#bi!rey

People said that you were tough. Sand had polished your skin smooth, but yet your hard eyes were as rough as the jagged rocks that jutted out from underneath Jakku’s sandy landscape. You were a smuggler by trade, and Unkar Plutt often managed to obtain parts that you couldn’t find in other areas of the galaxy.

Well, not for as cheap, anyway.

As you headed away from your ship, you noticed a girl headed in your direction on the back of a speeder bike. You could tell by the shadow of a stick that stood against the silhouette that it was Rey who was coming towards you.

Rey, she had said when you had asked her name. Just Rey.

You had offered to give her a lift, trying to scope out where she was from, but the girl had remained quiet. Much too quiet for a girl who made a living scavenging for parts. In your experience, people liked to talk tale: adventure, scavenges, finds.

Rey was different, though. You knew without asking that Rey wasn’t born here. Rey was made of something different, cut from a different cloth. She could speak with the common jargon, but there was something underneath her accent that even Jakku’s turbulent weather hadn’t managed to bury.

If you didn’t know any better, you would have asked her if she had been from the Core Worlds.

If you were the type to ask questions.

You weren’t.

“Rey,” you say as she slows her speeder near you. You throw up an arm as Rey hops off her speeder, her caf-colored boots kicking sand this way and that as she shuffled her way towards you. Her staff was slung over one shoulder: you had offered a hefty staff for that stick once upon a time but Rey had refused you with such immediacy that you reasoned it must have been an heirloom. Behind her, she dragged a sack.

You didn’t have to ask what was in it.

“Looks like quite a haul today.”

“Y-yes.” Rey glances back at her bag, as she had momentarily forgotten that she was carrying anything at all. “Suppose so.”

Your thumb toys with your bottom lip as you look it over. Rey seems to watch the motion with muted interest, but you pay it no mind.

“Got anything worth selling?”

Rey glances from your mouth to your eyes and then back again before she seems to have snapped out of whatever daze she was in. “Some,” she says as she snaps back to the conversation. “Not worth more than a few half-portions today, I believe.”

“Let me take a look.”

“No, you don’t-”

“You’re skinnier than the last time I saw you.” You push your own canteen into her hands as you lean down to take a look at what she had brought, talking as you do so. “Unkar’s been restricting the rations he’s been giving out lately. Something to do with the First Order and some business they might have in the Outer Rim. I don’t know. I don’t ask questions, but you should probably get what you can now, before he makes his belt any tighter.”

“Thank you.” Rey looks at the canteen, gnawing at her lower lip. You can almost hear her thirst.

“Drink up,” you say. “I’ve got plenty more where that came from. You, obviously, don’t.”

Rey gives a small shrug as she relents, lifting the canteen to her lips as she drinks. You turn back to her sack as something small and chrome catches your eye.

“I like this,” you say as you turn it over in your hands. It was a small spherical object, chrome, with a small bronze peg sticking out one end. You couldn’t quite put a name to this part just yet, but you knew valuable when you saw it, and this was it.

“Take it.” The words are off Rey’s lips before she can stop them. You look up at her strangely, and Rey herself seems to understand the gravity of her own outburst. “Fair trade.” She waves the canteen. “For the water.”

“Food’s going to be scarce for a while,” you tell her, unable to keep the suspicion out of your voice. “You want me to just take it for some water? It’s not a luxury everywhere in the galaxy like it is here on Jakku, you know.”

“I know.” Rey seems to be searching for something, anything to say. “I just want you to have it, that’s all.”

“For this?” You toss the small object between your hands. “I don’t know, I feel like I should give you something else for it.”

“You don’t have-”

“Close your eyes.”

Rey lets out a small laugh as she glances around, but everyone is more or less going about their business. No one is paying attention to the two of you, standing in the middle of a junkyard.

Without waiting, you quickly lean forward and press your lips against hers. You can feel the brush of her eyelashes against your cheek as they flutter open. Your hand slips around the back of her neck, but she doesn’t even try to pull away. Instead, she runs the tip of her tongue along your bottom lip before she leans in to kiss you again, stepping a little closer until your bodies are flush against one another’s.

You don’t know how long the moment lasts, but you let Rey be the one to pull away first. She’s standing there with an almost dazed expression on her face before her eyes suddenly drop to the leather cuff on her wrists as she fiddles with it in a desperate attempt to remain nonchalant.

“Fair trade?” you ask as you hold up the bauble between your fingers.

Rey looks up at you, letting a sly grin slowly overcome her features.