Chapter 14 #2
It's not graceful. Not the slow seduction I might have imagined in my weaker moments.
It's desperate and messy and real. The desk scraped against the floor with each thrust. Her gasping for my name like a prayer or a curse.
My hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks, claiming her in a way that's probably unforgivable but feels inevitable.
She meets me thrust for thrust, taking everything I give her and demanding more. Her hands are everywhere. My shoulders, my back, tangling in my hair and pulling until the sting makes me groan into her neck.
"Mine," I growl against her throat, tasting sweat and skin. "Say it. Tell me."
"Yours." The word breaks on a gasp as I hit something inside her that makes her whole body shudder. "Yours, I'm yours, only yours—"
The possessive litany does something catastrophic to my control. I shift the angle, drive deeper, chase the sound of her falling apart with single-minded focus.
She comes with my name on her lips and her body clenching around me like a vise, like she's trying to pull me in and never let go. The sensation drags me over the edge after her, pleasure slamming through me with enough force to white out my vision.
I catch myself on the desk, arms bracketing her, forehead pressed to hers while we both struggle to remember how breathing works.
Her hands come up to cup my face, palms warm against my jaw, thumbs brushing over my cheekbones with a tenderness that makes something crack open in my chest. The gesture is so gentle, so achingly soft, that it feels like an absolution I haven't earned and don't deserve.
Like she's handling something precious instead of a man who just took her on a desk with all the finesse of a starving animal.
"Hey," she whispers, her voice barely audible over the sound of our ragged breathing. Her eyes search mine with concern flickering in those endless depths despite the satisfied flush still painting her skin. "You still with me?"
I manage a nod. Can't quite form words yet. My heart is trying to punch through my ribs, and every nerve ending in my body is singing with aftershocks.
She smiles. Soft and a little smug and so beautiful it hurts to look at her.
I gather her up carefully, lift her off the desk and carry her to my bed. It's not much. Military-issue mattress, dark sheets, nothing like the luxury she deserves. But she doesn't complain when I lay her down and stretch out beside her, just curls into my side like she belongs there.
Like she's always belonged there.
I trace the curve of her spine with my fingertips. Count each vertebra. Map the constellation of freckles across her shoulders. Try to memorize this moment before reality comes crashing back in.
"What are you thinking?" Her voice is drowsy, content.
That I'm doomed. That I've done the one thing I swore I wouldn't do and let myself care about someone in a way that makes me weak. That loving you is going to destroy me, and I can't bring myself to regret it.
"That you're dangerous," I say instead. Honest in the way I can manage. "More dangerous than any weapon I've ever built."
She shifts beside me, propping herself up on one elbow so she can look down at me properly.
Those eyes, warm and knowing and far too perceptive, search my face with an intensity that makes me want to look away.
But I don't. I hold her gaze even as I feel her seeing through every defense I've spent decades building.
"Because I can grow things?" she asks, and there's a teasing lilt to her voice that doesn't quite mask the genuine curiosity underneath. "Because of my bio-kinesis?"
"Because you make me want things I can't have." I reach up, tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. "Like a future. Like peace. Like mornings waking up next to you without wondering which enemy will try to take you from me."
Her expression softens in that way that always undoes me, all the sharp edges of her earlier teasing melting into something tender and achingly earnest. She leans down slowly, deliberately, giving me time to pull away even though we both know I won't. Her lips brush across my scarred cheek, the one that still pulls tight when I smile, a ghost of old violence that she's never once flinched from.
The kiss is feather-light, reverent almost, and I feel it in places that have nothing to do with skin and nerve endings.
When she pulls back just enough to meet my eyes again, there's a quiet determination in her gaze that reminds me she's not nearly as soft as everyone assumes. Not weak at all, despite what she thinks of herself.
"Then we build it," she says, and the words land between us with the weight of a vow, simple and absolute as starlight cutting through the void.
I pull her down into another kiss because I don't have words for the hope blooming in my chest, fragile and terrifying as the first spring after a long winter.
Outside, the station hums with life. Politics and danger and enemies circling. But here, in this moment, with her warm and willing in my arms, I let myself believe that maybe we can survive what's coming.
That maybe, against every probability and past precedent, I deserve this. Deserve her warmth, her stubborn hope, the impossible gift of her choosing me when she could have chosen safety, comfort, a life free from the shadows that cling to my name like old blood.
The thought should comfort me, should settle warm and reassuring in the hollows of my chest where doubt has carved out permanent residence.
Instead, it fills me with a dread so profound it tastes like metal on my tongue, cold and sharp and inescapable.
Because I know, have always known, from the first moment I understood what loss truly meant, what the universe does to things I care about.
The cruel arithmetic of my existence has proven itself time and time again, immutable as the laws of thermodynamics.
It takes them away.
Every. Single. Time.