Mal’s POV:

She comes to him in the night watches, the soft swish of her skirts tickling his ears and making the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. Not just the hairs neither, he thinks, shifting in the pilot’s seat with the sudden heaviness in his nether regions. She is light on her feet, and were it not for the silk she wears, she would come upon him in complete silence.

Not that she could ever completely catch him unawares, he knows, at least not as long as that scent hovers in the air around her, the slightest breeze filled with something she told him once was night-blooming jasmine, whatever that was. Sounds strangely erotic for a flower, he decides, but it matches her all the same. Erotic, exotic, and altogether too heady a mix to think on rationally, to his way of thinking.

Her skirts brush against the leg of his trousers as she comes to his side. He suppresses a small tremor. Her small hand lights almost casually on his shoulder, and fire spreads slowly through the rough fabric of his shirt. He clears his throat. “What brings you to the bridge this fine evenin’, ‘Nara?” he says tonight, just as he has said every night for awhile now.

“The view,” she says, in standard answer.

“Is fine, at that,” he replies, looking out into the Black to postpone the moment he knows will come, the moment when he will be unable to tear his eyes away from her.

She sighs a soft, feminine kind of exhalation, barely stirring the air as she lifts her skirts slightly and perches on the arm of his chair. “Peaceful,” she replies as she slides her hand along the hard knot of his shoulders and curls her hand lightly around his neck.

He eases into the feel of her thighs resting so close to his own, her weight slight and yet impossible to ignore as she shifts minutely, sending jolts of pleasure into places that, until recently, have gone unpleasured for far too long to be easily admitted.

They sit, quiet for a long moment, poised on the edge of the precipice, close enough to feel the