Samwell had not yet returned to the luxurious suite they were sharing. Matthys had made it back first, stopping only long enough to change before finding himself once again staring at the PADD Alim had given him with his Starfleet Academy acceptance information.
His mind refused to slow. Every possibility led to another. Every decision created three more. It was exhausting, but it was how his mind had always worked whenever something significant happened. Normally he would lose himself in a painting or spend time pruning plants to settle his thoughts. Most times, that worked.
Tonight, nothing seemed to.
The villa door slid open to the sound of the ocean and the smell of salt, and Samwell walked in still tasting the wind.
The hydrosailing had been extraordinary. For two and a half hours, there had been nothing in his head except the pull of the sail, the slap of the hull against the chop, and Marco’s cheerful instructions shouted over the spray. His arms ached. His hair was stiff with dried seawater. His skin was warm and tight from the sun, and somewhere on the left side of his ribs there was a bruise forming from where the boom had caught him on a bad tack. He felt, for the first time in weeks, genuinely and uncomplicatedly alive.
Whatever had happened on the dock beforehand, the ocean had taken it and carried it out with the tide, at least for now.
He dropped his bag by the door, kicked off his shoes, and wandered through the living space towards the bedrooms, peeling off his salt-crusted shirt as he went.
“Matty? I’m back. You would not believe how fast those boats go. I nearly capsized twice, and I am absolutely booking another session tomorrow.”
It took Matthys a moment to realize Samwell was standing in the doorway of his room. He had barely registered that he was naked, fully exposed and hadn’t gotten dressed yet as intended. Samwell had seen just about everything over the years, so that part didn’t faze him. The only thing Matthys reacted to was the PADD. He quickly tossed it into his open luggage bag on the bed before Samwell could make out what was on the screen.
Samwell leaned against the doorframe and let his eyes travel from Matthys’s face to his bare feet and back up again with the slow, theatrical deliberation of a man conducting a formal inspection.
“Well,” he said, folding his arms across his own bare chest. “I can see someone has been taking their tanning very seriously on this holiday.” He tilted his head with an appreciative smirk. “Not a single white patch anywhere, Matty. Nowhere. Impressive commitment. Should I be concerned about what you’ve been getting up to on that private beach while I’ve been out?”
The joke landed exactly where he wanted it to, but even as the grin settled on his face, his eyes caught the movement. The PADD was tossed quickly into the open luggage bag. Too quickly. Matthys had many tells, and Samwell had catalogued most of them over the years, and that particular motion, the casual flick of the wrist designed to look like nothing, was the one he used when something was very much not nothing.
He tilted his head slightly, the grin softening into something more curious. “What was that?”
Matthys wasn’t quite ready to answer Samwell’s question.
“It’s… well… something I can talk to you about in our mud bath.” He offered a small, nervous smile. “I think I need this mud bath more than I have in a very long time.”
Almost immediately, though, Matthys noticed something wasn’t quite right with Samwell either.
He wasn’t a Betazoid, but he knew his best friend well enough to recognize when something was weighing on him. The usual warmth in Samwell’s expression seemed just a little dimmer than normal.
“You doing okay?” Matthys asked.
Samwell hesitated. It was only a fraction of a second, barely enough for most people to notice, but this was Matthys, and Matthys had always been able to read him the way Samwell could read a sensor array.
“Yeah,” he said. Then, because the word had come out too fast and too flat, he tried again. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just ran into someone on the beach earlier that I wasn’t expecting to see. Threw me off a bit.” He rubbed the back of his neck and offered a smile that was close enough to genuine. “Nothing a volcanic mud bath won’t fix. In fact, I think I need one almost as much as you apparently do.”
He nodded towards Matthys’s luggage, where the PADD had disappeared. “And you can tell me what you’re hiding in there while we soak. Deal?”
“Well. Let me get situated here and we can head out shortly.”
Matthys didn’t press the issue. He had a feeling whatever was bothering Samwell would find its way into the conversation soon enough.
“Right,” Samwell announced, clapping his hands together. “I need to get this salt off me before it permanently fuses to my skin.”
