CHAPTER 11 #2
I shift in his lap — I had not realized I was already in his lap.
Some bit of choreography happened underneath my attention.
The medallion at my sternum has slipped sideways and pressed cool against my collarbone, and Luca is somehow still in the room with us through a chain and an alloy and the small electric absence of him upstairs.
My thighs are over his thighs. The prosthetic hand has spread flat across my lower spine, span and weight of it deliberate, the human hand still cupped under my jaw.
The storm rolls a deep crack outside. Through the ducting, the solder iron hisses once more — cold contact — and then the soft electric click of Luca laying it back in the cradle.
He is one floor up. The bunker is still inhabited; the ventilation lays its warm dry exhale across the back of my shoulders, steady, indifferent, the building breathing for us all whether we are paying attention or not.
Adrian breaks the kiss and looks at me directly this time, not in reflection. His eyes are very pale, very steady. "You are not in a hurry," he says. "I am not in a hurry. The bunker is sealed. Take the time you want."
"I want the shirt off," I say.
"Yours or mine."
"Both."
He laughs — a single low huff of air, almost soundless, his face doing the spare, rationed thing it does instead of laughing, allowed for once the smallest room to become a sound. Marcus would have caught it. I am the second person in this bunker who has caught one of those.
He pulls my black shirt up over my head, careful with the cobalt ends where they tangle in the hem.
The medallion falls back against my breastbone as if Luca's grandmother put it there herself.
His eyes go to it and stay one beat — long enough to register the other man it belongs to, long enough to decide it is not his to move — and then he leaves it exactly where it lies.
His prosthetic forefinger traces the bra band — not into the cup, along the band, along the small thickened spot under the left strap where the chip rides.
He has felt it. Of course. He spent nine years learning to find things on bodies, and his hand reports what it finds with the quiet of a man who has filed worse intelligence in worse light.
"This stays on," he says. He has made it a statement so I do not have to make it a request.
"This stays on."
"All right."
The Vexis flight jacket comes off with one motion of the prosthetic.
The white cotton shirt under it is plain and clean.
I work the buttons. I am not fast. He waits.
Four buttons down and I see the scar — pink-edged, four inches across, a starburst on the lower left of his abdomen where the round meant for the defector he was covering went into him instead, three years and four months ago, in the Vexis Sector-3 job that took the arm with it and that Layer 1 has told me only the shape of, not yet the names.
I put my mouth on the scar.
He goes still. Completely still. The alloy at my back pauses for one full second, as if his cybernetics have re-allocated their power to the cardiovascular work of his actual chest. I feel his ribs expand and not contract. I lift my mouth.
"Adrian."
"Hold a moment. " Two notes lower than baseline. "I am — getting it back."
I press my forehead to his abdomen above the scar.
His human hand comes into my hair, gentle.
I count under my own breath without meaning to, the way he counts his finger calibration — one, two, three, four; three back — and by the time I am at three back his prosthetic returns warm against my spine.
"Up," he says, after the moment.
He pulls me back up his body, slow, until my mouth is against his again.
The kiss has lost some of its careful frame and become a thing with weight to it.
He kisses me the way you kiss someone who has just put a mouth on a thing on you that nobody has been allowed near in three years, which is what I have just done.
His mouth goes from my mouth to my throat, slow, his engineered palm flat at the base of my spine.
He is reading my body — pulse at the carotid, the small flutter at the hollow of my throat, the architecture of my collarbone under his thumb.
I have been touched in apology and in contract and once in something approaching genuine want, and never, in my whole life, by a man who treats my body as a structural problem he intends to honor.
I put my left arm up around his neck.
The inside of the left wrist comes against his shoulder.
The surgical scar. The hand-poked silver-wire tattoo I drew at sixteen on the second anniversary, off her old training files, half-faded since.
He pulls back and looks at the soft skin along the inside of my forearm.
I do not let men see the wrist. Every nerve I have tells me to take it back, and I make myself leave it where it is, open, against him.
