Chapter 6
Chapter six
Jen
It’s still dark outside and I do not remember the safehouse.
The truck stopping. Cold air, a door, Thaw's arms carrying me. Then nothing, because a body that has run on adrenaline and bond-current since a klaxon woke it has a floor, and I hit mine, and the dark took me whole.
I wake because I am burning.
Not warm. Not feverish. Burning — I come up out of sleep already moving, already turning my face into the pillow, already pressing my thighs together against a pulse that is low and deep and demanding and horribly familiar.
It feels like the drug.
But there’s no drug. The thought lands thin and fast. Nobody put anything in me. I have been asleep. No one touched me.
And that is what drops through me cold while the rest of me runs hot.
No one did this.
No IV. No aerosol. No broken bottle, no compound nine, no doctor with a valve.
I have been asleep in a safe bed and I have woken with my body climbing toward something it should not be able to climb toward on its own — and it is climbing anyway.
Faster than the drug ever made it. Sharper.
The pulse between my legs is already past want and into hurt, a deep aching emptiness that pulls with every heartbeat, and the heat is in my skin and my throat and behind my eyes and there is no one to blame for it.
It came from me. This is mine.
The door opens.
In the dim light from the hall, I see him. Thaw.
He is across the room before I have pushed up onto an elbow, and he does not look surprised. He felt it. The bond at my sternum is wide open and pouring and he felt me wake into this from wherever he was, and he came.
"Jen." He crouches by the bed. He does not touch me yet. His eyes go over me once — the flush, the shake in my hands, the way I cannot hold still — and his jaw sets. "It came back."
"There's no drug." My voice is already wrecked. "Thaw, there's no — nobody —"
"I know."
"Then why —"
"Because it's you." Plainly. No flinch. "This is your body, Jen. Not theirs. Yours."
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. The heat surges with the pressure, with the friction of my own thighs, with the sound of his voice. "I don't want it to be mine."
"I know that too." Gentle. Unmovable. "Doesn't make it less yours."
Behind him the door is still open, and Crull fills it.
He does not come in fast. He reads the room first, the way he reads everything, and his dark amber eyes find me on the bed. He crosses to the other side of the bed and lowers himself down, and the heat lunges toward him too, toward the warmth coming off him, and I hear myself make a sound.
And in the doorway — Harek.
He does not come in.
He stands in the frame of it with one shoulder against the jamb, bright green eyes on me, and the forming thread under my ribs pulls tight the second I register him there. He does not move toward the bed. He does not move away.
"Harek can go," Thaw says. Quiet. To me, not to Harek. "If you want the room smaller. Say it and he goes."
I look at Harek.
He looks back, and he does not ask for anything, and the thread between us is unfinished and aching, and I know he will leave the second I say the word, and that leaving will cost him something.
"He can stay," I say.
Something moves through the thread. Bigger than relief.
"Tell me what you need," Thaw says, low, close to my ear. "Out loud. I'm not deciding this for you. I won't. You tell me, and it happens, and nothing happens that you don't tell me."
That is what he is doing. He could decide right now. He is not doing that. Instead he is asking me.
My body needs him. My mind wants him. He is mine.
"You," I say. "And Crull. I want — " the word shakes coming out — "both of you."
"Okay." No surprise. A hand sliding into my hair. "Okay, Jen."
Crull’s huge hand settles on my hip, careful, asking, and when I push into it he takes it for the yes it is.
The need surges.
Fast. It comes up through me in a wave, and the room goes small and hot and close, and the only things in it that matter are the hand in my hair and the hand on my hip and the pulse between my legs that will not, will not stop.
I press into Crull's palm. I turn my face into Thaw's wrist.
Heat. Skin. The drag of my own breath. Their warmth on both sides of me and the bond wide open at my sternum and my body reaching —
— and it reaches for Harek.
He has not moved from the door. He has not touched me. But the forming thread under my ribs is live in a way it has never been, and my body — running hot, running open, every bond lit — sends want down that thread too. Toward the steady one in the doorway.
I want him.
I make a sound that is half his name.
Harek goes very still in the door and his three-note purr starts up in his chest.
He felt me. The thread runs both ways, and whatever just came down it, he caught. His green eyes are wide. His hand has closed on the jamb. He does not come in. He does not take a step.
Thaw's hand stills in my hair.
He felt where the heat went.
Thaw turns his head and looks at Harek in the doorway, then back at me, and there is no anger anywhere in him — not in his face, not in the bond. Only a steady understanding.
"That's allowed too," he says, quiet, for me. "When you're ready. When he's ready." His thumb moves against my temple. "Wanting him isn't something you have to be ashamed of in front of me. It isn't a betrayal. It's just true."
The heat rolls up over me.
Thaw's hand finds my jaw. Crull's hand on my hip slides under the hem of the sweatshirt and the heat of his palm on my bare skin pulls a sound out of me that is almost a whine.