They had his sister.

They were on another pathetic little terraformed moon, like all of the other go-se dumps where the Captain did his business, and they wanted to get off the ship. Just to see something besides the confines of Serenity. Just to eat some real food, however uncultured, just something made with human hands that an animal had to die for. Just to feel dirt under his heels, and even smell horseshit in to road, and most of all to feel the sun on his face.

My God, the thought of smelling horseshit is actually becoming an appealing one to me. How much further am I going to sink before this is all over?

But most of all, Simon wanted a break from Kaylee, however brief it might be. He needed that in the worst way. Simon had grown into a mass of conflicting impulses which got only worse whenever she was around him. Even Inara had no such effect on him. As beautiful and seductive and just plain sexy as Inara was, she was also the closest thing to Simon’s level of culture on board Serenity, and she could conduct herself and converse with him in ways he found so wonderfully familiar, he could sit and enjoy her company all day. Simon, of course, wanted to bed Inara as much as any man ho favored women did, but all he ever really wanted to be was friends with her, to remember his life before.

Kaylee, however, had a very different effect on him. She was so, just, there, so available, so eager to be available to him, it clouded his head. A year or two ago, working on Osiris, living in his vulgarly luxurious apartment, filled with vulgarly luxurious things, he would have had a hard time hiring Kaylee as a maid, but here he was now, studying every curve of her body when she wasn’t watching him, finding excuses to be around her, only to consistently lose his nerve once there and say something infinitely stupid to push her away from him.

But to go to Kaylee’s bed, a path she had all but mapped out for him, for even ten minutes, would be ten minutes he would take his attention from River, and that was the who