Kaylee heard the loud double clang-hiss through the deck, where her ear was currently pressed. She grinned widely, then pushed herself out from under the assembly she was disassembling and shouted gleefully “Inara’s back!”

She had been hip-deep in maintenance – her idea of therapy, really – when the deck vibrated under her ear. She knew it was Inara, too, because the other shuttle made a slightly different sort of clank when it docked. The engineer struggled to her feet, and then looked down at herself. Her coverall was coated in grease, grime, dirt and dust – not how she wanted to see Inara, especially in light of the nature of her problem. “I gotta get cleaned up!”

There was usually a bit of celebration whenever Inara returned from a meeting with clients – and this time she had been gone for three solid weeks. That called for a little more than the standard celebration to Kaylee’s mind. It certainly merited washing her hands and face, getting out of this nasty cover-all, and trying to look prettier than normal – because that’s the kind of effect Inara inspired in most women.

Homicidal jealousy occasionally came up, too. But Kaylee wasn’t like that. She loved Inara. Inara was stunningly beautiful, and she was a very nice person, and Kaylee didn’t see any reason at all to hate her or her beauty. She wasn’t that petty. But she valued her friendship with the Companion very highly, and after three hard weeks, she needed her company badly.

Ten minutes after that first clang, she was standing outside the shuttle lock dressed in a casual but very pretty cotton floral print dress, face quickly scrubbed clean and augmented by just the barest hint of makeup. She wasn’t at all surprised that Mal showed up in a similar state – minus the dress and makeup – just moments later. He gave her a shy, fleeting grin.

“Nice dress,” he said, noticing, as he did now and then, that Kaylee was, indeed, a girl. Sometimes he forgot. He said that it was because she was such a good mechanic, but she figured the