Chapter 12 #2
“I have never,” Falkin said, low, “wanted a badly organized anything so much in my life.”
She stepped in.
He caught her, finally reached, both hands coming up to frame her face like she was something breakable he’d decided to hold anyway.
She got up on her toes and kissed him before she could run the numbers one more time.
And felt it double back.
She’d expected the kiss.
She had not expected the feedback.
The instant his mouth met hers, the thing she was feeling came back through him, her own want reflected and amplified and returned, so that she wasn’t just kissing him, she was kissing him and feeling him feel her kiss him, a closed warm circuit humming brighter every second.
He made a rough sound against her mouth like the loop had caught him off guard too.
She pulled back an inch. “Okay, what was that.”
“The cuff.” His voice had gone gravel. His forehead dropped to hers. “I opened it when you walked in. All the way. I didn’t—Brooklyn, I don’t do this with it open. Ever. I can feel what you feel. Right now I can feel exactly how much you—”
He stopped. Breathed. “It comes back to you. What you feel, I feel, and you feel me feel it. It’s a loop. I’ve never done this without any sort of block. I didn’t know it would—”
“Do that.” Her scientist woke all the way up, delighted and appalled.
“So if I—” She dragged her nails lightly down the back of his neck, and felt her own small experimental spike of interest hit him and rebound into her twice as strong.
She had to grab his shoulder. “Oh. Oh, that’s—that is deeply unfair, that’s going to be a problem, we should absolutely investigate that thoroughly. ”
“That’s a plan of attack,” he said, and she felt the wry warmth of it curl through the loop, and laughed against his throat.
“This is not a time for a plan,” she said. “It’s a time for improvisation.”
Improvisation, it turned out, was a thing Dalgurians were extremely good at when they stopped being disciplined about it.
He got her out of her shirt like it had personally offended him, then went still, both hands framing her ribs. He looked at her with such open want that she felt it wash back through her and had to shut her eyes. “Falkin.”
“I’m devising—”
“If you say a plan of attack I will lose my mind.”
“—an improvisation,” he finished, and kissed her collarbone. She felt her own shiver arrive in him a half-second before her body produced it, that eerie beautiful lag, weather blowing in ahead of the storm.
His mouth moved lower. Found a nipple, and the small sharp pleasure of it bounced straight back into him and out through the loop into her again, so that one kiss landed as three.
She made a sound she’d have been embarrassed about if she’d had a single defense left.
“That’s the loop,” he said against her skin, gravel and delight. “You feel good, I feel you feel good, you feel me—”
“I know, I did the reading, don’t narrate the—oh—”
He’d gotten the rest of her clothes off somewhere in there.
When his fingers slid between her legs and felt how wet she already was, she felt him feel it, his low groan doubling back into her.
The whole circuit lit up.
His markings had gone luminous, faint gold lines she’d only ever seen dull, glowing now everywhere his skin met hers, mapping the loop like a circuit diagram.
The scientist in her wanted to know everything and the rest of her wanted the scientist to shut the hell up.
The rest of her won.
He put his mouth on her and there was no run of the numbers for this.
She felt her own pleasure and felt him feel it and felt herself feel him feel it, a feedback climb with no ceiling, his tongue working her clit while the loop wound tighter and brighter.
She came apart embarrassingly fast, hips rocking up into his mouth.
And felt her own orgasm crash through him, felt him groan against her like it had knocked him sideways too.
“Did you just—” she gasped, still shaking.
“I feel it when you—” His voice was wrecked. “Brooklyn. Do that again.”
“You do it again. That’s your job now. I’m making it your job.”
He grinned, gold-lit and undone, and did it again.
The second one built before the first had finished, because the loop didn’t reset, it just kept climbing.
She rode it out with her fingers in his blue hair and her heels digging into the bed and came a second time crying his name. She felt it hit him, felt him half-drunk on the double of it.
“Okay,” she panted. “Part two. Get up here. I have questions about the alien physiology and I’d like to research them empirically.”
“So wet,” he murmured, moving up her body, and she laughed and dragged him down.
“You made me that way. Feedback loop. Take some responsibility.”
And then he was pressing into her, slow. She felt his own overwhelmed shudder arrive in her body a half-second before the stretch of him did, and—“wait, did you get bigger—”
“Adapting,” he managed, luminous, gritted. “It fits. It fits you. I feel what you—”
“Customizing the shape. Of course you are. We are absolutely studying that later—there, okay, don’t stop—”
He didn’t stop.
He moved and she felt it twice, his pleasure and hers braided so tight she couldn’t tell which was which, the loop climbing past anything she had language for.
A third one built out of the wreckage of the first two, impossible. She chased it with her nails in his back and felt him feel her chase it.
When it finally burst out of her it took him with it, his release crashing into hers so they went over the same edge at the same instant through the same circuit.
There was nothing safe about any of it and she did not care at all.
He collapsed half over her, gold lines fading slowly back to warm, both of them ragged.
Eventually they surfaced. After round two—which the loop made shorter to build and longer to survive, and which she added, wryly, to the findings.
“So,” Brooklyn said into his shoulder, boneless and cracked-open and, she noticed with astonishment, not once reaching for a door. “That’s going to be a whole thing, isn’t it. The loop.”
“Every time,” Falkin said, warm and wrecked and honest. “I can never turn it off with you. I don’t want to.” A beat. “Was that—is that all right? It’s a great deal to feel someone—”
“It was terrifying,” she said, “and I’d like to schedule it recurring.” She felt his laugh move through his chest and, faintly, through the loop, and she let it. “Falkin. You felt all of it. The whole night. The floor. All of it.”
“I know.” He pressed his mouth to her hair. “You don’t have to be fine. I felt you not-fine and I’m still here.”
“The station,” she said, into his shoulder, because the scientist never fully slept. “Thousands of people. You said the first day nearly took your knees. Where are they?”
He was quiet a moment. “Gone. You’re louder than all of them together.” His mouth moved against her hair. “It’s the first quiet I’ve had since I was a boy.”
She noted that. Not for a paper. For herself.
Her eyes stung. She let them.
“You don’t wear underwear,” she said instead, because it was that or cry again, and she’d cried enough. “Under the armor. I noticed.”
“Is that the small layer humans wear beneath their clothing?”
“Oh no,” Brooklyn said, delighted. She pulled the grey station-issue blanket over both of them, in a grey room that, for once, had someone in it.
“Oh, we have so much to discuss.”