never lose hours to listless conversation the way she and Spock had, converging on colossal topics and allowing words to die in the starless embers of nothing. Pauses with him had never been anything, if not all the more enthralling.
"Okay, hang on," Kirk said, "Gaila knows who the guy is? Why can't I know who the guy is? And 'Nee'? Who's Nee?"
"Gaila knows who the guy is because she's supposed to be here, unlike some people I know," the Orion rejoined sharply, "And don't worry about Nee, she can handle herself."
The boy's crystalline eyes incinerated as he was shooed from the bed's surface and unto his feet. He gathered his Starfleet issue slacks blindly as he addressed Uhura with a wry smile. "You're Nee? That's your name?"
Uhura shook her head as Kirk baltered from foot to foot, all the while being herded from the room by an increasingly irate Gaila. "No dice, Cadet."
"Get out already!" the petite creature shouted, "I told you you're not allowed to stay here!"
"I'll figure it out, y'know. There's no way I won't."
Jim Kirk disappeared behind the door's chrome veneer, his lips still tailored in that unattainably amicable bow and his eyes still glimmering in all the ways a Vulcan's never could.
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