She was safe, Steven was glad she was safe again, back in the Ship. When Doc Holiday had rode off with her as some kind of hostage, well he'd feared the worse. After all the history books had painted the Old West and the men who lived in it as pretty rough fellas. But to his and the Doctor's relief, Dodo had come back to them unharmed and with a famous shootout behind them, the Ship was in flight again and everything was just how it was. Except that it was not the same. This relief he felt was not only tied to a friendship with to the chirpy young woman. It was time he admitted it to himself at least, his feelings were growing more intense, at least more physical.
Maybe it was because he had been alone for such a long time. First a prisoner in a zoo for the scientific interest of robots, then flung into a new stream of adventures with this mercurial old gent. He'd barely known that couple that had accompanied the Doctor when they'd first met. And Vicki, well she'd been a kid in spirit, pretty and bright, but surprisingly immature in other ways. When Dodo had arrived, she'd seemed cut from the same cloth but he had soon realised she had seen a bit more of life, had experienced a bit more in the coffee bars of her Northern city.
True she didn't look much like the kind of tall, curvy girls he'd chased after in his space pilot days in the spaceport bars. But lately he'd been admiring her short, slim figure and her sweet face with its toothy grin. When she'd started wearing that red T-shirt with the large O across it, he liked the way it accentuated her small nicely proportioned breasts. She was definitely a girl of the Swinging Sixties, but that cowgirl outfit looked great on her, it was good to see more of those legs. He found himself hoping she would keep wearing skirts, shorter ones preferably.
Steven sighed and stretched out on the sleeping couch, which silently tried to accommodate him. His room aboard the Ship was pretty spartan, partly because of his military upbringing. Mostly because aside from HiFi, the toy panda good luck charm he'd kept from his imprisonment on Mechanus, now sitting on top of a plain white chest of drawers, he had never been much of a souvenir collector. Even on journeys as strange as this one. He closed his eyes and tried to rest but found more images of Dodo Chaplet appearing. Her legs in those shorts, that toothy grin, remembering her holding his chest tight when the deadly electricity was crackling up from the floor. He felt himself growing hard and his hand moved down to feel it. Dammit, he wasn't some teenage kid wanking in his bedroom over unobtainable holovid stars! He swung his legs off the bed. He was wearing a set of black jeans and a grey T-shirt he'd found in one of the drawers. Opening the bedroom door, he absently decided to take a walk.
He didn't have a conscious destination in mind, but he soon realised which way he'd come when he heard a cry of panic. Running down the white corridor, he made a left turn and saw Dodo's cowgirl skirt lying on the floor in a heap, outside her bedroom door. "Who's that," he heard her call out with a faint tremor.
"It's me of course! Who'd you think would walking about here?" he retorted, "What's going on? Are you hurt?"
"No, it's just - there was a spider in my skirt! It must have got in just before we left Tombstone." He poked the skirt with his bare foot. "Careful!" she warned.
