I Want You
OLIVER
Two hours, perhaps three, before someone with a seal and a larger gun decided quarantine authority had become negotiable.
Oliver had always admired deadlines that arrived armed.
He stood in what had once been the station master's office wearing dry trousers, an unbuttoned shirt, and the expression Marin had recently described as evidence that he was about to become troublesome.
Rain struck the leaded windows. The storm had moved east, leaving the harbor bruised purple beneath broken cloud.
From the outer pier came the scrape of chains as Kelm's people shifted a barricade.
Somewhere below, a Hollowfang technician shouted that he had rights.
Halvek's launch was gone. That fact sat beneath everything else.
Fifty-one seconds of paired data, copied onto brass and carried east while Oliver helped keep the Maw alive.
He could still see the dispatch canister vanish through rain between the cutter rails.
There had been no dramatic choice available afterward, only the ordinary cruelty of distance.
By the time anyone could have followed, Halvek possessed a lead measured in miles and weather.
He had suggested all of them. She had not smiled.
He had seen the corner of her mouth try.
The shadow at his feet did not match the room.
It had become so common that noticing it required intention now.
Rainlight entered from the west window. The oil lamp on the desk threw a second weak source from his right.
His shadow should have split accordingly.
Instead one dark shape gathered beneath him and climbed the wall behind the desk as though the light had agreed to stop arguing.
Oliver watched it. The shadow watched nothing.
Assigning intention to something without a face invited invention.
Human thought hated an empty category. Give it movement and the mind supplied motive.
Give it timing and the mind supplied attention.
Give it a shape resembling a man and Oliver, apparently, would spend weeks resisting the urge to ask whether it was pleased with itself.
He buttoned the lower half of his shirt.
"You're becoming domestic," he said. The shadow remained dark. "Terrifying."
A knock came once before Marin entered. She carried his coat over one arm and a paper packet in the other.
Her hair had dried badly after the storm, which Oliver found unfairly attractive.
Damp strands had escaped whatever practical arrangement she had attempted, curling near her throat.
The bandage on her left hand was fresh. Her expression suggested several institutions had disappointed her in quick succession.
"How many governments?" he asked.
"Three."
"Only three?"
"One of them has cannons."
"There we are."
Marin closed the door with her heel. "The customs authority recognizes the quarantine claim until dawn. Naval command recognizes it until someone senior enough arrives to become offended. Kelm has convinced the local harbor office that Q-14 is a medical patient under military protection."
Oliver took his coat from her. "Is that legally true?"
"No."
"Emotionally?"
"Also no."
He laughed.
Marin set the paper packet on the desk. "Q-14 is stable. Heart rate is lower than during transport. It accepted fresh water and fish from Teren's crew."
"Preference?"
"Behavior." She looked at him. "I am trying to avoid becoming seduced by nouns."
"An admirable defense."
"It removed another sensor clip."
"That sounds like a preference."
"It sounds like it dislikes sensor clips."
"Which is a preference."
"Oliver."
He smiled and stopped. Her gaze moved past him to the wall. The shadow had not changed. That somehow drew more attention than movement would have.
"How long?" she asked.
"Since before you came in."
"Doing anything?"
"Existing ominously."
"Specific."
"I strive for rigor."
Marin came closer. Her eyes went over him automatically.
Right hand. Ribs. Pupils. Breathing. She had become more subtle about medical inspection and therefore no less obvious.
Marin had been awake for almost twenty hours.
Oliver knew because he had been awake for slightly longer and had watched the hour marks become increasingly personal.
They had crossed a storm, boarded a Hollowfang transport, cut a living being out of an apparatus designed to measure it, and watched the person responsible carry away the cleanest result.
Neither of them had eaten enough. Both had dry clothes only because Teren kept emergency lockers for sailors too stupid to respect weather.
Desire should have been exhausted with everything else.
Instead it had survived the day with offensive vigor.
Perhaps that was one reason Oliver wanted her close.
Hunger had spent months turning wanting into evidence, danger and mechanism.