Without so much as a pause for modesty, he hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts, pushed them down, and stepped out of them, leaving them in a crumpled heap on Matthys’s floor. He straightened up, spread his arms wide, and turned slowly on the spot with the exaggerated poise of a man presenting the evening’s dress code.
“What do you think?” he asked, gesturing down at himself with complete sincerity. “Is this acceptable for dinner later, or should I accessorize?”
He held the pose for precisely two seconds, let out a laugh that echoed off the villa walls, and then bolted for the corridor, giving Matthys an entirely deliberate wiggle over his shoulder as he disappeared towards his own bedroom.
“Five minutes!” he called back, already halfway to the sonic shower.
The spa attendant who led them through the stone archway was, in Samwell’s professional estimation, almost certainly engineered in a laboratory. He was young, broad-shouldered, and built in a way that made the skinny white vest top he was wearing look like it was losing a structural argument with his chest. His shorts were equally minimal, white, and clinging to thighs that suggested he had never once skipped a leg day in his life. His hair was platinum blonde, cropped short at the sides and swept back on top, catching the last of the evening light like polished latinum.
“Right this way, gentlemen,” he said with a smile that managed to be warm and appraising at the same time, his gaze drifting briefly over the two of them as though their attire, which amounted to a towel around the waist and a pair of thin resort sliders each, was somehow still overdressed for the occasion. He held back a curtain of trailing orchids and gestured them through. “Private terrace, two cocktails on the ledge, towels and pillows provided. My name is Cassiel. If you need anything at all, and I do mean anything like a private massage afterwards, just press the call panel on the wall.”
His gaze lingered on both of them for a moment longer than strictly professional, and the smile he left them with was the kind that came with an unspoken invitation.
Samwell glanced sideways at Matthys the moment the attendant disappeared, eyebrows raised.
The private bathing area was tucked into the far corner of the resort’s spa grounds, screened from the rest of the terraces by walls of dense tropical foliage and tall, smooth-barked trees whose canopies filtered the last of the evening light into something amber and liquid. The bath itself was sunken into the natural rock, roughly oval, large enough for four but intimate enough for two, and filled with volcanic mud so dark and rich it looked almost black against the pale stone surround. Thin wisps of steam curled off the surface and drifted into the warm air. Beyond the low stone wall at the far edge, the ground dropped away towards the coast, and the ocean stretched out beneath a sky that was deepening from gold to violet, the first stars beginning to prick through above the horizon.
Two cocktails sat on the stone ledge beside the bath, something bright and local that the bartender had recommended with the same quiet confidence. A small stack of neatly folded towels waited beside them, along with two pillows in waterproof linen.
It was, in every measurable way, better than the holodeck.
They had stripped without ceremony, the way they always had, the way they had since a sickbay shift and a stolen afternoon had turned two strangers into whatever they were now.
Samwell lowered himself into the mud and felt it close around him like a warm, heavy embrace, rising up over his chest and settling against his shoulders. He sank back against the stone rim, tucked one of the pillows behind his head, and exhaled so deeply that he suspected he had been holding that particular breath since somewhere around stardate seventy-nine thousand.
Matthys settled in beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched beneath the surface, the contact easy and constant and entirely unremarkable to either of them. It was the same position they had always taken: side by side, shoulders pressed together, faces tipped towards whatever sky happened to be above them.
Except this sky was real. The mud was real. The warmth spreading through his muscles and the salt breeze drifting over the stone wall and the sound of the ocean somewhere below them in the gathering dark, all of it was real, and none of it was going to shimmer and dissolve when someone called for the arch.
Samwell closed his eyes, let his head fall back against the pillow, and for a few long, perfect seconds, said nothing at all.
Matthys felt the tension leave his body within moments of sinking into the warm volcanic mud. It wrapped itself around him like a comforting cocoon. There was nothing else in the universe quite like it.
Well…Almost nothing. Having Samwell there beside him somehow made the experience even better.
“I go first?” Matthys asked, more to confirm it with himself than anyone else.
“Alright.”
