She said, but you already knew that. "So why do you think it's more worth it for me to have you owe me, than to turn you in for the reward? You know, like I normally do for a living."
It wouldn't be correct to say you half-smiled, or that she smirked at you with a hand suggestively on her hip, but that would translate the sense of it better to someone without a ship's senses. Human-ships show emotion in posture and expression as naturally as all human bodies, you've found since you matured into a pilot. Valoria Vertigo, the bounty hunter you've just offered yourself to, helped you into this maturity, and you feel a tingling thrill from outer chrome to inner muscle, remembering some parts of that apprenticeship. From your sense of her, she's thinking about the same thing, and you know what she wants.
"I'll be yours again," you said. "Just like before. As long as you want."
There wass a buzz of radar over your skin, somewhere between a caress and someone saying "Hmmmm" in a drawn out way. Then she said, "You've no need of a second apprenticeship, you need to disappear or they'll kill or imprison you. I've no need of an apprentice."
Her voice, from audio to the slight modulations of the laser-transceiver signal carrying it, dripped with arousal, so you could tell she was still enjoying teasing you. She wanted you to spell it out.
"One becomes a slave in situations where one would otherwise have died," you said. You trembled and tried to hold onto the urge to rev your thrusters and get closer. With an effort, you gently back off a little instead, showing the kind of bashful vulnerability you know drives her wild. "That's how the old pre-starship peoples did it, right?"
"I trade in bounties, little barbarian," she said, drifting closer, almost to docking range. "Not slaves."
"I don't want you to trade me," you told her, and though it was the right thing to persuade her, there was no acting in the way your voice trembled. "I'm saying you'll own me."
You felt her docking port sync up with yours, and mate, and then the startling grip of her remote-command-override accepting your offered key pairing, a controlling hand right in your systems, just as you were sure her hand would soon be tangled in your hair. As you realized your original lungs were breathing too fast, and you could hardly regulate your ventilation to compensate, it was almost redundant when she said, right inside your mind as a direct system message, "I accept your terms. You're lucky you're so cute, you know."
Responding to wordless system instructions, you slip out of the acceleration couch to prepare yourself and meet her. You're thinking as you do it's more that you're lucky the best people-smuggler you know is a top with a crush on you. Then, when her original flesh is standing over yours, in your shell you just shared with her, you can admit to yourself: it was always mutual. This running from the law situation was just your excuse.
