Chapter 509 | Good For You, Captain

Chapter 509: 509 | Good For You, Captain

She should be angry about that. She should feel cheapened or jealous or any of the things her mother’s voice in her head said she should feel. But standing in her shower with soap running over her body and steam curling around her, all Misato felt was relief.

She didn’t have to pretend anymore. She didn’t have to maintain distance or professional boundaries or any of the walls she’d built between herself and the people she led. Jace had looked at her like she was worth wanting, and he knew about the others, and he wanted her anyway, and that was terrifying and freeing in equal measure.

Misato’s hands moved down her stomach, over the muscles she’d earned through eight years of combat training, across the curve of her hips where the soap ran in white streams. She washed her thighs, her calves, the space between her legs where the water rushed warm and constant. She was thorough. She was always thorough. Cleanliness was a form of control, and control was the only thing that had ever kept her sane.

But her mind kept drifting back to the tree line. To the way his shirt had felt bunched in her fists. To the specific angle of his jaw when he’d pulled back to look at her, pupils blown wide, breathing hard, looking at her like she was something worth memorizing.

He’d died. Twice, according to the medical reports Belle had shown her in the recovery tent. His heart had stopped in the back of a transport while medics worked and Belle screamed at them from the doorway. He’d come back both times, because Jace Monroe apparently treated death as an inconvenience rather than a destination, but he’d still died, and Misato had stood in that recovery tent for three hours watching the monitors and counting his heartbeats because she couldn’t look away.

She hadn’t cried. She didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried since she was eleven years old and her father had told her that tears were weapons for people who didn’t have better options, and Misato Ayame always had better options.

But she’d wanted to. Standing over Jace’s hospital bed with the machines beeping and Belle’s spreadsheet open on a tablet and Naomi curled in a chair by the window, Misato had wanted to cry more than she’d wanted anything in years.

She’d kissed him instead. Not then. Not in the hospital with witnesses and complications. But this morning, when she finally had him alone, when she finally had the words and the opportunity and the courage to admit what three days of believing he was dead had cost her.

Misato turned off the water and stood in the steam for a moment, dripping, breathing, letting the silence settle over her like a blanket. Her reflection in the fogged mirror was a blur of lime green and bare skin, curves and muscles and all the parts of herself she’d spent so long trying to make invisible.

She reached for her towel and dried herself with the same thoroughness she’d used to wash. Her hair first, wringing out the water, then her face, her neck, her arms. She dried her breasts carefully, lifting each one to get the water from the undersides, and she thought about hands that weren’t hers doing the same thing.

His hands. Jace’s hands. The callused palms that came from spear work and the gentle fingers that came from whatever he did with the other women in his life. She’d seen those hands cup Naomi’s face through a window once, so gentle it had made Misato’s chest hurt, and she’d looked away and told herself she didn’t want that.

She did want that. She wanted it so badly she could taste it, metallic and sharp on the back of her tongue, and she’d wanted it for weeks without admitting it to anyone including herself.

The towel moved down her body. Her stomach. Her hips. The space between her legs where she was still warm from the water and something else, something that had been building since the tree line and showed no sign of stopping.

Misato wrapped the towel around her hair and walked naked into her bedroom. The blinds were closed but the afternoon light still filtered through, painting stripes of gold across her bed and her dresser and the mirror on the wall where she could see herself again, full and bare and impossible to hide from.

She looked at her body. Really looked, the way she hadn’t in years.

Lime green hair piled on top of her head in the towel. Sharp features, dark eyes, the face that scared first-years into behaving and made faculty meetings slightly more tolerable. Shoulders that had carried responsibility since she was old enough to hold a weapon. Arms that had dragged unconscious squad members out of failed gates. Hands that had killed things and healed things and commanded things for so long she sometimes forgot they could do anything else. ℯℯ𝑙.

And below that. The parts she’d hidden. The parts she’d compressed and bound and concealed because the world had told her they were distractions, liabilities, invitations.

Her breasts hung heavy against her ribs, pale skin marked with faint lines where the compression bras had dug in over the years. Her waist curved inward above hips that flared wide, genetics she couldn’t outrun no matter how hard she trained. Her thighs were thick with muscle and soft where the muscle ended.

She was not what people expected when they heard the word captain. She was not lean or androgynous or any of the shapes that combat supposedly demanded. She was built like someone’s fantasy of what a woman should look like, and she’d spent her entire adult life trying to make people see past that to the threat underneath.

Jace had seen both. That was what had broken her. He’d looked at her on that cliff edge and seen the captain and the woman, the threat and the softness, all of it at once without trying to separate the pieces into something more manageable.

Nobody had ever done that before.

Misato pulled on clean underwear. A sports bra, because old habits died hard. Loose pants and a tank top that she only wore in private, soft and thin and the kind of thing her mother would have called inappropriate. She toweled her hair until it was only damp and then she sat on the edge of her bed and picked up her phone.

Three messages from Belle about tomorrow’s gate rotation. Two from Jordan asking if he could skip afternoon drills because his legs had apparently filed for bankruptcy. One from Naomi containing a single line.

"You looked happy this morning. Good for you, Captain."