Chapter 127: Don’t Push Yourself

"LEO!"

Vexa’s voice came from somewhere above him and then a blur of pink and purple dropped down onto the mat beside his head.

THUMP!

She landed on her knees right next to him and leaned over him with both hands hovering uselessly in the air, like she wanted to touch his face but was afraid it might fall off.

"Leo? Leo! Are you okay?! Can you hear me?!" Her violet eyes were huge and shining with horror. "I didn’t mean to hit that hard, I swear I didn’t! I just got excited because you were actually good, and then my hand sort of... went! Leo, say something! How many fingers am I holding up?!"

She held up three fingers and Leo squinted at them.

"...Seven?"

"OH NO!"

She grabbed his face in both of her hands and turned it gently from side to side, checking his eyes, his nose and his jaw, and her own face was so close to his that her purple hair fell down around them both like a curtain.

"Okay, okay, your nose isn’t broken," she muttered frantically. "That’s good, that’s really good... Your pupils look fine, I think? I don’t actually know what human pupils are supposed to look like. Leo, blink twice if you can understand me...!"

Leo blinked twice, slowly.

The room had mostly stopped spinning, though everything still felt soft and fuzzy around the edges, like he was looking at the world through warm water and right in the middle of that fuzzy world was Vexa.

She was bent over him with her ponytail coming loose and her cheeks flushed pink from the spar, her cropped top had ridden up a little over her toned stomach, and her big worried eyes were locked on his face, and she kept saying his name over and over in that bright musical voice.

’Huh,’ Leo thought, staring up at her through the haze. ’She’s... actually really hot.’

Behind her, her long pink tail was swishing back and forth across the mat in nervous agitated sweeps, and the soft fluffy tip of it kept brushing right past his open hand.

SWISH! SWISH!

’Don’t,’ said the last sensible part of Leo’s brain, very quietly. ’Don’t do it, man... Do not grab the tail.’

The tail swished past his fingers again and the intrusive thoughts won as his hand closed around it.

"HYAAH?!"

Vexa froze solid, with her hands still cupping his face.

A sound came out of her that Leo had never heard from her before, a startled breathy little moan that broke halfway through into a squeak and her whole body shivered from the base of her tail all the way up to the tips of her ears.

"L-Leo?!" Her face went from pink to a deep glowing magenta in under a second. "W-what are you... that’s... that’s my t-tail... that’s really... hnn...!"

Still dazed and not entirely sure what he was doing, Leo ran his thumb slowly along the soft fur near the tip.

"Hyaa... ah... s-stop... w-wait... Leo, I don’t... I don’t know what’s happening...!"

Vexa’s ears went completely flat, her eyes went wide and glassy, and her knees started trembling on the mat while her hands slid uselessly down to his shoulders and gripped his shirt.

"It’s... it’s really sensitive, Leo... nobody’s ever... nobody’s ever touched it before... hnnngh...!"

’Oh,’ Leo thought, slowly, as the fog in his head started to clear. ’Oh no. Oh, that’s... that’s bad. That’s really bad... Why am I still doing it?’

His thumb moved again and Vexa let out another little squeak that echoed off the high ceiling.

HISS!

The door to the training room slid open.

Harper stepped inside, wiping grease off her hands with a rag and already talking.

"Hey, cat-girl, do you know where you keep the spare injector seals? Because the ones in the shop are the wrong size for the..."

She stopped.

She looked at Leo, flat on his back in the middle of the mat with a red mark blooming across his cheek.

She looked at Vexa, kneeling over him with her hands fisted in his shirt, her face glowing magenta and her ears plastered flat against her skull.

She looked down at Leo’s hand, still wrapped firmly around the pink tail and for three long seconds, nobody in the room moved then Harper slowly folded her rag in half, tucked it into her back pocket and clicked her tongue.

"Tsk tsk..."

That was all she said.

She turned around, walked back out through the door and let it slide shut behind her.

HISS... CLICK!

