Fic: Uncharted Territories, NC-17, McCoy/Chapel, Chapter Two
Title: Uncharted Territories
Rating: NC-17
Author: fringedweller
Pairing: McCoy/Chapel
Beta: The amazing seren_ccd
Warnings: Sex and violence, but only for the deserving.
Word Count: 50000
Disclaimer: Nothing recognisable is mine, and trust me, I'm making nothing from this!
Notes: Written for het_bigbang.
The first thing she learned about life in the fleet was that she hated campus housing. There had been a reason that she had always tried to live off-campus at her previous universities, and that reason was being forced to live with a roommate. Christine was quite a private person, and the thought of being forced to live in small, magnolia-painted quarters with a complete stranger ten years her junior was enough to make her shudder.
At the age of 30, Christine was one of the oldest people in her intake group. Most people joined Starfleet after their first degree, if they were on the officer track, younger if they were training to join the fleet’s administrative and non-command staff. Cadets of her age were fairly rare. In fact, as she sat through the third and, thankfully, last of a series of tedious orientation lectures, she could only spot one other human that looked as if he was in her age group. He had arrived slightly late and had spots of red high on his cheekbones as he nodded curtly to the Petty Officer who was leading the session. He was towing behind him a younger man who would have been handsome if he hadn’t been sporting so many bruises.
The older man was slightly taller than his friend, scowling and dark haired in comparison to the cheerful blond who acknowledged every pretty cadet he saw with a wink and a friendly leer. His shoulders were broad and he tapered nicely to a backside that Christine idly thought about biting through the unflattering cadet reds that they all wore with various degrees of enthusiasm.
That thought made her sit up, startled.
She was not the sort of person that thought about biting the backsides of strange men. She was engage….
No, she thought bitterly. No, she wasn’t. She hadn’t formally broken the engagement with Roger, but she thought that was implicit in the way she had thrown her ring at him with such force and precision that he was forced to wear a protective eye patch for several days afterwards. She was not an engaged woman. She wasn’t a woman with a boyfriend. She wasn’t even a woman who had a discreet arrangement with a like-minded friend, more’s the pity.
So, she reasoned, if she wanted to, she could think about biting the backside of whomsoever she pleased.
She’d never been what she’d consider promiscuous, but Christine had never lacked for boyfriends. Not all were serious relationships, although some had been headed that way before something derailed them. She had resigned herself to never thinking of another man sexually other than Roger which, she realised with a snort, should have been a very large warning sign. Roger was intellectually brilliant and a leader in his field, but he had not inspired much admiration once his clothes were removed. It hadn’t mattered, not when she loved him and she thought he loved her. You were supposed to look past those things, weren’t you?
Now he had revealed himself to be a cheating bastard that deserved to catch every strain of drug-resistant STI currently at large, Christine no longer had to think charitable of his hairy toes and pot belly.
She bet that the tall grumpy man didn’t have a pot belly. Or hairy toes, either, although that wasn’t really a deal breaker. She bet that his biceps were bigger than Roger’s had been, and although there as no reputable study published that said that height and foot size correlated with penis size, Christine was willing to make a very unscientific bet that Mr Tall, Dark and Handsome was also Mr Tripod.
Hmm. Now that was a thought worth considering. Now that she was (relatively) young, free and single perhaps it was worth trying to conduct a little private research of her own. Specifically, into the pants of the grumpy latecomer. The last thing she wanted was another relationship, but some fun and friendly no-strings-attached…research was just the thing to cleanse her palate after Roger.
Movement from the cadets around her snapped her out of her reverie, and she began filing down the aisle of the tiered lecture theatre towards the first of that day’s testing rooms with the rest of the class. By hanging back a little here and being willing to elbow past people there, she was able to get into position just behind her target as they shuffled slowly down the stairs.
“…if you hadn’t been so damn late in the shower, we would have been here on time, jackass,” she heard him grumble.
“It takes time to look this good,” his friend joked, turning back to address his friend. “And talking of looking good,” he continued, catching sight of Christine Chapel, “Hey gorgeous. I’m Jim Kirk.”
The dark haired man turned back to look over his shoulder too, and Christine had to rethink her earlier appraisal. Dark, yes, but with hazel eyes, neither brown nor green. His eyelashes were impossibly thick and lustrous and his lips were deliciously plump.
