![[I saw three
ships]](../2005-1icon.png)
Inside the locker room it's sweaty, almost humid, and outside it's raining. When the wind picks up the chill air comes through the cagerwire window and gooseflesh rises on Helo's arms and the hair on the back of his neck bristles. He wraps him arms around Kara's bare midsection and pulls her closer on his lap. "Frack, it's cold out there." She nods and takes a long drink of ale.
Riptide rattails him with a towel and Kara tumbles from Helo's lap and pulls herself to her feet. She picks up her beer and plugs the top with her thumb, giving the bottle an idle wiggle. "You wanna play?" she asks Rip. She shakes the bottle hard and lets loose a spray of foam and ale, and Rip swings the towel again and Helo makes a dive for Kara and they all end up on the floor. Kara wipes a blob of foam from her forehead and licks it off her finger. Helo grins.
"Get outta here, Riptide," Kara says. "Battle drill at eighteen hundred."
Rip pulls himself to his feet, wraps the towel around his bare ass and trudges off toward the showers. Helo rolls onto his back and Kara crawls on top of him and kisses him again. "You reek," she says, nuzzling his neck.
Helo closes his eyes and grabs at her shoulders, her breasts, all solid curves and muscle. She's no pine-scented doll herself, but he loves her musky sweaty smell, like blood and cigars. He touches her lower lip with his tongue and then sucks it a little, and she moans under his hands. He straightens out his legs on the tile floor and his shin collides with the bench. The noise echoes in the empty room. "That hurt," he says.
"Forget about it," Kara says, and she slides her hand between his thighs and curls her fingers around his balls.
"What am I going to tell my brother?"
Helo opens his eyes to the crotch of a fully clothed Lee Adama standing over him. "Move," Helo says. Lee does. Helo hoists himself up onto his elbows. "If you see Zak, by all means tell him to come join," Helo says, because he likes to watch the Adama kid squirm. When he looks at Kara, she's not smiling.
"What do you want, Apollo?" she asks, sucking her teeth.
Lee sits on the bench, and Helo sprawls more comfortably on the floor and lays a hand on Kara's thigh. "Seriously, Kara—"
She screws her face into a mocking grimace. "Seriously, Lee—"; she intones. Then she pulls herself to her feet, plants her hands on her hips and just stands there, naked and akimbo, sticking her tongue out at Adama. "Wanna take a shower with us?"
Helo opens his mouth to protest, but then decides not to bother. Lee Adama is a good-looking kid, and Helo will do what Kara wants. When she started dating Zak a couple weeks back, Helo came to see her.
"I just wanted to say that if this means we need to stop—"
Kara had shushed him. "You and I go way back, Helo," she had said. "I don't know about this Zak kid yet."
Helo, who knew that Kara had known the Adamas for years, had been to their picnics and funerals and slept in their beds, figured he'd better kiss her, and so he had. She was, after all, his flight instructor. She had kissed him back.
Now she snatches up her towel and heads for the shower without turning around, and Helo follows behind her because she's still his flight instructor and his dick's still hard. He can hear the squeak of Lee's boots as he follows too.
And then he's wet, and there's Lee Adama looking scared out of his mind, up against the wall of the shower all sleek pectorals and hard, muscled arms and a solid cock rising up under Helo's soapy touch. Kara bites Helo on the ear and takes the shower head down from its hook. She tosses it to him.
When he turns, she's arched her back against the wall and he aims at her square in the pelvis and shoots. Next to him, Lee makes a whimpering sound. Kara shimmies her ass against the tile, trying to get the shower spray to target that sweet spot. Helo perfects his aim and Kara groans, smacks her skull on the wall and then grabs for him and her chest is slippery against his and her breasts pop to the sides like slippery fruit.
Lee is brave enough to lay a hand on Helo's shoulder, steady enough to re-hang the showerhead at the same time, dangerous enough to probe Helo's ass with a couple soapy fingers. Helo kisses Kara, and she tastes like soap, like cigars and blood.
When Lee Adama graduated flight school Helo had already been flying vipers for a year. He remembers standing in the hangar deck with Kara, watching Lee tool outta there for his celebratory solo. "There's a kid who's gonna die at the stick of his Viper," Kara had said. It was high praise. Lee wraps an arm around Helo's chest, and Helo's disappointed when Lee's hand gropes for Kara's breast.
Then Kara's driving into him, reaching for his dick and shoving it into her, and Helo bites back a wail of pain which is readily replaced with pleasure. Lee throws down with both hands. His right arm's hooked over Helo's hip, gone to work in Kara's folds and he must have found something because Kara's moaning, "yes, Lee!" and Helo lays a palm on the tile wall and drives in, hard.
And Lee's some kind of ambidextrous madman and he's got a thumb up Helo's ass, and Helo clenches tight around him and Lee groans "oh, gods, Kara!" Helo can't keep his orgasm down any longer and he pulls away from Kara to finish under the hot spray of the showerhead.
Lee's taken over like they don't know Helo's gone, he guesses he's always known why Kara keeps him around, why she comes to his rack in the middle of the night and counts him as "free." He closes his eyes and inhales mentholated foggy air.
And so he is the last to notice Sharon. But all of a sudden Kara is laughing like a maniac, and Lee is glowering like an old soldier, and there's cold air stealing hot steam from the shower.
"Hey, guys," Private Valerii says.
"Wanna join?" Kara laughs, reaching out a slick, soapy leg. Sharon is in a grey x-top, white briefs, hairband, no socks. Legs bare and beautiful and all the fracking way down. Helo will remember her standing there, in her little white shorts with a hairbrush in her hand, every day from this moment on. Kara says, "Helo's aching; for you, aren't you, Helo?"
"Sharon?" Helo says, and in his mind he is suddenly fifty years old, retired under the weight of his medals and with this woman as his wife. It flashes in his brain in a way no dream ever has, like it's a video recording, preserved and played back perfectly from start to finish, a five second clip where Admiral Karl Agathon sits in a military home near Tycho, with Sharon Agathon perched on his knee, laughing that perfectly timed laugh as three little children, blonde as albinos, gallop gaily around the military standard furniture. He pushes past Kara, past Sharon, grabs a towel and heads for his rack in the barracks.
Two weeks later, Sharon shacks up with the Chief, and they think nobody notices. Helo never touches Kara Thrace again.
![[fin]](../2005-1banner.png)