She looks smaller in my clothes, softer, like someone took the sharpest knife in the drawer and wrapped it in something borrowed, and the knife is still a knife but the wrapping changes the way the light hits it.
My hand rests against the warmth of her back for longer than it should before I make myself reach for the phone.
System status runs across the small screen: all green, perimeter secure, comm channels nominal.
The overnight diagnostic completed with zero anomalies.
The numbers scroll, and the familiar rhythm of data assessment grounds me in the same reality I've inhabited every morning for years.
I look at her again.
The rainbow hair is crushed against the pillowcase in a pattern that shouldn't work aesthetically but does because Dar exists in defiance of conventional patterns.
Her mouth is slightly open. Her breathing is even.
The fingerless gloves are on the nightstand beside a half-empty can of Mountain Dew, and without them, her hands look smaller and younger than the rest of her.
The sheet has slipped to her lower back, and the line of her spine is visible in the low light. She came to my quarters last night because the workspace was empty and the corridors were cold and my room was closer than hers, and Dar choosing proximity to me over the independence of her own space is the kind of data I'm going to be processing for a while.
I checked my systems second this morning. The woman in my bed came first.
I don't know what that means yet, but I know it means something, and the something is big enough to scare me if I look at it directly.
I ease out of bed without waking her and pull on a shirt.
The mountain cold hits my skin the instant I leave the radius of her body heat, and the contrast is sharp enough to feel like a statement about what I'm walking away from.
I pad barefoot to the workroom because the overnight data needs review and the Committee's weapon doesn't observe personal milestones like "the morning after Dar voluntarily fellasleep in Tommy Hale's bed while wearing his spare t-shirt and looking like she belonged there."
Within a short time, I've reviewed the overnight logs, updated the perimeter analysis, and consumed enough coffee to qualify as a biohazard.
Dar arrives shortly after, showered, gloved, armored in her hooded sweatshirt and her flat expression.
She looks exactly like the professional version of herself and nothing like the version that curled into my pillow with her bare hands tucked under her chin and her breathing synced to the server hum.
She sits down at her station without comment, and neither of us mentions that her hair smells like my shampoo because she used my shower this morning. The domestic intimacy of that detail is sitting in the workspace between us like unexploded ordnance that we've mutually agreed to step around.
"Sleep well?" I ask, because apparently I enjoy detonating the ordnance I just decided to avoid.
"Your pillow smells like chocolate."
"That's either an observation or a complaint."
"It's data." She opens her laptop. "I haven't classified it yet."
The collar of my spare t-shirt is visible above the zipper of her hoodie. Gray cotton, crew neck, the shirt I grabbed from my drawer last night and tossed to her because she didn't have anything to sleep in.
The sight of that collar against her skin is making my brain perform calculations that are entirely about the mental image of Dar wearing only that shirt and her fingerless gloves and the expression she makes when she's deciding whether to let me close enough to touch.
"You're staring," she says without looking up.
"You're wearing my shirt."
"I'm wearing my hoodie. Your shirt is underneath it and technically invisible."
"And yet here I am, fully aware of it."
"That sounds like a you problem."