“You’re about to fall down the stairs,” Christine said blithely to Kirk, who smiled uncomprehendingly before his missed his footing and stumbled into the backs of two cadets in front of him.
The dark haired man smiled for the first time since he entered the room, and it just made him even more attractive.
“Gravity is a great equaliser,” he said over his shoulder to Christine, careful to keep his own footing.
“Christine Chapel,” she said, smiling at him.
This seemed to throw him for a moment; he looked back suspiciously at her for a second, then controlled himself enough to say “Leonard McCoy” in a gruff voice.
“See you around, McCoy,” she said simply, and manoeuvred past him, leaving him floundering a little on the staircase.
There. That had been an altogether satisfactory first meeting. She’d shown interest in him, not his friend, but hadn’t appeared gushing or predatory. She’d thrown him a little off balance (although not as much as Kirk) and that now meant that he’d be thinking of her. She nodded, pleased with herself, before turning her attention to finding the right computer station in the large hall all the cadets had been herded into.
The testing procedure lasted for a full week. From nine in the morning to six in the evening, the cadets were put though a rigorous series of tests that covered everything from their academic knowledge of their specialist fields, tests of both logical and lateral thinking and many, many psychological evaluations. Some of the questions on the tests made Christine pause; they asked her whether she could cope with the fact that she could die while doing her job, and she could have cause to order others to their deaths in order to complete a mission. They made her think quite carefully, but, she reasoned, everybody died sooner or later. Whether you did it at home in bed surrounded by plump grandchildren or you went out in a blaze of glory as your starship exploded, it had to happen. She answered as honestly as she could to all questions, and only hesitated over the one that asked her if she could order somebody to their death. She hoped it would never come to that, and as a medical officer she would probably never have to issue that order. But she would probably have to triage after a serious incident at some point in her service, and that would mean prioritising who would get treatment and who were too badly injured to try and save.
Could she do that? Could she be that dispassionate?
Probably, she realised, slightly shocked at herself. She had always been known for her cool and calm demeanour, and as a scientist she always tried to make her decisions based on logical reasoning rather than her emotions. When faced with that sort of decision…yes, she could probably do it, if the situation were serious enough.
Of course, not all the tests were mental ones. Serving in Starfleet demanded a high level of physical fitness, and all cadets were put through a punishing regime of physical tests that left Christine feeling like a limp noodle at the end of them.
It was after one such test that she saw McCoy and his friend Kirk again. Her group had just finished a run through the notorious assault course, and she was leaning against a fence greedily gulping down a bottle of water. She had rope burn on her hands from slipping down the climbing section and some nasty bruising forming on her thighs where she had lost her footing and fallen after she dropped down from a high wall. Mud was splattered all over her legs and arms and, quite frankly, she felt sweaty and disgusting. So of course, that was when she saw Kirk, McCoy and their group come charging over the line in the last sprint section of the course and make a bee line for the table set up with water bottles. She hadn’t gone far after collecting hers, so she was directly in their eyeline as they collected their drinks.
“Hey hot stuff. Enjoy getting dirty?”
Ah, Jim Kirk, a name she was reminded of because McCoy growled it at him in warning as they ambled over to her spot.
“McCoy, Kirk,” she said, nodding to them and ignoring Jim’s friendly grin. “You made it through?”
“Just,” McCoy said, rubbing his elbow and wincing. “I swear to God, that thing is a damned death trap.”
“Tell me about it,” she commiserated. She displayed her palms. “Rope burn. And my thighs are going to be bruised for days.”
Kirk’s eyes went predictably towards her thighs, on display in her physical activity kit. McCoy’s eyes flickered there, but he stepped forward and took her hands in his. Large hands, she noted, remembering her theory, and tried not to laugh.
“It doesn’t look too serious, but you should get these abrasions sanitised and sealed before you pick up an infection,” he said, his eyes peering professionally at her reddened palms. “Jim, make yourself useful and find me a first aid kit.”
Jim wandered off towards a large group of female cadets.
“Are you qualified to be treating me?” Christine teased. “Or is this an excuse to hold my hands?”
“I’m more than qualified, darlin’,” he said, giving her a smirk that made her stomach flip-flop. “I’m a doctor.”
“So am I,” Christine said, eyebrow raised. “Of biomedical science. About a fifth of the people here probably have some kind of doctorate. But are you a medical doctor, or a doctor of physics or something like that?”
“I’m a surgeon,” he told her, still holding her hands. “So I can do this,” he said, stroking his fingers lightly over the rope burn, “and know what I’m doing.”
