The earlier parts can be read by clicking on my name and checking out all my Blue Sun Room postings.

A LASTING IMPRESSION

Part Three - Breathing Space

Jayne stalked straight along the aft passage and across the threshold into Miss Frye’s Mystical World o’ Engines. No more puttin’ it off. He really needed a dialogue with the little mechanic.

They’d had a ball of it yesterday putting up the gun racks in his bunk, with all the flirty winks and nudges, but they couldn’t keep on that way, not if Mal didn’t want anythin’ to come of the two of ‘em. Only thing was, he’d best be lettin’ her in on the deal, elsewise she’d get the wrong idea ‘n think he didn’t want her or somethin’.

He glanced around at the reddish-hued walls, feelin’ a prickle of sweat beading on his skin just from bein’ inside. Ai ya, it’s hotter than a fat man’s ass crack in here.

“Kaylee?”

She scooted out from neath some rotating part or other and beamed at him, delighted that he’d sought her out. “Jayne! Hi!” She scrambled to her feet and brushed ineffectively at the coveralls tied around her waist, so covered in grime that the flowery pattern on her shirt was nigh obliterated. “You need somethin’?”

Jayne stared. He hadn’t seen her in her element before now. Her eyes were all bright and sparkly, and her hair was twisted up in some kind of fancy knotty thing, little flyaway strands clinging to the dampened skin of her neck.

So gorram pretty…

“I, uh…” Jayne licked his lips. He couldn’t rightly remember what his original purpose had been; she’d done shorted out his brainpan lookin’ all sweet and smudged like that. Acting purely on instinct, he reached out and brushed the pad of his thumb across her cheekbone, smearing the tiny trace of oil there. “You’re all grunged up.”

Kaylee’s eyes fluttered shut. “Hmm. Yeah. That happens a lot.”

Jayne stepped a mite closer, dropping his voice low and intimate. Womenfolk seemed to respond real nice when he did that. “I like it.”

The Captain’s warnings had flown