ugly bag of mostly voyager

3. Kashyk

Hungry as an archway through which the troops have passed, I stand in ruins behind you

The water pummels her bowed head, and Kathryn closes her eyes and tips forward until her forehead presses into cool, smooth tile.

He’s gone: sleek leather gloves, supercilious smile and all. His ship slid away, dark and powerful and dangerous just as he was, and she breathed a sigh of relief – she did – but she doesn’t feel relieved.

She’s pent up and agitated and burning with need, and this is the only way she will allow herself to quench it.

Kathryn braces one hand on the shower wall and pushes the other between her thighs, biting down on her lip as she rubs at her own flesh.

And she remembers.

Captain Janeway. Report to your ready room …

… Each time the call comes, she fights to tame the leap of her heart and the clenching of her belly. She can’t bear to look any of her bridge crew in the eyes lest they read the churning anticipation in hers. Especially Chakotay, who shifts in his chair, brooding and dark and wearing a scowl that he passes off as concern, but that she knows means something far more complicated.

Tell me, are all of your inspections this personal?

Oh, but how she courts his inspection. She tells Chakotay, tells Tuvok – even tells herself – that she’s simply drawing Kashyk’s attention, flirting to misdirect. A masterful deceit; a sleight of hand.

There’s no rule that stipulates she can’t enjoy it.

Perhaps she enjoys it a little too much.

Chakotay certainly believes so. The night Kashyk defects, after she’s ensconced him in guest quarters with a locked-down replicator and sentries posted outside, Chakotay appears, scowling, at her door.

“You know you can’t trust him,” he says, belligerent, as if he has that right.

She cocks a hip, watching with amusement as Chakotay’s gaze trails heat along the shadowed curve of her body. Her soft chuckle brings his spine snapping straight and his eyes back to hers.

“He’s using you.”

“Maybe I’m using him, too,” she parries.

“You’re playing with fire, Kathryn,” Chakotay says. “Don’t be a fool.”

And she leans in close, smiling at him without warmth, and replies with resonant clarity, “Fuck you.”

His recoil is as exquisitely painful as a slap in the face. She turns to the darkness of her quarters so as not to give herself away.

“Dismissed, Commander.”

“I’ll be on the bridge,” he says, lava bubbling beneath ice, “Captain.”

You know the way to my ready room …

… She widens her stance, curls her fingers into a well of slickness and shame. Her breath is gusting faster now, the beat of blood in her ears almost drowning out the drubbing of water over her head and shoulders.

She pictures him, lounging in her chair behind her desk in her ready room, his long lithe body encased in black leather, like a snake’s skin. The way his dark eyes follow her as she moves toward him, and the way she puts a little extra curve in her walk, a little tilt in her hips, as she lets her gaze drift down to his lips.

She recalls removing her jacket in the mess hall, draping herself almost across his body. He looks different in civilian clothes, touchable; his hair ruffled as though she’s been running her fingers through it. She remembers turning her face, so close to his, reading the spark of heat in his eyes … and now her fingers are quickening, an ache gathering low in her belly …

… I suppose you liked me better in uniform.

I haven’t decided whether I like you at all …

… Oh, but she hates him and everything he stands for, and her hatred means nothing to her in this moment. All she wants is to peel him out of his clothes, press her skin to his, feel the imprint of his hands on her, around her, inside her. She wants to push his face between her legs and let him eat her like a succulent fruit. She wants him to bite her and score her skin and tear her apart. She wants him to swallow her whole.

And the way he looks at her … for so long, she’s been wilfully blind to the same look in another man’s hot dark eyes, and it thrills her to see it in Kashyk’s. Unveiled and unashamed, hiding nothing. Telling her clearly, without words, that he intends her to be his.

She brings her other hand to her breast, pinching and tweaking her nipple, the pleasure-pain rippling through her like needles, like shards of glass …

I was planning on asking you to stay with us once we got through the wormhole …

… When she kisses him in the shuttle bay, it’s the closest she comes to forgetting that she’s playing a role. She’s swollen with need, almost bursting, barely stitched into her own skin; and when his lips sear the inside of her wrist she gasps and trembles like a maiden.

She could throw herself into his shuttle and run away with him.

The idea is more tempting than it has a right to be.

What if she did? What would it be like to be his lover, kept naked on silk sheets, accessible whenever the whim took him? Would he live up to the promise his eyes make when he looks at her?

Would it be worth it?

Her fingers slide and rub. She presses her face to the cool tiled wall, mouth open and panting, her pulse thundering.

She pictures his hands, leather-gloved and clever and shaping the pale contours of her skin, bruising, electrifying. She imagines his mouth closing around her nipple, the hot pull and suction, the rasp of his tongue. She imagines his cock driving inside her. Filling her. Owning her.

And the swelling ache bursts, a moan dragging its way from deep in her core as she slumps against the shower wall, shaking, sated, sickened.

The water runs cold.

… You created false readings.

That is the theme for this evening, isn’t it?

Kathryn curls up in the corner of her couch. She is swathed in her most shapeless clothing, wet hair wrapped tightly in a towel. Her face is scrubbed clean.

She wishes her soul could be, too.