“That hurts!” Christine protested.
“Baby,” McCoy said scornfully, just as Kirk jogged back up with a field med kit in his hands.
“Found one!” he announced cheerfully. “Here you go, Bones.”
“Bones?” Christine asked.
“It’s all he has left, apparently,” Kirk told her as McCoy opened the kit, examined it and shook his head as he rummaged through it. “His bones. Although he does also come with a huge chip on his shoulder about women.”
“Really?” Christine asked, amused at Kirk’s not-so-subtle poking of the bear.
“Bad divorce,” Kirk said, shaking his head in mock-sorrow. “He’s damaged goods. You need somebody younger, less bitter.”
“Somebody like you?” Christine said, wincing as McCoy wiped an antiseptic swab over her damaged palms.
“Well, if you’re offering…” Jim began, before Christine’s laughing cut him off.
“I’m not,” she told him firmly. “Sorry kid, not interested.”
“You can’t be that much older than me,” Jim said, looking her up and down with an assessing look.
“Jim,” McCoy warned, but Christine waved his concern away.
“I’m old enough to know better,” she told him.
“Suit yourself,” Jim shrugged, completely unconcerned by this knock-back.
“Oh, I’m planning to,” she assured him. She caught McCoy’s eye for a second as he ran a mini dermal regenerator over her hands. Something flickered in his hazel eyes for a second - interest, possibly? - before he dropped his eyes again to her hands.
“So what’s your story?” Jim asked.
“My story?” Christine said, flexing her hands and smiling at McCoy, who turned away and repacked the med kit.
"He’s here because of a bad divorce, I’m here because I’m going to be the first person to graduate in three years - why are you here, Chapel?”
“I’m here because it’s time for a change in my life,” Christine said carefully.
“And the rest,” Jim said knowingly.
Christine sighed.
“I walked out on my fiancé, Roger, when I found out that he was screwing my assistant and screwing me out of credit on our research. It was either find a job that was the same as before, or starting over and doing something new. So here I am.”
“Ouch,” said Jim, appreciatively.
"That’s what he said,” Christine said grimly.
Jim grinned. McCoy was facing away from her, but Christine saw his shoulders move slightly.
“I like you,” Jim announced. “You should come out with us tonight.”
“I’m not sure,” Christine began, but then stopped herself. Why shouldn’t she go out? A few drinks wouldn’t hurt, and God knew she could do with letting a bit of
the week’s tension go. And, perhaps, McCoy might be up for a bit of tension releasing too.
“Oh hell, why not?” she said. “Where are you going?”
“We’re starting at The Key, and then moving on from there,” Jim said vaguely. “We go where the night takes us.”
“It’ll take us back to the dorm by eleven,” McCoy said firmly. “There’s still two days left of testing and I don’t want to screw it up by getting smashed with you, Jim.”
“Says the man who turned up to the shuttle to the Academy half drunk,” Jim said cheerily, slapping him on the shoulder.
McCoy’s face darkened and his eyes showed the anger he was obviously feeling.
“You know damn well I hate those tin death traps,” he said through gritted teeth.
“So, The Key,” Christine said brightly. “When?”
“Gaila!” Jim shouted over to a group of cadets milling around by the water table. “What time at The Key?”
“Seven!” shouted back a beautiful Orion girl, with red corkscrew curls.
“Seven,” he repeated to Christine. “Gaila’s in your dorm, right? I’ll get her to swing by and pick you up.”
He gave her a friendly grin and went to drape himself over the Orion girl, who obviously didn’t seem to mind at all.
As the last group of cadets staggered over the finish line, the instructors started to bellow instructions to the group.
“I’ll see you later then, McCoy,” Christine said, throwing her bottle into the nearest recycling unit.
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “If I go. I’m not exactly as young as the rest of these guys. I can’t just shake off a heavy night the way I used to.”
“That’s right, you’re positively ancient,” snorted Christine. “You could drink those kids under the table and you know it.”
That got a bark of surprised laughter from him.
“Thanks for fixing my hands,” she told him. “Maybe later you could see what you can do with my thighs.”
He blinked in surprise and she smiled sweetly before turning away and walking nonchalantly back to the shuttle that would take the exhausted cadets back to their dorms.
There. Just enough sexual innuendo to get him interested without appearing too predatory. Christine was pleased; it had been a while since she’d actively flirted with anybody, and she thought that had gone rather well.