Marin could still make wanting ordinary enough to have a mouth, a hand, a joke badly timed on purpose.
He did not need the distinction explained. He needed to feel it.
"My hand is fine," he said.
"I didn't ask."
"You looked."
"I possess eyes."
"One of your more intrusive qualities."
She touched the edge of the bandage around his right palm, careful enough that the contact carried no pressure.
Oliver looked down at her fingers. The storm had left small abrasions across her knuckles.
He wanted to kiss them. He also wanted to pull her into him hard enough that nineteen minutes of separation became an unreasonable grievance.
Her eyes lifted. There were very few experiences as intimate as being caught wanting something by a woman who had learned the shape of his restraint.
"Later," Marin said.
"You said that on the cutter."
"I remember."
"You repeated it."
"I was attempting to keep you from doing something stupid in open water."
"Effective motivational strategy."
"I have notes."
Oliver slid one hand around her waist. Marin allowed the movement, then stepped close enough that the loose front of his shirt brushed her coat.
The last of the storm remained on her in salt and cold.
Beneath it he could smell soap, wet leather, and the faint medicinal trace that had become associated with her hands after too many days spent treating everyone around her.
"You are supposed to be recovering," she said.
"I've been recovering long enough to resent the profession."
Her eyes narrowed. "You are not a member of the profession."
"A technicality."
"A reassuring one."
"I resent your medical authority."
"Good."
He kissed her before she could explain the medical consequences of being annoying.
Marin's mouth was warm despite the rain.
She made a small sound against him that erased whatever clever thing he had intended to do next.
Oliver tightened his arm around her waist. Her uninjured hand slid into his damp hair and closed there with familiar certainty. The room receded.
The careful surrender of the relay room belonged to a different need.
Tonight there was no rope and no negotiated ritual beyond the accumulated language of two people who had spent long enough learning where a hand could close, what pressure meant yes, what stillness meant wait, and when humor had become a delay rather than pleasure.
Marin pulled his lower lip between her teeth. Oliver breathed her name.
"Still recovering?" she asked against his mouth.
"Miraculously."
She kissed him again, harder. His back found the edge of the desk.
Papers shifted beneath one hand. Marin moved between his knees and Oliver opened them without thinking, giving her the space she wanted.
Her palm slid from his hair to the side of his neck.
Her fingers settled into the familiar arrangement.
Four behind the ear. Thumb beneath his jaw.
A small pressure that meant look at me. Oliver did.
Her eyes were dark in the rainlight. Controlled.
Amused. Hungry in the specifically Marin way that never asked the room to believe she had lost control merely because she had decided to spend some.
Heat drew tight low in his body. He kissed her.
Her hand left his neck. The pressure remained.
Oliver froze. For half a heartbeat his body did not understand the contradiction.
The touch at his jaw was familiar enough that recognition arrived before thought.
His chin lifted into it. Desire sharpened.
Then cold entered the place where fingers should have been.
Oliver stopped breathing. Marin stopped too.
Her actual hands were visible. One fisted lightly in the front of his shirt.
The bandaged left rested against his shoulder.
Nothing touched his neck. The pressure stroked once beneath his jaw.
Exactly the way she had. Oliver moved so fast the desk struck the wall behind him.
Marin stepped back immediately. "What?"
He raised a hand. "Don't."
She went still. The cold pressure vanished.
For a second Oliver heard only rain, his own breathing, and the scrape of militia boots outside.
Then the shadow behind him lifted one hand.
Oliver did not. The shadow's fingers curved near the dark suggestion of its own jaw.
Four behind the ear. One beneath. Marin saw it.
Her face emptied. The shadow tilted its head. Oliver's stomach turned.
"That was you," Marin said.
"No."
"I know."
The answer came too quickly and too softly.
She had not meant the touch. She meant the reaction.
Oliver looked at her. Marin's gaze dropped once, taking in the evidence his body had supplied before either of them understood the source.
She looked back at his face without embarrassment or accusation. His skin crawled anyway.
"I responded," he said.
"Yes."
"It felt like you."
"I know."