She took a deep breath, pulling air into her bruised lungs. They still gurgled a little, but she was on enough reflex inhibitors that she wasn’t coughing herself light-headed anymore. She didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want to talk. She opened her eyes, sat up, her back against the headboard, her arms wrapped around her knees. Holden went quiet, feeling the weight of what was about to come. Naomi plucked at her hair, pulling it over her eyes like a veil, then almost angrily, she smoothed it back so her eyes were clear.
“So,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“Captain to XO?” he asked, carefully.
She shook her head. “Naomi to Jim.”
The dread that bloomed in his eyes hurt to see, but she’d also been expecting it. She felt its echo in her own chest. It was strange that after all she’d done – all the demons she’d faced and escaped – this should still be so hard. Holden’s hand terminal chimed, and he didn’t even look at the screen. The lines around his mouth deepened the way they did when he’d tasted something he didn’t like. His hands folded together, strong, controlled, calm. She remembered the first time they’d met, lifetimes ago back on the Canterbury. How he’d radiated charm and certainty and how much she’d hated it at first. How much she’d hated him for being too much like Marco. And then how much she’d come to love him for not being like him at all.
And now, she would break her rule of silence, and the thing they had between them would either survive or it wouldn’t. It was a terrible thought. Marco might still be able to empty her, and he wouldn’t even have to spend the effort of being aware of it. Existing was enough.
“I don’t,” Jim said, then stopped. He looked up at her through his eyebrows, like he was the one feeling guilty for it all. “We all have pasts. We all have secrets. When you took off, I felt… lost. Confused. Like part of my brain was gone. And now that you’re here, I am just profoundly happy to see you. This right here? It’s enough.”
“Are you saying you don’t want to know?”
“Oh lord, no. No, I’d pretty much cut off a toe. I’m pretty much made of ragingly deep curiosity and floating jealousy. But I can deal with those. I don’t have any more right to make you tell me anything you don’t want to than I ever did. If there’s anything you don’t want to say —”
“I don’t want to say any of this,” Naomi said. “But I want you to know. And so we have to get through this part, no?”
Jim shifted, pulling his legs up under him, kneeling at the foot of the bed, his face to hers. His hair was the color of coffee with just a little cream. His eyes were blue as deep water. As evening sky was supposed to be.
“Then we’ll get through it,” he said with a simple, boundless optimism that caught her by surprise and drew out laughter, even here.
“Well,” she said. “When I was in my middle teens, I was living with a woman we called Tia Margolis and burning through the engineering courses on the networks as fast as I could, and there were ships that came through dock. Belter ships. Hard-core.”
Jim nodded, and then – to her surprise – it was easy. In her mind, the idea of unpacking her past to Jim – to anyone – was a thing of anger and disgust and recriminations. Or worse, of pity. Jim, who for all his faults was sometimes capable of perfection, listened carefully and completely. She had been Marco Inaros’ lover. She’d gotten pregnant young. She’d been involved – at first without knowing it – in the sabotage of inner planets ships. She had a son named Filip who had been taken from her as a way to control her. She described the dark thoughts, and realized it was very nearly the first time she’d talked about them openly, without a veil of ironic humor. I tried to kill myself, but it didn’t work. Just saying the words out loud felt like being in a dream. Or waking up from one.
And then, somehow in the depth of her confession, the baring of her blighted soul that was always supposed to be a trauma and a terror, it was just her and Jim having a conversation. She’d found a way to get a message out to him during the battle, and he told her about getting it, and the conversation he’d been having with Monica Stuart, and why he’d felt betrayed by her. And then backtracked to how she’d been kidnapped, and then before that to her plan to use the protomolecule sample as a Ouija board to investigate the missing ships. And then they went back to the Chetzemoka and Marco’s fallback plan, which brought up the way he always nested one scheme inside another, and before she got back around to Cyn, Alex and Amos and Bobbie were back, their voices burbling over each other like birdsong. Jim closed the bedroom door against them and, when he came back, settled beside her, his back to the headboard too.