Rating: NC-17
Author: fringedweller
Pairing: McCoy/Chapel
Beta: The amazing seren_ccd
Warnings: Sex and violence, but only for the deserving.
Word Count: 50000
Disclaimer: Nothing recognisable is mine, and trust me, I'm making nothing from this!
Notes: Written for het_bigbang.
The first thing she learned about life in the fleet was that she hated campus housing. There had been a reason that she had always tried to live off-campus at her previous universities, and that reason was being forced to live with a roommate. Christine was quite a private person, and the thought of being forced to live in small, magnolia-painted quarters with a complete stranger ten years her junior was enough to make her shudder.
At the age of 30, Christine was one of the oldest people in her intake group. Most people joined Starfleet after their first degree, if they were on the officer track, younger if they were training to join the fleet’s administrative and non-command staff. Cadets of her age were fairly rare. In fact, as she sat through the third and, thankfully, last of a series of tedious orientation lectures, she could only spot one other human that looked as if he was in her age group. He had arrived slightly late and had spots of red high on his cheekbones as he nodded curtly to the Petty Officer who was leading the session. He was towing behind him a younger man who would have been handsome if he hadn’t been sporting so many bruises.
The older man was slightly taller than his friend, scowling and dark haired in comparison to the cheerful blond who acknowledged every pretty cadet he saw with a wink and a friendly leer. His shoulders were broad and he tapered nicely to a backside that Christine idly thought about biting through the unflattering cadet reds that they all wore with various degrees of enthusiasm.
That thought made her sit up, startled.
She was not the sort of person that thought about biting the backsides of strange men. She was engage….
No, she thought bitterly. No, she wasn’t. She hadn’t formally broken the engagement with Roger, but she thought that was implicit in the way she had thrown her ring at him with such force and precision that he was forced to wear a protective eye patch for several days afterwards. She was not an engaged woman. She wasn’t a woman with a boyfriend. She wasn’t even a woman who had a discreet arrangement with a like-minded friend, more’s the pity.
So, she reasoned, if she wanted to, she could think about biting the backside of whomsoever she pleased.
She’d never been what she’d consider promiscuous, but Christine had never lacked for boyfriends. Not all were serious relationships, although some had been headed that way before something derailed them. She had resigned herself to never thinking of another man sexually other than Roger which, she realised with a snort, should have been a very large warning sign. Roger was intellectually brilliant and a leader in his field, but he had not inspired much admiration once his clothes were removed. It hadn’t mattered, not when she loved him and she thought he loved her. You were supposed to look past those things, weren’t you?
Now he had revealed himself to be a cheating bastard that deserved to catch every strain of drug-resistant STI currently at large, Christine no longer had to think charitable of his hairy toes and pot belly.
She bet that the tall grumpy man didn’t have a pot belly. Or hairy toes, either, although that wasn’t really a deal breaker. She bet that his biceps were bigger than Roger’s had been, and although there as no reputable study published that said that height and foot size correlated with penis size, Christine was willing to make a very unscientific bet that Mr Tall, Dark and Handsome was also Mr Tripod.
Hmm. Now that was a thought worth considering. Now that she was (relatively) young, free and single perhaps it was worth trying to conduct a little private research of her own. Specifically, into the pants of the grumpy latecomer. The last thing she wanted was another relationship, but some fun and friendly no-strings-attached…research was just the thing to cleanse her palate after Roger.
Movement from the cadets around her snapped her out of her reverie, and she began filing down the aisle of the tiered lecture theatre towards the first of that day’s testing rooms with the rest of the class. By hanging back a little here and being willing to elbow past people there, she was able to get into position just behind her target as they shuffled slowly down the stairs.
“…if you hadn’t been so damn late in the shower, we would have been here on time, jackass,” she heard him grumble.
“It takes time to look this good,” his friend joked, turning back to address his friend. “And talking of looking good,” he continued, catching sight of Christine Chapel, “Hey gorgeous. I’m Jim Kirk.”
The dark haired man turned back to look over his shoulder too, and Christine had to rethink her earlier appraisal. Dark, yes, but with hazel eyes, neither brown nor green. His eyelashes were impossibly thick and lustrous and his lips were deliciously plump.
“You’re about to fall down the stairs,” Christine said blithely to Kirk, who smiled uncomprehendingly before his missed his footing and stumbled into the backs of two cadets in front of him.
