CHAPTER 24 #2
Ten days of this and the gate between us has stopped being a gesture and turned into a word.
"Warm," I tell him — the one I gave him in Bunkroom D, my read of the lattice handed back to him as his permission, because the check goes both ways now and tonight I am the one running it.
His pulse answers under the metal at my throat; the bronze ticks one notch hotter against the bone, the all-clear he cannot hide and no longer tries to.
"Warm," he agrees, low, and that is the whole exchange.
Luca's eyes hold on mine, the loupe ring sitting bright at the edge of my sight, his whole face held in the careful patience of a man waiting for a green LED. I nod, slow. He goes back to his mouth on me.
Marcus's whole long body quits moving against my side — the breath at my ear held mid-draw, the hand at my waist gone to the weight of a thought. He is asking. I press my hip up into his palm. The breath at my ear comes back.
Luca's mouth at my cunt has a violinist's exactness tonight, all of it bent toward worship, and his tongue at my clit is one slow drag, then a second, settling, finding the there of it.
He works two fingers into me on the third stroke, slow, curling them up to the front wall where the system answers, and that is the stroke I make a sound for, low in the throat, the inside of a moan, the one I have been holding all afternoon since I set the knife on this bench.
Adrian's mouth at my breast. Marcus's mouth at my ear, murmuring something I do not catch because I am inside the wave — only the music of it, long sentences breaking down to the names of things. Eliza. Look. Stay. Eliza.
It does not take long. My body has been a fuse he has been holding the spark close to for six hours, and the wave climbs from the center of me and breaks out through the thighs and breasts and throat at once, his fingers still curling, his tongue gone soft and flat to ride it down.
My left hand finds the inside of my right wrist without me telling it to, two fingers against the pulse — not the scar-press I keep for my left wrist, the slow soothe over the port my mother left, but its opposite, a different and deliberate gesture, the small private signal that the wave is here.
Marcus catches the move. He lifts the wrist away from itself, kisses the inside of the right wrist where the fingers were going to land. The signal sent into his mouth instead.
My ribs work. The lamp throws gold across me.
Luca sits back on his heels, mouth wet, looking at me as if he is back in his bunkroom at twelve and his mother is alive in the photograph and the world has not yet sabotaged a single thing he loves.
He kisses my hip. He stands up and comes to my left beside Marcus, and the small Spanish exhale he makes against my hair as he settles is half a laugh and half a benediction.
"Marcus," Luca says, and the name in his mouth is the way Luca says Marcus — Marcus, not Cade.
"Renner," Marcus says, dry, "if you tell me to step in for you I will hate you for it."
"I'm not. I am telling you querida would like your mouth a little lower than her ear."
Marcus laughs — one breath through the nose — and his mouth comes off my ear and travels down.
The warmth of him along the throat, down the side of the neck, down to the collarbone where Adrian's prosthetic still rests.
Adrian draws the prosthetic back a little to make room.
Marcus's mouth at my breast where Luca's was.
Adrian's mouth at the side of my throat, over the pulse.
Luca's mouth at the inside of my left thigh, climbing.
They speak across me, low, not one hand touching another hand.
There. Lower. — She likes that, do it again.
— Hold her hip, she pulls left. — I have her.
Adrian clips his to imperatives; Luca slips half of his into Spanish; Marcus narrates because Marcus cannot help narrating.
They have done this with corridors and breach-points for years and never once with a woman between them, and the only seam in it is the care.
They are sharing me, and I let my weight down into the three of them and do not brace, and that is the whole of what I have to say about it.
"Marcus," I say.
His mouth lifts. "Yes, darling."
"You first. — I want to watch you."
He breathes out, slow, the smile-that-is-not-the-fixer-smile cracking bare-faced. "Bossy," he says, mild. He looks at Adrian — over me, a question passed without a word — and Adrian nods. Luca nods.
Marcus does not get on the bench. He stays at my left, standing, and undoes his slacks one button at a time, the throat-scar pale in the amber filament where the open collar lets it show.
His hip presses against my side. He fits his fingers through mine and brings the linked hands to his cock.
He does not push. He lets me find him, lets me wrap, lets me set the pace.
