Unguarded
Summary: Seven years in exile creates some strange bedfellows.
Characters: Ayala, Janeway
Codes: Janeway/Ayala
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Paramount. Imagination belongs to me.
Notes: This was a "guess who?" story inspired by the VAMB "Guess the Pairing" challenges. but I've now listed the pairing.
Rated M
She assigns me to her away mission, and everything changes.
I am by nature not a talkative man, but alone in that shuttle - as she monitors sensors and updates her reports - my silence feels unnatural. Yet she is the one who breaks it.
“I understand you received a letter in this month’s datastream,” she says. “Good news, I hope?”
It wasn’t, but it also wasn’t unexpected, I explain. She lays her hand on my arm; a familiar gesture, signifying comfort, camaraderie, support.
I look at her hand and then into her eyes, and what they offer is not simple comfort.
My hand is steady as I trace the line of her jaw. She leans into my touch, her eyes closing. For a moment we’re still, the air between us redolent with promise.
Then she says, “Computer, engage autopilot,” and in the breath of a moment she’s straddling me. Her skin is smooth as butter and she kisses me as though she wants nothing more than to forget.
“He can never know,” she tells me, as her fingers work the jacket from my shoulders. “Nobody can know. Promise me.”
I promise.
Her hair is soft and smells like vanilla. Her lips taste of copper and desire. I curl my tongue around the shell of her ear and she gasps, her white neck tilted; I bite, and colour blooms on her pale skin. She moans, and I tell myself to remember that she likes it.
She disarms me.
Naked, she is smaller than I’d expected, delicate. I curve my hands around her narrow back and hold her to me as she rocks her hips into mine. She comes silently, shaking, her breath shuddering out on a sigh, her thin arms wrapped around my shoulders.
Afterwards I want to hold her, but she climbs to her feet and dresses efficiently, not looking at me.
“Disengage autopilot,” she says, and I pull on my uniform and take my place behind her.
She doesn’t speak of it. We complete the mission and return to the ship, and she says not a word. I hesitate at the door to the shuttlebay, and she gives me her practised, public smile, patting my shoulder as she breezes past me.
“See you on the bridge, Lieutenant.”
At the end of my shift I return to my quarters. I am ill at ease; I am expectant, and I’m irritated with myself, knowing full well I should expect nothing. I think of copper and vanilla and velvet skin and the arch of a pale neck, and I’m restless.
I decide I will go to the holodeck just as the door to my quarters chimes.
I call for entry and she steps inside, her eyes unknowable.
“He can never know,” she says, and then she presses her body into mine, and I taste copper.
~*~
This story now has a sequel, Surrender.