Nicki was sitting in her cabin when the knock came. Her hair was down, a loose tumble of curls she allowed herself in the privacy of her cabin. Her coat hung from the back of her chair and her shirtsleeves were rolled up as she worked on row after row of characters. The shadows dipped and danced in the hollows of her wrist as she practiced moving the brush smoothly in the way she had been taught. The work was repetitious and calming. A small bit of control to help her find her center. The stiffness in her shoulders had eased as she worked, the same poem copied over and over until the character’s felt like an extension of herself. 

[i]On a long night sleep doesn’t come
How does the moon burn so bright?
Imagine hearing a distant voice
Meekly reacting with a reply to nothing.[/i]*

When the knock came she looked up at the intrusion, one eyebrow arching for no audience to see, but simply out of habit. Then she cursed, looking down at her work and seeing the ink spreading over her last row from the stilled brush. She stiffened at the voice that came and cursed the way her belly fluttered and the way her tongue flicked out and licked at her lips as if trying to catch a distant taste. 

She was about to call out for him to wait when he continued and her eyebrow rose up again. She stood, taking her hair in one hand, twisting the fall of it into a quick rope, not enough to survive much movement but certainly a little more respectable than the golden fall it had been. She didn’t bother with her coat and simply moved to open the door, bracing herself to face him, to be casual, to be authoritative, to be anything but the fluttering nervous girl she was proving to be. 

Contest on the top? What was this? What need had he of a second? She opened the door with questions on her tongue, with censure and all of them, every single last one of them died the instant she saw him. It was dark, that was a blessing and she could hope that her face was cast in the shadows so that no one would have seen the way her eyes widened and fixed on his chest before going out of focus and dreamy, or the way she seemed to lose a little height as her joints went all liquid. It was simply unfair that anyone should have a chest so… perfectly scrumptious. Her mouth watered and she scrambled to find words that would get him out of there, or into her cabin or to the bottom of the sea or… she shook her head as images of beds started to creep into her thoughts. She was hoping to jostle some sense into herself but it didn’t quite work.

Finally she managed a clever,“What?” 

She cleared her throat and her honeyed voice sounded just a little more focused when she spoke again, “What are you talking about Jax?” 

*[i]Chinese poem written sometime between the 3rd Century B.C. and the 5th Century A.D.[/i]