Chapter Fifteen #2
She pulled back enough to look at him — just for a moment, just to see the face that had been the first clear thing in a freezing dark and had not stopped being clear since.
The careful management and professional distance had disappeared. Just him, entirely unguarded, watching her the way he had been watching her since the dock whether he meant to or not.
And she saw it there.
The emotions that he’d kept so deeply locked up, they were there, behind his eyes.
She reached up and started on the fasteners of his jacket.
He let her. He watched her do it with that focused attention that he gave everything that mattered, which was, she was discovering, extraordinarily effective as a point of concentration.
When the jacket came open he shrugged it off without being asked and she pressed her palms flat against his chest and felt the reality of him — the warmth, the solidity, the heartbeat that was faster than his usual stillness suggested.
"You're nervous," she said, with some surprise.
"Yes," he said. Simply. Without apology.
She found that the honesty of it did something to her that the confidence hadn't. She kissed him again, softer this time, and felt him exhale.
His hands moved to the hem of her shirt. The question in them was different from last time — last time had been possibility, the edge of something.
This was arrival. The agreement. The actual understanding of what they were doing, and the consent.
She answered it by pulling the shirt over her head herself, which saved time and communicated something she didn't need words for.
His intake of breath was quiet. His eyes moved over her slowly, with the specific thoroughness she had come to expect from him.
His intensity was far more arousing than she would have expected, just his gaze.
When he started to touch her, his hand gliding up her sides, just grazing her skin, it felt like fire.
The fires of everything. Emotion. Desire. Need. All of it wrapped into an intensity that she hadn’t expected.
She should have, though.
Everything Edi-Veen did was intense.
"Coreni," he said, his words hoarse and deeper than usual.
"I know," she said. "Come here."
What followed was not brief. It was not uncertain. It was the cargo hold of a transport ship on a commercial dock on Trevort, cold metal and poor light and the looming shapes of stasis chambers waiting at the edges of their attention, and none of those things mattered at all.
She had her hands in his hair and his mouth at her throat and the solid weight of him against her and the knowledge that this was the last night on the planet she had lived on her entire life, and she was spending it here, in this hold, with him, and she had made that choice with full information and was not sorry.
His hands were careful at first — deliberately so, she understood, in the way he was deliberate about everything. His fingers traced her slowly, mapping her with the same thorough attention he gave all things that mattered to him, and she felt the specific quality of being the thing that mattered.
His mouth followed, warm against her skin, and she let herself make sounds she had no professional composure left to manage.
They stripped away the remaining distance between them with a shared efficiency that had nothing mechanical about it — hands and mouths and the particular discovery of someone you have been watching for days finally being allowed to know.
When his fingers found the center of her she was already ready, and she shifted against his hand to show him how, and he learned it the way he learned everything she showed him — immediately, completely, applying it back to her with a focus that made her breath uneven.
His eyes found hers when she responded, and she saw it in them then — not just desire, which she had expected, but something that had been sitting behind the management and the careful distance since a dock and a dark and a word she hadn't known.
Something that had been true for longer than either of them had acknowledged.
She pulled him closer.
When he entered her they were both still, looking at each other in the poor light of the cargo hold, and she understood that this was the most honest either of them had been — more honest than the kitchen and the confession and the conversation about later, because this had no words in it, only the specific true fact of them.
He moved slowly at first, drawing it out, and she wasn't sure whether he was being careful with her or careful with himself or both.
She shifted against him to answer the question, and he took the answer and gave her what she'd asked for, and she held on and stopped thinking about anything except this — his weight and his warmth and the rhythm of him and the sounds he made when she moved with him, which she committed to memory with the same precision she committed everything that mattered.
The release when it came was not quiet. She didn't attempt quiet. The cargo hold had no opinions about it.
He followed her, and she felt it in the way his arms tightened around her — not a performance, just the involuntary truth of it, the specific undone quality of someone who had been certain and controlled and was briefly neither.
They held one another and she pressed her head against his chest, not wanting to let go.
She committed it to the part of her memory that didn't let things go.
She listened to his heartbeat slow from something urgent back toward something steady. His hand moved in her hair, slow and absent, the way a person moved when they had stopped thinking about the movement and were simply present.
The stasis chambers waited in the dark.
She felt him become aware of them at the same moment she did. A shift in his breathing. A slight change in the quality of his stillness.
"We should," she said.
"Yes," he agreed. Neither of them moved for another moment.
Then she pulled back and found her clothes and put herself back together with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been doing that since she was sixteen, and he did the same with the quiet economy of a man who had been trained for worse situations than reassembling himself in a cargo hold.
When they were both standing again in the poor light with the dock sounds coming through the hull she looked at him and he looked at her and there was nothing left that needed saying.
She stepped forward and kissed him once more — brief this time, actual brief, the kind that was a period at the end of a sentence rather than the beginning of one.
"Get in your pod," she said.
"Yes," he said. His voice was not entirely steady, which she found she was going to think about for a very long time.
She turned to her chamber. The panel responded to her palm.
The door opened with a soft exhaled sound, the same kind the transport floor had made descending into the deep, and she understood that she had been practicing this — all of it, every threshold she'd ever crossed — without knowing what she was practicing for.
She looked back once.
He was already watching her. He had not looked away.
She got in.
The chamber was narrow and cool and smelled faintly of something mineral, like stone near water.
She settled into it and looked up at the small viewport in the door and waited while the systems engaged around her — the soft hiss of pressurization, the warmth beginning at the base, the particular quality of silence that meant something was about to change and had decided not to announce itself.
Through the viewport, she could see the door of his chamber. She could see him looking back at her through his own viewport, blue-green and steady and giving her exactly as much as she'd been given permission to have.
Later. When there is one.
She thought about a woman named Sevaaki who had known something was coming before it arrived and had made her choice anyway, and about a man with vials on every surface who had carried the weight of that choice for twenty-six years without setting it down, and about an underwater city where an old woman was sitting alone in an ancient alcove listening to the water and thinking about patterns that couldn't otherwise be explained.
The stasis took her gently, the way sleep did when you had finally stopped fighting it.
Her last clear thought was not a question.
It was an answer she had been working her way toward since a loading dock and a cold wave and a word she hadn't known.
I know what I am.
The dark came.
And she was ready for it.