He turns my arm out, slowly, with the prosthetic, and lifts it.
He puts his mouth on the inside of my left wrist.
On the scar.
A sound comes out of me that I have never made for anyone.
Small and broken and almost a word, not in any swear language I know.
He stops. Lifts his mouth a half-inch and looks at me — pale eyes, very still — and the brushed-bronze inner lattice at my back flares warm enough I feel it through the cotton of my own bra strap.
His prosthetic palm lifts off my sternum and hovers there, a question with no words in it. I push my breastbone forward into it. He resettles his hand against me, warm, and does not lift it again.
"You are allowed there," I tell him. "Keep going."
He kisses the scar again. Slow. Then the tattoo — the length of the silver-wire coil, all the way to the crook of my elbow. He lets the arm down across his shoulder and slides his human hand under the back of my thigh.
"Couch," I manage. "Here. Don't make me walk anywhere."
"Couch."
My skirt is the easy thing — soft, with a stretch panel; he pushes it to my waist. He works my underwear down and off one ankle, not the other; the strap catches at my left calf and stays. He looks at the catch, then up at me. "We will fix that later."
"Later."
His Vexis tactical trousers are a more complicated problem.
He works the buckle with the human hand, the prosthetic holding my hip; I shift up onto my knees to give him room.
He pushes the trousers down — no underwear; of course not, he is a man who has worn tactical for nine years — and he is hard against my thigh, warm, human skin of him at last, no cybernetic, only Adrian.
"Slow," he says.
"Slow."
I take him in slow. I am wet enough that the slide is not a difficulty, but he is more than I am used to, and the take is real and full and a little sharp at the first inch.
He pauses there and waits, engineered palm under my hip lifting me back a fraction, until the give in me catches up to him.
The full of him against the inside of me is enough, and I sink the rest of the way and brace my palm on his sternum above the starburst scar.
We do not move for a second. His pale eyes go almost colorless in the amber light.
The prosthetic stays under my hip. The human hand comes up to my left breast, careful around the strap and the chip, palm warm against me — and a sound leaves me I do not register the shape of, and I start to ride him.
The first time is slow.
The wanting arrives before I have the word for it: slow.
I had spent eleven years assuming a thing this real would be fast because fast is how you survive a thing you do not deserve to feel.
He does not let me have fast. He keeps the engineered hand firm at my hip and the human hand at my breast and holds my pace where he wants it — slow enough to wreck me on a long curve instead of a short cliff, slow enough that I have to feel each fraction of him land inside me and account for it before he gives me the next.
"Eliza."
His breath along my hairline. The engineered palm warming the length of my spine where it holds me. The storm outside the screen and the iron-whistle through the vents.
I come.
It is quiet — a thing my body does on the long curve of his pace and his low easy against my throat and the engineered palm sliding up my spine to brace my shoulder blades.
His teeth catch my lower lip just enough to remind me I have a body.
My right hand closes white-knuckled at his thigh, the way it closes around the mother-of-pearl knife in my pocket when I have nowhere safe to put my fear.
He sees the white at my knuckles. His hand presses at the small of my back, and I come down against him still full and shaking, his mouth at the side of my neck giving me the only correction he has: "Let go of it. Not me."
"Not you."
He starts again.
The second time he sets a different rhythm. Slow giving way, by degrees, to less slow. The engineered hand lifts me a little and lowers me, his mouth at my throat, his human hand at my hip now too, both hands on me, the cool human one and the warm engineered one.
His human hand finds mine on his sternum and squeezes once. Affirmative. I squeeze back.
The second come is louder. I bite his shoulder to keep from making a sound that would travel through ducting to a workshop where Luca is leaning over a console and a corridor where Marcus is asleep.
Adrian feels the bite. His grip locks one click tighter at my hip — his lie tell, but he is not lying, he is just holding — and he comes inside me on the next stroke with a single word.
"Eliza."
Not an order, and not one he can finish — the one word a finite man cannot make finite, wrenched off the exhale a half-beat before he can flatten it.