Rasia hummed a jaunty shanty. She sat atop the windship railing with one foot looped through the vertical pole to keep her steady. She unraveled the twine of previously cut pieces of rope to weave back into one longer whole. She gripped the end between her toes, weaving with such practiced ease that she didn’t need to look at her hands. She glanced intermittently at the windship steer, but Rasia’s attention was on the horizon.
The first few rays of sunrise, which had glowed first across her cheek, brightened the dark early morning. She’d waited a long time for daylight. She clutched the rope gleefully to her chest and stared at the hatch door in anticipation. Yesterday might not have gone down like Rasia had wanted, but today Rasia had a plan.
The door flew open and banged with force against the deck.
“What did you do?” Kai accused, head popping up from the underbelly. Dawnlight crawled across the deck, not yet reaching his nebulous outline.
Rasia bit down hard on her mischief and forced a nonchalant shrug. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Zephyr wanted me to wake him at the start of my shift.” Rasia might have overheard something of the sort. “He’s not waking up.”
“And you think I have something to do with it?”
Kai crossed his arms and glowered. Rasia tried so hard to keep the curl from her lips but broke in the span of a vibration.
“Geez, calm your nips. I just put a little sleeping powder in his gourd. He’ll be fine. Besides, the morning is our time. Now we have the deck all to ourselves.”
“Rasia, what do you want?”
Rasia hopped down from the railing. She tossed her unfinished project over her shoulder, letting it sprawl to the deck. Kai would inevitably pick it up anyway. He was big on the whole “not leaving things out so people can trip over them later.” But people wouldn’t trip over them if they looked where they were going. Cough-Zephyr-cough.
“Who says I want anything?” Rasia asked as she prowled around the deck. She pressed her back against the mast and motioned to the unattended steer, available for Kai’s shift.
Kai glared at her, then habitually went through the steps of preparing for his turn at the steer. He double-checked the knots and adjusted the sail for windshifts even Rasia couldn’t predict coming.
With Kai’s back to her, Rasia popped her hip. She twisted and angled her body the way she’d seen tent whores do. Awkwardly, her arms dangled, and she tried to assemble them in a more appealing manner.
Kai looked up from where he was adjusting the rigging. “Rasia, what are you doing?”
Rasia had never tried to intentionally be sexy before, so forgive her if Operation Seduction had a few kinks in it. She stared at him, holding eye contact, and placed two fingers in her mouth. She swirled her tongue around the digits and popped her fingers out wet and glistening with spit. She pulled the leather strings of her waistband.
Kai left.
Rasia hadn’t even gotten to the good part!
The wind blown out of her sails, Rasia crumpled to the deck, legs and arms flopping, and hit her head back against the mast in frustration. She peeked around the mast to where Kai had swiped her undone rope from the deck and stuffed it away into the equipment hatch.
Rasia knew she should have put it away.
Kai continued to shuffle through the hatch, his back turned to her, denying Rasia the audience she wanted.
It wasn’t fair.
After sitting up, Rasia planted her chin in the palm of her hand and pouted, blinking pathetically and hoping he’d take pity on her. She whined, “I get it. You’ve made your point. Can you let it go, and we can get back to having fun again? We haven’t had sex in forever.”
“We literally had sex yesterday morning.”
“Exactly! It’s not healthy to break routine.”
“Enjoy your fingers, then. By all means, don’t let me interrupt.”
“Fuck you.”
Rasia launched to her feet and stormed to the other side of the windship. She crossed her arms, embarrassed and feeling like a fool. She paid the fucking blood price. What more did he want from her? She didn’t get it. They had been having a good time. Why ruin that?
Rasia glanced over at him. He had walked back to the other side of the ship, having taken nothing from the equipment hatch. Now he was standing there steering her windship how she taught him, wearing the clothes she gave him, ruining her kull.
“Take off my pants.”
Kai glanced up from the steer. The sun reached his face, and dawn broke hard over his expression. “You gave them to me.”
“I want them back. Take them off.”
Kai clenched his jaw, then yanked at the belt cords. Kai pushed down the pants and kicked them across the deck. He pulled the shirt over his head and tossed it over too. It wasn’t exactly the striptease Rasia had planned.
Rasia charged, scooped up her clothes, and threw them overboard. They fluttered, traveling quite a distance in a hard gust of wind.
“Real mature,” Kai said, crossing his arms over his bare chest to ward off the cool morning air.
She hated him. She hated his stupid face and his stupid hair and his stupid eyes and . . . it occurred to Rasia in that moment that Kai was stupidly handsome. He’d grown half a hand taller than her. Or maybe he’d stopped hunching his shoulders smaller than he actually was. Or maybe the sky had finally grown tall enough for him to stretch out and stand. He’s taller, somehow. Kai’s cheeks didn’t look so sharp and sunken anymore. His sharp angles had rounded. Lean muscles wired his arms. Kai stood before her, bright and full like someone had stuffed him with elderfire. His own brilliant sun.
Rasia had done that. She made him eat. She taught him how to run. She had claimed all his firsts. The fact Kai stood there looking so pretty boiled her nerves.
In blinding fury, Rasia stampeded forward and slammed her hands down on either side of him, trapping him between the railing and the anchor mechanism. Kai never flinched or stumbled back in fear. He never went for his dagger. He confronted her without a single quake, far braver than anyone else would ever dare to be. Fuck. It was kind of hot.
“You want me,” Rasia insisted.
“No.”
Rasia was so used to people telling her that word and was used to doing what she wanted anyway. That word was often a boundary or a restriction placed on Rasia for no good reason. Well-meaning family members limited her for her own safety, because they saw nothing beyond the edges of their small mental maps.
But it sounded different when Kai said it. For one brief moment, Rasia considered barreling over his defiance and taking what she wanted. But her not listening to Zephyr was exactly what got Kai mad at her in the first place. What was the worst that could happen if she didn’t listen to him? Would he leave her?
She was up against a border that was illegal to cross. Kai didn’t belong to her, and his body wasn’t a territory anyone could explore without his permission. Rasia had been invited in as his guest. It might be hard to accept that she had to leave this brand-new terrain she’d barely gotten the chance to map, but to lay claim to something that wasn’t hers, to steal landmarks for souvenirs, would make her a skink. That was the worst sort of person to be.
Rasia pushed away. She crossed her arms and turned her back. Whatever. She didn’t need him anyway. She had been fine before Kai, and she’d be fine after Kai.
“Rasia,” Kai said, gently. “I haven’t abandoned you. I’m still here. I am still your friend, and I hoped you’d still consider me so even without the sex. I still want to hunt a dragon with you.”
Rasia yelled. She yelled some more, then ran and jumped off the windship.
Too many emotions huffed through her chest. Rasia laid where she’d landed, covered in sand, and stared grumpily at the shifting clouds. She heard the windship stop. Rasia ignored Kai’s shouts.
Kai wasn’t her first kiss.
That honor went to fucking Faris.
And it utterly sucked. Faris laughed afterward, thinking someone had put Rasia up to it as some stupid prank. He hadn’t taken her seriously because she was Rabid Rasia. But she wasn’t anyone’s joke. Rasia had promised herself then she wouldn’t waste her time chasing empty hunts.
If Kai didn’t want her anymore, that was his problem.
Rasia wiped at her cheeks and stomped off. She kicked at the sand and scanned the indiscriminate brown. She snatched up the shirt and pants. She trudged back, climbed the steps of the windship, and slammed the clothes down at Kai’s feet, sending up clouds of dust. The sun shone, blinding.
“Let’s hunt our fucking dragon.”