Chapter Text
Stardate 1997.9
His hands. His hands.
All Christine Chapel could feel were his hands. They glided too easily against her back, along and across, searching. His hands stopped only when they found purchase on the curve of her waist. There and then, his fingers pressed into her crisp, white uniform, rendering her covered flesh into putty. Chapel knew Vulcans possessed superior strength, but to feel it in Spock’s hands alone?
It was almost too much.
But if she dared to think of his lips… His lips.
No, she would be gone. She could only focus on his hands. That was enough, more than enough.
Spock’s hands were perfect, and a perfect distraction from his lips and the pleasurable twisting the nurse felt in her stomach. Chapel could ignore those feelings and the others that threatened to bubble up from under them. She just needed to hold on. Hold on.
Instinctively, Chapel’s own hands moved, searching, as Spock’s had, for that hold. Her right palm pressed against Spock’s left shoulder. Deltoid. Trapezius. The names of the muscles Chapel’s fingers brushed against as she searched swirled about her head. Unfortunately, the medical exercise did little to ground her.
His hands. He’s engaged. His arms. His lips-
Her left hand desperately continued its grappling for a hold. It traced up Spock’s arm. Brachioradialis. Triceps brachii. Deltoid , again, the slow sloping start of it and then the top curve. Trapezius , again, but higher, to the finer end at the base of the skull.
Early in her training, Chapel was taught to expect a more frigid touch from Vulcans. Perhaps their grip on logic was psychosomatically to blame for the medic testimonies of freezing fingers and icy veins. After all, Vulcan blood shed green and ran cold.
But Chapel found the skin of Spock’s neck surprisingly warm.
Just as she found with his hands. His arms. His lips. Him.
Against her better judgment or any judgment at all, Chapel surrendered herself to his warmth. To the feelings that bubbled and burst beneath the very surface his hands so gracefully touched. She allowed him to pull her closer, chest to chest. Chapel pulled too, just to press back.
His lips. Him. Him?
Chapel stayed still, eyes fluttering open slowly as Spock turned his head from hers. Pointed brows were slightly furrowed, framing his dark eyes with a look of…intrigue. Chapel almost read into his expression, into the way his gaze flicked across her face. She almost let her mind paint it as a lapse in the ruse he had concocted to foil the piracy plans of Captain Angel.
Perhaps Spock was surprised by Chapel, her hands, her lips. Maybe he wanted to pull her close again, shed the pretense. Perhaps this fake affair was rooted in some reality of a very buried feeling. Though, before she let herself even dare to entertain such a reading, the Vulcan’s hands fell away and his eyes shifted focus to the viewscreen.
“Oh, you guys are fun,” Angel scoffed, their voice as thin as their patience. “T’Pring, feel free to beam over here. Feel like you could straighten things out in about a minute.”
Straighten things out. Chapel took an unsteady breath before stepping out of the center of the bridge. A numbness rolled over her shoulders as she heard Spock and T’Pring initiate a Vulcan bond-breaking ritual. It was merely a ruse, a really, very good ruse. Straighten yourself out.