She walked through the corridor without looking back.
The corridor lights buzzed faintly overhead as she walked past the bulkhead door, her boots striking a soft rhythm against the vinyl. He was still standing where she'd left him, probably trying not to stare.
Behind her, she heard the muffled rustle of parkas, distant voices from the rec room, and then… silence. He must’ve joined his study group.
She reached her room, quarters B12, pressed her ID against the scanner, and let herself in. The moment the door hissed shut, her shoulders slumped. Inside, the stillness was almost brutal. There was no music, no voices, just her and the gentle hum of machines pretending not to age.
It was past midnight. The station was quiet, if not for the occasional hydraulic groan of the ice shifting beneath them.
She sank into the chair. The terminal flickered to life, casting a pale light across her hands. The screen was already crowded. There were open tabs full of isotope readouts and borehole logs, the mess of a mind stretched too far across too many threads. Her notes were scattered, some handwritten, some half-typed, her thoughts stretched thin.
She picked up a datasheet, its corner damp where her glove must’ve touched it earlier. Borehole #7A. The deuterium-to-oxygen-18 ratio had spiked again. It could be contamination. Or a calibration error. Or, if the numbers held up, it could be the proof of a rapid warming event 11,400 years ago.
She squinted at the isotopic plot, trying to map the divergence in δ¹⁸O against the methane concentrations in the same layer. She knew she should cross-reference it with Ellie’s logging from earlier in the day. She reached for her pen.
But she froze.
Adrian’s eyes.
Almond-brown eyes framed by thick lashes that didn’t belong in this brutal landscape. Eyes that didn’t try to hide anything but stood there being so warm. Like he’d waited his whole life to be seen by someone who wouldn't look away.
Her pen twitched, then tapped against the desk.
She glanced at her reflection in the small metal-framed mirror above the workstation.
“I need to focus,” she muttered to herself. But the words sounded thinner than the air outside.
She grabbed the page she’d been scribbling on and crumpled it with a groan, the numbers now seemed meaningless.
With the final keystroke, she shut the system down. The monitors blinked to black, the soft hum of the server now a duller presence in the room. Her breath fogged faintly in the cold air, lingering for a second longer than it should have.
She pressed her knuckles into her eyes. It was not from sleepiness but from a certain tension without a name.
The room felt heavier now. The silence was too deliberate.
For a moment, she stood by the window with her arms folded as if to contain herself. She pulled the tie from her hair and shook it out, curls falling around her jawline.
The Antarctic night outside was a palette of bone and shadow. It felt motionless. Even the stars looked like they were holding their breath. But in the corner of the window was the only splash of colour in the room: a small macramé dream catcher, woven from sea-green and ochre threads, its feathers had faded, but they looked stubbornly hopeful.
She had bought it from a street vendor in Ushuaia, just before the expedition, on a whim.
Her gaze lingered on it, and she smirked. A ridiculous thing, really. She was quietly treasuring a piece of string and beadwork, as if it could anchor her.
Maybe it wasn’t the dream catcher she was clinging to. Maybe it was the girl who chose it. The girl before the degrees, the titles, the mission logs. The girl who had once reached for whatever the hell she wanted, whether it was absurd or not, without hesitation, or an apology.
The one who never waited to be asked.
The one who didn’t flinch from power.
The one who took pleasure like a fucking birthright.
Fearless. Unhinged. Shamelessly sure of herself.
That version of her wasn’t soft. And Becca didn’t outgrow her.
She let her fingers skim the edge of the windowsill, then curled them into her palm. That girl still lit fires under her skin when things got too quiet.
Becca shut the blinds.
Back in the dark, her body hummed with leftover tension from restraint. From that look in Adrian’s eyes. The way he stood too still, too willing. He hadn’t asked for anything, but he’d offered everything. She could feel it in the way his breath hitched when she got too close. In how his silence had weight.
She always fancied men who knew their place, not because they were told, but because they recognized the gravity of hers. Adrian didn’t need instructions. He adjusted. Attuned. He moved through proximity like he understood she was the axis around which this operation rotated. That made him dangerous. And, dangerously useful.
Becca didn’t fall for beauty, not in the way people assumed. She didn’t need pretty. She needed potential. Adrian had it in spades, the type that simmered in silence, that obeyed without fanfare, that waited for permission without demanding it.
She spotted it from the first week. The way he kept pace with her stride, adjusted his pack without being asked, learned her rhythms without interrupting them. He read her silences like a good sub reads a breath pattern. That kind of devotion wasn’t born in the bedroom. It was born in willingness.
And she was an expert in shaping willingness into service.
She undid her belt slowly thinking about it. It clinked against the floor, deliberate as punctuation. Her undershirt rode up as she stretched, the scar along her rib catching cold air was a reminder that her body had always survived what her mind had already conquered.
She didn’t bother with pajamas. The sheets were cold. She welcomed it. Her body folded in familiar with discomfort, but her mind drifted to him, again.
Adrian had shown signs all week. The kind of signs rookies don’t mean to show; the way he followed instructions too precisely, like he was waiting for correction. The way he handed her tools with the precision of ritual. That restraint wasn’t fear. It was discipline. And discipline... was delicious.
She didn’t crave chaos. Her pleasure was in the sculpting. In guiding men into their better selves.
And Adrian?
He was the kind of man who would kneel not because she asked, but because it made sense.
He wasn’t performing obedience. He was.
Her hand rested on her stomach, fingertips tapping idly as she thought of tomorrow’s lineup. Environmental readings, isotope logging, a trip to the northern ridge. Her eyes twinkled as if she had something planned up.
She didn’t ask for trust with soft smiles and pretty promises. She crafted it.
Intimately.
Relentlessly.
Layer by layer, until a man forgot where his choices ended and her will began.
That was the difference. The line between a fleeting game and a quiet, unshakable reign.
Adrian was already circling her , caught in the silent current of her presence, lulled by her poise, magnetized by her restraint. He hadn’t even noticed how much he’d surrendered already.
But he would.
Oh, he would.
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