The dark haired man smiled for the first time since he entered the room, and it just made him even more attractive.
“Gravity is a great equaliser,” he said over his shoulder to Christine, careful to keep his own footing.
“Christine Chapel,” she said, smiling at him.
This seemed to throw him for a moment; he looked back suspiciously at her for a second, then controlled himself enough to say “Leonard McCoy” in a gruff voice.
“See you around, McCoy,” she said simply, and manoeuvred past him, leaving him floundering a little on the staircase.
There. That had been an altogether satisfactory first meeting. She’d shown interest in him, not his friend, but hadn’t appeared gushing or predatory. She’d thrown him a little off balance (although not as much as Kirk) and that now meant that he’d be thinking of her. She nodded, pleased with herself, before turning her attention to finding the right computer station in the large hall all the cadets had been herded into.
The testing procedure lasted for a full week. From nine in the morning to six in the evening, the cadets were put though a rigorous series of tests that covered everything from their academic knowledge of their specialist fields, tests of both logical and lateral thinking and many, many psychological evaluations. Some of the questions on the tests made Christine pause; they asked her whether she could cope with the fact that she could die while doing her job, and she could have cause to order others to their deaths in order to complete a mission. They made her think quite carefully, but, she reasoned, everybody died sooner or later. Whether you did it at home in bed surrounded by plump grandchildren or you went out in a blaze of glory as your starship exploded, it had to happen. She answered as honestly as she could to all questions, and only hesitated over the one that asked her if she could order somebody to their death. She hoped it would never come to that, and as a medical officer she would probably never have to issue that order. But she would probably have to triage after a serious incident at some point in her service, and that would mean prioritising who would get treatment and who were too badly injured to try and save.
Could she do that? Could she be that dispassionate?
Probably, she realised, slightly shocked at herself. She had always been known for her cool and calm demeanour, and as a scientist she always tried to make her decisions based on logical reasoning rather than her emotions. When faced with that sort of decision…yes, she could probably do it, if the situation were serious enough.
Of course, not all the tests were mental ones. Serving in Starfleet demanded a high level of physical fitness, and all cadets were put through a punishing regime of physical tests that left Christine feeling like a limp noodle at the end of them.
It was after one such test that she saw McCoy and his friend Kirk again. Her group had just finished a run through the notorious assault course, and she was leaning against a fence greedily gulping down a bottle of water. She had rope burn on her hands from slipping down the climbing section and some nasty bruising forming on her thighs where she had lost her footing and fallen after she dropped down from a high wall. Mud was splattered all over her legs and arms and, quite frankly, she felt sweaty and disgusting. So of course, that was when she saw Kirk, McCoy and their group come charging over the line in the last sprint section of the course and make a bee line for the table set up with water bottles. She hadn’t gone far after collecting hers, so she was directly in their eyeline as they collected their drinks.
“Hey hot stuff. Enjoy getting dirty?”
Ah, Jim Kirk, a name she was reminded of because McCoy growled it at him in warning as they ambled over to her spot.
“McCoy, Kirk,” she said, nodding to them and ignoring Jim’s friendly grin. “You made it through?”
“Just,” McCoy said, rubbing his elbow and wincing. “I swear to God, that thing is a damned death trap.”
“Tell me about it,” she commiserated. She displayed her palms. “Rope burn. And my thighs are going to be bruised for days.”
Kirk’s eyes went predictably towards her thighs, on display in her physical activity kit. McCoy’s eyes flickered there, but he stepped forward and took her hands in his. Large hands, she noted, remembering her theory, and tried not to laugh.
“It doesn’t look too serious, but you should get these abrasions sanitised and sealed before you pick up an infection,” he said, his eyes peering professionally at her reddened palms. “Jim, make yourself useful and find me a first aid kit.”
Jim wandered off towards a large group of female cadets.
“Are you qualified to be treating me?” Christine teased. “Or is this an excuse to hold my hands?”
“I’m more than qualified, darlin’,” he said, giving her a smirk that made her stomach flip-flop. “I’m a doctor.”
“So am I,” Christine said, eyebrow raised. “Of biomedical science. About a fifth of the people here probably have some kind of doctorate. But are you a medical doctor, or a doctor of physics or something like that?”
“I’m a surgeon,” he told her, still holding her hands. “So I can do this,” he said, stroking his fingers lightly over the rope burn, “and know what I’m doing.”
