Atlas #2
There's a room in the back of Fulmen Hall I've all but lived in this year.
A bed, not a cot. A real one, because at some point I stopped pretending I went anywhere else.
I get her through the door and the storm keeps going without me.
It doesn't need me to stand in it now, it'll run itself for an hour, which is the whole point.
I don't want to think. I want the storm doing my thinking for me, out there where I can't reach it, while I do something else entirely in here.
The window over the bed throbs blue with every strike. I don't ground the charge. I could. I know how. I let it ride my skin instead, let it crawl my arms and snap off my knuckles, because tonight I don't give a damn about being the careful one. I've been careful my whole life over a lie.
I get the soaked shirt off her. My hands aren't steady and I don't try to make them.
Her clothes come off wet and difficult, peeled down her legs and dropped to the floor, and we both half-laugh at how impossible it is, the one warm thing in all of this.
Then she's bare under me on the bed and the laugh's gone out of both of us.
She's warm everywhere the rain made her cold.
That's the first thing my hands tell me, ahead of my eyes, the heat of her under all that wet.
I put my mouth to her throat. Her collarbone.
The soft underside of one breast. I close my lips around her nipple and she arches up into it, a sound going straight down my spine and into the charge.
"Look at me," she says, fingers twisting into my hair, dragging my head up. Her eyes are steady. Rain still runs off the ends of my hair onto her skin. "I'm here. I'm choosing this. Say you hear me."
"I hear you."
"Then stop being gentle with me."
I move down her body. Hook her thighs up over my shoulders and put my mouth on her.
She's already wet—not from the rain, this is hers—and the taste of her undoes something I've kept shut since Oklahoma.
For a few seconds there's nothing in my head at all.
No mom. No registry. No number in a notebook.
Just her, and how good she tastes, and the sound she makes when I get it right.
I work my tongue against her clit. Slow, then not slow. Her hips buck up and I pin them with one forearm and keep going.
The bond opens before I'm ready for it. Her pleasure lands behind my sternum a half-beat before her body shows it, heat arriving from the wrong direction, from outside me. I feel her climbing in my own chest the same moment her thighs start to shake against my ears.
"There," she gasps. "Right there—don't stop, don't you dare—"
I don't stop. I push two fingers into her while my mouth stays on her clit.
Curl them up to the place that breaks her voice.
She comes apart on my hand and my tongue at once.
The window cracks across with a strike that lands right on the hall, blue light flooding the room, thunder in the same breath.
I drink the sound of her down. I don't lift my head until she's pushing at my shoulders, too sensitive, swearing at me and laughing while she does it.
Then I'm up over her. I take myself in hand and line the head of my cock against her, right where she's wet and open for me.
Outside—or maybe it's not outside anymore, maybe it's in the walls now—thunder rolls under everything, steady enough that it's stopped feeling separate from my own pulse.
She reaches down and wraps her fingers around the base of my shaft and guides me in herself, her hips tilting up to meet it.
I feel every inch go in. The give of her.
Tight enough that she has to work to take the thickest part of me.
Her body opens around my cock a fraction at a time, until there's nothing left to give.
The heat of her closing around me runs through me top to bottom, the same current finding a different ground.
It's the best I've felt in ten years that didn't come with a price tag on the other side of it. I want to stay right here and never go back to being the guy from an hour ago.
She's tight. Slick. I hold there a second just to feel it, buried in her to the hilt. Her breath is ragged against my jaw. Her heartbeat doubles in my chest where the bond keeps it—two hearts going too fast, and for a second I can't tell whose is whose.
"Don't be careful," she says, reading me like she always does. Her legs come up and lock around my waist. "Not tonight. I don't want careful. I want you."
So she gets me.
I move, and she meets me, stroke for stroke. My cock drags almost all the way out of her before I drive back in to the hilt. Again. Again. Her nails drag down my back hard enough to leave marks I'll find tomorrow.
The pace climbs and the storm climbs with it, every drive of my hips a strike somewhere over the green, the room going blue, dark, blue.
I don't ground the charge. It stands off my skin and arcs where we're pressed together, current jumping between her breasts and my chest. It should hurt.
It doesn't. Nothing about this hurts, which scares me more than the storm does.
She gasps and pushes up into it instead of away.
Of course she does. She's never once flinched from any part of me—not the storm, not the grief, not this.
"Atlas." My name, wrecked. "Atlas—harder—"
"I've got you."
I give her harder. I don't think about my mom.
I don't think about anything—that's the gift of this, the only one I've let myself take all night.
I get a hand between us, my thumb on her clit, and she's climbing again.
I feel it gather up the thread before her body shows it, pulling tight and low in her.
I chase it. I want her over the edge before me. I want to feel her go first.
She does. The lightning goes with her. A strike close enough to shake the floor. The lights blow out down the corridor. The room goes pure white, then pure dark.
She clenches around me. All of me. Pulsing tight around my cock.
It's too much and it isn't enough, both at once, and I don't want it to stop, and it's going to anyway.
That's what finishes me. I drive in deep and hold there. I come with my face pressed into her neck, the thunder landing right on top of us, storming somewhere over the green at the same time it's storming in me, the whole thing emptying out of me into her at once.
For one second there's no grief in me anywhere. No mom. No registry. No name in a notebook. Just heat, and her, and the rain on the roof. Then the second ends and all of it comes back—but I had it. For one second, I had it.
I don't feel the mark burn. I don't feel anything but her.
After, the rain eases. I let it. It goes from arriving to falling to a normal gray drizzle, and the room's dark except for the dim from the window, and she's tucked against my side with her hand flat on my chest like she's keeping count of my heart.
The mark throbs on the back of my hand, raw and red where the boundary's been chewing on it the whole time.
I look at it. The skin's blistered along the curve of the half moon, same pattern it always blisters in, and I'll wear it for days and tell no one where it came from.
I'd pay a lot more than that and not think twice.
Somewhere across campus the other three felt the bond go bright and knew one of us reached her tonight, and knew it wasn't them, and had to lie in their own beds with the thing on their hands and endure it. I should feel bad about that. I will, tomorrow. Tonight I don't have it in me.
"I keep thinking I should feel different now that I know," I say. The words come slow. "I don't. I just know who to point at. And I want to break every single one of them in half."
"That's not nothing."
"No." I turn my hand over so the burn faces down, away from both of us. "It's not nothing."
She shifts, props herself up, looks at me in the storm-light with rain still drying in her hair.
She doesn't tell me it'll be okay. That's how I know she's the real thing.
Anyone else would have said it by now, would have reached for the soft lie, and she just looks at me and lets the truth stand in the room with us, ugly and ours.
"I'm going to burn it all down," I tell her. Quiet, this time. Not a threat thrown at a sky. A fact. "Catalina. The Administration. Whoever decided my mom was worth more to them as an experiment than as a fucking person. All of it."
She doesn't promise me it'll work. She doesn't promise me I'll come out the other side. She holds me tighter, her arm across my chest, her forehead against my jaw, and she lets me mean it.
Outside, the last of the thunder rolls off east and goes quiet over the river. I made that. I'll make worse before this is done. Good.
She's here anyway.