#*rv

Joy

It all began after an incident just outside the Bridge that sent one man to the morgue and sent Spock to Sickbay. The Vulcan the first officer of the ISS Enterprise didn’t spend much time there. He rarely needed medical attention, not only because he was tall, strong, and intimidating on his own but also because he, like the captain, was usually accompanied by his personal guard. In this case, he’d been attacked from an angle and so failed to unsheathe his own dagger in time to avoid having his upper arm gashed by his attacker. He had debated on the necessity of visiting Sickbay at all after dispatching the man. The last thing Spock wanted to do was spend any time around that drunken butcher McCoy, especially since he always had something disparaging to say about Vulcans. But the bandage he’d wrapped around his arm quickly became saturated, green blood oozing down his sleeve and onto the floor, so it was with some reluctance he made his way to McCoy’s lair.

Happily, the doctor hadn’t been there at all. The sharp-tongued head nurse had taken charge in his stead. You would have thought, to Spock’s slight amusement, that she was the superior officer the way she ordered him to “strip” and to “sit down on the damn bed”. I don’t care what happened, and I’m not going to ask, she’d told him. In fewer than sixty seconds, she had staunched the bleeding and rebandaged his wound much more competently and securely than he had.

Spock spent that brief time considering Christine Chapel. The way her platinum-blonde hair curled subtly around her chin framed her long features perfectly. He had a very un-Vulcanlike preference for blonde, human women, and there were plenty such women aboard if he wanted to admire one from afar...or, more improbably, take one as his lover. Until now, however, he could count the number of encounters he’d had with this blonde crewman on one hand. He rarely had any reason to be here, and he avoided interacting with McCoy whenever possible. Her work in Sickbay likewise kept her quite busy. There was always someone who needed to be metaphorically stitched up and sent back into the violent world that was the Enterprise. In short, their paths seldom crossed.

Something about the curiosity and low-level, thrumming excitement he’d felt when Christine Chapel’s fingers skimmed against his skin made him take particular notice now. He had remained seated on the bed for a few more moments after she had dismissed him. His deep-set brown eyes met her crystalline blue ones as she said, “Well, are you waiting for an official discharge, Commander? I’d advise you to leave while you can.”

Flexing his wounded arm, he picked up his stained and discarded uniform shirt from the floor and swept past her. At the door, he turned to get a better look at her long, shapely legs only to find her looking back at him as well. Her top teeth had sunk into her bottom lip. The gesture made her look surprisingly girlish and vulnerable, and the sight made Spock want nothing more than to turn back, pin her against the wall, and taste those lips himself. It wasn’t logical. It was...instinctual. Instead, he simply inclined his head and went on his way.

Since then, both Spock and Christine Chapel had made a point of manufacturing reasons to run across one another for a few seconds here and there. This contact always occurred while both were on duty, and they seldom exchanged anything but a heated glance or, on Christine’s part, an occasional smirk or a sassy one-liner. Both of them knew what being wanted looked like, and both could read it all over the other. But Spock also knew that the dance was just as alluring as the end result. As a Vulcan, he had a great deal of patience, even in a world that didn’t much value that virtue or any other. He would stay alive and wait.