“That hurts!” Christine protested.
“Baby,” McCoy said scornfully, just as Kirk jogged back up with a field med kit in his hands.
“Found one!” he announced cheerfully. “Here you go, Bones.”
“Bones?” Christine asked.
“It’s all he has left, apparently,” Kirk told her as McCoy opened the kit, examined it and shook his head as he rummaged through it. “His bones. Although he does also come with a huge chip on his shoulder about women.”
“Really?” Christine asked, amused at Kirk’s not-so-subtle poking of the bear.
“Bad divorce,” Kirk said, shaking his head in mock-sorrow. “He’s damaged goods. You need somebody younger, less bitter.”
“Somebody like you?” Christine said, wincing as McCoy wiped an antiseptic swab over her damaged palms.
“Well, if you’re offering…” Jim began, before Christine’s laughing cut him off.
“I’m not,” she told him firmly. “Sorry kid, not interested.”
“You can’t be that much older than me,” Jim said, looking her up and down with an assessing look.
“Jim,” McCoy warned, but Christine waved his concern away.
“I’m old enough to know better,” she told him.
“Suit yourself,” Jim shrugged, completely unconcerned by this knock-back.
“Oh, I’m planning to,” she assured him. She caught McCoy’s eye for a second as he ran a mini dermal regenerator over her hands. Something flickered in his hazel eyes for a second - interest, possibly? - before he dropped his eyes again to her hands.
“So what’s your story?” Jim asked.
“My story?” Christine said, flexing her hands and smiling at McCoy, who turned away and repacked the med kit.
"He’s here because of a bad divorce, I’m here because I’m going to be the first person to graduate in three years - why are you here, Chapel?”
“I’m here because it’s time for a change in my life,” Christine said carefully.
“And the rest,” Jim said knowingly.
Christine sighed.
“I walked out on my fiancé, Roger, when I found out that he was screwing my assistant and screwing me out of credit on our research. It was either find a job that was the same as before, or starting over and doing something new. So here I am.”
“Ouch,” said Jim, appreciatively.
"That’s what he said,” Christine said grimly.
Jim grinned. McCoy was facing away from her, but Christine saw his shoulders move slightly.
“I like you,” Jim announced. “You should come out with us tonight.”
“I’m not sure,” Christine began, but then stopped herself. Why shouldn’t she go out? A few drinks wouldn’t hurt, and God knew she could do with letting a bit of
the week’s tension go. And, perhaps, McCoy might be up for a bit of tension releasing too.
“Oh hell, why not?” she said. “Where are you going?”
“We’re starting at The Key, and then moving on from there,” Jim said vaguely. “We go where the night takes us.”
“It’ll take us back to the dorm by eleven,” McCoy said firmly. “There’s still two days left of testing and I don’t want to screw it up by getting smashed with you, Jim.”
“Says the man who turned up to the shuttle to the Academy half drunk,” Jim said cheerily, slapping him on the shoulder.
McCoy’s face darkened and his eyes showed the anger he was obviously feeling.
“You know damn well I hate those tin death traps,” he said through gritted teeth.
“So, The Key,” Christine said brightly. “When?”
“Gaila!” Jim shouted over to a group of cadets milling around by the water table. “What time at The Key?”
“Seven!” shouted back a beautiful Orion girl, with red corkscrew curls.
“Seven,” he repeated to Christine. “Gaila’s in your dorm, right? I’ll get her to swing by and pick you up.”
He gave her a friendly grin and went to drape himself over the Orion girl, who obviously didn’t seem to mind at all.
As the last group of cadets staggered over the finish line, the instructors started to bellow instructions to the group.
“I’ll see you later then, McCoy,” Christine said, throwing her bottle into the nearest recycling unit.
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “If I go. I’m not exactly as young as the rest of these guys. I can’t just shake off a heavy night the way I used to.”
“That’s right, you’re positively ancient,” snorted Christine. “You could drink those kids under the table and you know it.”
That got a bark of surprised laughter from him.
“Thanks for fixing my hands,” she told him. “Maybe later you could see what you can do with my thighs.”
He blinked in surprise and she smiled sweetly before turning away and walking nonchalantly back to the shuttle that would take the exhausted cadets back to their dorms.
There. Just enough sexual innuendo to get him interested without appearing too predatory. Christine was pleased; it had been a while since she’d actively flirted with anybody, and she thought that had gone rather well.