Leo let go of the tail as if it had suddenly caught fire.

Vexa scrambled backward off the mat on her hands and knees with her tail clutched protectively against her chest in both arms, and she sat there staring at him with her face so red it looked painful.

"I..." she said.

"Yeah," Leo said, staring at the ceiling.

"You..."

"Yeah."

"Harper..."

"Yep," Leo said, and covered his face with both hands. ’I’m going to die... Harper’s going to tell everyone, and then I’m going to die. Aoi’s going to look at me... Elena’s going to say something. Chloe’s going to... oh no, Chloe...’

It took both of them a good five minutes to recover enough to look at each other again.

Vexa recovered first, mostly by pretending very hard that nothing had happened, and she sat cross-legged on the mat with her tail tucked firmly underneath her and her cheeks still faintly pink.

"So," she said, clearing her throat. "Um... You can fight a little. That’s good but you’re slow, Leo... Really slow. If a Federation boarding team ever gets inside your ship, you’re going to need more than flying and that scary space-cutting thing."

Leo sat up carefully, rubbing his throbbing cheek.

"Yeah... I figured that out when you knocked my brain out of my head."

"So I’ll train you," Vexa said firmly, and then her ears perked up a little. "If you want me to, I mean... I’ve got everything here. Weights, bags, sparring gear... We can start right now."

Leo looked at her, and then over at the racks of weights along the wall.

’She just punched me so hard I saw seven fingers,’ he thought. ’Yeah... I definitely want her teaching me that.’

"Alright," he said. "Let’s do it."

Vexa’s tail slipped out from under her and gave a happy little wag before she caught it and tucked it back in, glaring at it like it had betrayed her.

She started him on the weights.

Leo walked over to the bar she pointed at, wrapped his hands around it and lifted, braced for it to be heavy, and it came up off the rack so easily that he nearly threw it over his own head.

CLANK!

He stared at it.

"Uh... Vexa? How much is this?"

Vexa leaned over to read the marking on the plates.

"Ninety kilos..."

’Ninety?’ Leo thought, holding it up in front of his chest without even shaking. ’Back on Earth, I could barely do sixty... This has to be the levels. Level 8... my body’s actually changed.’

Vexa walked over and tapped his elbow with two fingers, nudging it into place.

"Elbows in," she said, suddenly all business. "And breathe out when you push, not before... If you hold your breath, you’ll see stars again, and I don’t want to explain to your girls why you fainted twice in one day."

"Once was your fault..." Leo pointed out.

"Once was your guard’s fault," Vexa corrected, and her ears twitched smugly.

He grinned and set the bar down, then grabbed a heavier one, and that one went up easily too.

CLANK!

...And then a heavier one.

CLANK!

"Leo," Vexa said carefully. "Maybe slow down a little..."

"I’m fine," he said, completely carried away, and he grabbed the biggest bar on the rack, hauled it up onto his shoulders and stood up with it, and for one glorious second, he felt like he could lift the whole estate then his knees wobbled.

His balance tipped backward, his feet slid on the mat, and the weight carried him straight down onto his back.

CRASH!

The bar hit the safety rails with a deafening clang, and Leo lay underneath it staring up at the ceiling for the second time in twenty minutes.

Vexa walked over and looked down at him with her arms crossed and her tail swaying slowly behind her, and she nodded very seriously.

"There’s work to be done..." she said.

Dinner that evening was out on the long terrace under strings of glowing vines, and Ollo the cook sang the whole time he carried the plates out.

There was roasted something that tasted a little like chicken, bowls of bright orange sun-melon, warm flatbread and a spicy red sauce that made Harper’s eyes water and Camila beg for the recipe.

Everyone was talking at once about their day.

Everyone except Vexa, who sat at the far end of the table and refused to look anywhere near Leo, and Harper, who sat right across from him and kept grinning into her food.

"So, Cap," Harper said casually, tearing a piece of flatbread in half. "How was training...?"

