Until She Catches Him

As I write this letter

Send my love to you

Remember that I'll always

Be in love with you

Treasure these few words till we're together

Keep all my love forever

P.S. I love you

You, you, you

-- John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Wash smiled when he heard the click-click-click of boot heels in the corridor behind him – Zoe, striding purposefully. Coming to berate him, no doubt. He didn’t mind. He’d rather be taken down four or five notches by Zoe on a bad day than have any other woman fawn on him, pretty much. So when she came click-click-click up the steps to the bridge, he felt the shudder of the flooring right at the base of his spine.

She stopped right next to his console, looking balefully down at him with those dark, delicious eyes and he stared up at her, still smiling – his best ‘innocent’ look. “Well,” he drawled, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

She held out a sheet of scrap paper – the note he’d left in her quarters while she was off-ship, for her to find when she got back. “You wrote this,” she said. It sounded like a threat.

“Well . . . no . . .” he admitted, watching her jaw tighten in disapproval. “I mean, yeah, I wrote it on that paper, but the words aren’t mine. I swiped ‘em. Couple of dead poets from earth-that-was.”

Something in her face changed, then, but she was so hard to read that he wasn’t sure how to interpret it. When she didn’t say anything, Wash said hopefully, “Did you like it?”

She replied coldly, “Did you mean it?”

Wash slid down in his chair, frowning. Did he mean it? What kind of a question was that? It was a love poem! Did men slip love poems to women without they meant . . . well, having thought about it, he decided maybe the question made sense after all. So he said, softly, “Every word.”

Zoe stepped smoothly around the console and grasped him by the front of his shirt, pulling him to his feet. Wash gulped. Was she going to kill him now? For what? For loving her? For telling her so? F