He goes still, his body weight all at the edge of the bench, his hand suspended where I have set him. One hand at the small of my back, the other in mine. He waits. I step my hip into his — the small forward that gives him the answer cleanly — and his breath against my temple comes back.
His head tips back a fraction. He breathes through his teeth.
Luca's mouth at me is steady; Adrian's metal palm cool across my left breast, his human hand under my head. Marcus is in my hand. He works against my fist slow, then less slow, his mouth back at my ear, voice half a register lower.
"You are not — you are not allowed to be this beautiful," he says, and laughs at himself, soft. "Eliza. Eliza Quinn."
He has been building since the door opened.
The lighter on the bench is somewhere I have stopped noticing.
He comes against my thigh — the warm spill on the inside of the right thigh, his hand on me, his mouth at my ear — and as he comes the music of his syntax thins all the way down and what comes out is one word, low against my temple, a beat ahead of my name.
"Love. — Eliza. Love. Eliza Quinn."
I push my face into his throat where the wire scar lives, the thin line under his jaw, and leave my mouth there. He has just spent the word he has been saving for eleven years. I have nowhere to put it except against the scar.
He shakes for a moment. Steadies. He moves my hand off him, brings my fingers to his mouth, kisses the knuckles, and folds my hand closed over my own heart, giving my palm back to me through nothing but the heat of his mouth still on the skin.
He does not move away. His free hand passes once flat down the front of the slate shirt, pressing out a fold that was never there, the small grooming gesture he reaches for when he needs to put his own face back together — and then goes still.
Adrian watches him come down from it and says nothing, the watchfulness in his face gone soft, a sentry standing easy over something he has decided is safe.
Luca has kept his mouth at me, anchoring me through Marcus's coming, attentive but not hurried. He lifts his head when I shift. He reads my eyes.
"Adrian," I say.
Adrian is up out of the chair before I have finished the word.
He sets the metal palm against the side of my throat — cooler than the room, smooth where my pulse runs — and the human hand at my hip.
He steps to the bench's right side and leans down to look at me, eyes level with mine.
Pale gray-blue in the lamp. The silver streak at his right temple sits in the cold cobalt of the floor-strip and the lamp's amber falls on the other side of his face, so that for one beat he is a man split down the middle by two different lights, warm on the left of him, cold on the right.
His human hand finds mine on the bench and presses once — the affirmative he is asking for and the one he is giving back.
I press. He presses again. The exchange done in two beats, no words spent.
He runs his calibration under his breath where only I can hear it, one, two, three, four; three back, the finger-flex against my knuckles — the same private arithmetic he runs at the lip of a breach door, spent here on me instead.
He undoes his belt with the human hand — function, not show.
Marcus's hand has already settled at the back of Adrian's neck for a beat without thinking, a thousand shared corridors making the gesture before the mind can veto it; Marcus catches himself, lifts the hand away, gives Adrian the corridor, gives me back the staging.
Adrian's mouth comes down on mine before he comes inside me.
The slow kiss. The Quinn one and the Eliza one both — the surrender he has been making in fragments since the storm ten days ago, here in one motion.
He guides himself in. Slow. The stretch of him is a slow bright ache, and I am wet enough from Luca's mouth that the slide takes him deep on the first press; my breath leaves me in a long broken exhale against his jaw.
The Mk-IX lattice warms then — the second time tonight, and the brighter of the two — bronze writing soft gold across his forearm where it bows against my hip, the heat through my skin like a small private sun.
He sinks all the way and holds, fully seated, the whole length of him a hot pressure I feel up under my navel.
"Christ," he breathes.
Luca's mouth comes back to my left breast, careful around Adrian's elbow, fitting into the empty space Marcus left at my ear and chest. Marcus's mouth at the back of my hand, kissing the knuckles where his mouth was a minute ago.
Adrian moves. Where Luca rides a long unbroken line, Adrian works in held positions — three slow drives and then a full stop, seated deep and motionless, holding me stalled at the top of the breath while he watches what my face does — the same held discipline he keeps at the lip of a breach door until his count comes round again.
He gives me the angle, the slow drag, the dead stop, the slow drive.