Leo choked on his water.

KHH-KHH!

"It was fine..." He managed.

"Yeah? Learn anything new?" Harper’s grin got wider. "Pick up any... new skills?"

At the end of the table, Vexa’s tail shot straight up into the air and then went rigid, and she stuffed an entire piece of sun-melon into her mouth so she wouldn’t have to say anything.

Aoi looked from Harper to Leo to Vexa, and her eyebrows rose slowly behind her glasses.

"Did something happen?" she asked.

"Nope..." Leo said quickly.

"Nothing at all..." Vexa said through a mouthful of melon.

Harper leaned back in her chair, took a long sip of her drink and looked Leo dead in the eye.

"Tsk tsk," she said.

Leo seriously considered walking straight off the edge of the cliff.

That night, the whole estate went quiet under a sky full of strange stars and two small moons.

Leo was lying on the wide bed in his suite with the glass wall open to the sound of the sea when his door slid open and Chloe padded in without knocking, the way she always did.

She climbed onto the bed, crawled over him and settled on his lap with her knees on either side of his hips, and her small cold hands came up to rest on his shoulders.

"I’m hungry..." she said simply.

"I know," Leo said, and tilted his head to the side for her.

Chloe leaned in and brushed her bangs out of the way, and her breath ghosted cool against the side of his neck for a moment before her eyes flushed red and her teeth sank in.

SHLK!

The familiar sharp sting came first, and then the warm heavy pull as she drank with her lips sealed against his skin and her fingers curling tighter and tighter into his shoulders.

Leo’s breath caught.

It always happened when she fed from his neck.

The slow pull of her mouth and the soft little sounds she made against his throat sent a hot shiver straight down his spine, and his whole body tensed up under her.

’Every time,’ he thought, staring up at the ceiling with his face going hot. ’Every single time... Stay calm, man. Stay calm. Think about engines. Think about Harper and think about Elena too...’

It didn’t help at all.

Chloe made a small satisfied hum against his neck as she drank, and she shifted a little closer on his lap while Leo had to grip the sheets with both hands.

’It makes me really hard...’

Then she stopped.

Chloe lifted her mouth away from his neck, and her red eyes opened all the way.

"E-eh...?"

She sniffed his collar, once then again, and then she leaned in and sniffed his shirt and his jaw and the side of his face before she reached down, picked up his hand and sniffed his fingers too, while her small face went completely still.

"Cat." she said.

Leo’s stomach dropped.

"Chloe, I can explain... We were sparring, and she hit me, and I was kind of dizzy, and then her tail was just... there..."

He realized as he said it that the explanation was making things worse, and he stopped talking.

Chloe didn’t say anything at all.

She just stared at his hand with her red eyes gone cold and narrow and her lips pressed into a thin flat line, and the silence stretched out so long that Leo could hear the waves crashing against the rocks three hundred meters below then she lay down on top of him.

She stretched out on his chest and began to rub her cheek against him... against his hands first, then his wrists, then his neck, then his jaw, burying her face in his collar and dragging her hair back and forth across his skin like she was painting over something she didn’t like.

She did his hands twice, and then once more for good measure, rubbing her cheek against each of his fingers one at a time.

When she was finally satisfied, she settled down on his chest with her ear pressed over his heart and her small fingers curled into his shirt, and she let out a long contented sigh.

"Mine~" she murmured, already half asleep.

"Yeah," Leo said softly, and rested his hand on her back. "Yours... You really do have a lot of strange tendencies..."

He lay awake for a long time after that, listening to her slow breathing and the sound of the sea, and waiting for his heart to finally calm down.

Leo thought about Camila crying in the greenhouse, and Harper talking to the engines, and Elena coming out of the spa two hours later looking like a completely different person.

’Today was... actually really fun,’ he realized. ’Just a normal day. The first one since the sky broke... I forgot what that even felt like.’

He looked out through the open glass at the two small moons hanging over the violet sea.

Tomorrow was the race.