Chapter 13 #2
My shirt follows. Her hands land on my chest before the fabric hits the floor, fingerless gloves rough against my skin.
The combination of cold leather and warm fingertips pulls a sound out of me that I'm glad there's no one else around to hear.
"Here," she says, and guides my hand to the clasp at her back. Her voice is clinical. The instruction is anything but.
I unhook it with one hand because some skills you acquire out of optimism, and this one has been waiting for its operational deployment.
The bra drops, and the server room cold tightens her nipples before I touch them. When I do, when I cup the weight of her breast in my palm and brush my thumb across the peak, the sound she makes is low and involuntary and goes straight through me like a current through copper.
"That," she says. "Again."
I do it again. Then my mouth replaces my hand, and her back arches against the equipment rack, and her fingers fist in my hair with a grip that stings and that I want her to maintain indefinitely.
The hum of the servers vibrates through the metal into her body and into my lips, and I can feel the tremor in her breathing before I hear it, a stutter that tells me her composure is starting to fragment at the edges.
My brain, because it's my brain and it never fully shuts up, supplies the observation that I am going down on Dar in a server room surrounded by the infrastructure I built over years of work, and that this is either the most on-brand thing I've ever done or a sign that I need therapy. Probably both.
I work lower. My mouth traces a path down her ribs while my hands deal with the button and zipper of her jeans, and she lifts her hips to help me without my asking, which is a level of cooperation that Dar does not extend lightly.
The jeans come off. Her underwear matches the bra: black, practical, and destined for the floor.
She watches me look at her. The flat affect is gone. What's in her eyes is raw and fierce and challenging, like she's daring me to be worth the exposure this is costing her.
I drop to my knees on the cold tile. She swears once, sharp and breathless, when she realizes what I intend.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"If you're doing that, I need the rack behind me or I'm going to fall."
"I've got you."
My hands grip her hips, steadying her against the equipment rack, and my mouth finds her. She is warm and wet and the taste of her makes my brain white out for a full second before the system comes back online.
Her fingers tighten in my hair. Her thighs tense against my shoulders.
The physical evidence that Dar is trusting me with this, is letting me have this version of her, is the single most erotic thing I've experienced in my life.
I learn her. This is what I do. I find the patterns, the sequences, the specific input that produces the specific output, and Dar's body under my mouth is the most rewarding code I've ever read.
She directs with words and hands, the same way she runs offensive ops: short commands, precise adjustments, clinical voice stripped raw by what her body is doing against her instructions.
"Right there."
I stay right there.
"Harder."
I give her harder.
"That rhythm. Tommy, that exact—" The sentence fractures. Her hips answer for her.
I don't stop. My tongue works a steady rhythm against the spot she specified, and her hips roll against my mouth, and the sounds she's making have abandoned language entirely and become something pure and desperate.
Her fingers are gripping my hair so hard my scalp aches, and the ache feels like exactly where I belong.
I feel her orgasm build before she announces it. The tightening of her thighs. The stutter of her breathing. The way her whole body goes taut like a wire under tension.
Then it hits, and her hips jerk against me, and the sound she makes is my name torn beyond recognition. Her body shudders in waves against my mouth while I hold her hips and keep going because the rhythm she asked for is the rhythm she's getting until she tells me otherwise.
She pulls me up by my hair. The urgency in the gesture is new, raw, and the kiss she gives me is open and graceless, tasting herself on my mouth without hesitation.
"Inside me," she says against my lips. "Now."
My clothes become obstacles I address with the kind of focused efficiency that combat training was supposed to teach me and that this woman actually motivates.
She wraps around me when I push inside her, one leg hooked over my hip, her back against the rack. The sound we both make is involuntary and identical and lost in the hum of the servers.
I move slowly because she said slower and I take instructions from Dar the way I take them from Kane: immediately and without question.
She matches my rhythm, her body rocking against mine, and the collaboration mirrors the simulation so precisely that the parallel would make me laugh if I had any breath left.
Her forehead presses against mine. Her breath is hot on my face. "Faster now," she says, and the "now" cracks in the middle.
I give her faster. The equipment rack groans under the combined weight and force, and the LED lights above us flash in patterns that have nothing to do with system status.
I am aware of every point where her body contacts mine: her thigh against my hip, her arms around my neck, the grip of her around me tight and slick and pulling me toward an edge I can see but haven't reached.
She gets there first, a second time, and I feel it before I hear it.
The tightening starts deep, her body clenching around me in rhythmic pulses that pull the breath out of my lungs and the thought out of my skull.
Her back bows against the rack. Her leg tightens around my hip, and the heel of her foot digs into the back of my thigh, and the sharp edge of that sensation combined with the slick, gripping heat of her is enough to shatter every remaining circuit in my head.
The sound she makes is raw and shattered and honest, and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard in this room full of machines I built with my own hands.
My orgasm hits like a cascade failure, every system going offline at once.
My hips stutter against hers. My hands grip the equipment rack on either side of her head, knuckles white, the metal cold under my palms while the rest of me burns.
I can feel her still pulsing around me, aftershocks pulling at me in waves, and I bury my face against her neck and let it take me apart.
The hum fills my skull. Her hands grip my shoulders. The world narrows to the pulse between us, the warmth of her, the cold of the room, the smell of her skin, and the sound of both of us breathing like we've sprinted the length of the mountain and back.
We end up on the floor on the cold tile with our backs against the equipment rack.
I reach for her hand slowly, giving her time to pull away, to rebuild the firewall, to shelve this under controlled variables.
Dar looks at my hand. Looks at me.
She takes it.
Her fingers lace through mine, and the gesture is simple and enormous.
My chest fills with something I can't encrypt, can't compress, can't store in any format my systems recognize.
The server hum surrounds us, steady and low, the heartbeat of Echo Base. For the first time, it sounds like it belongs to both of us.
Her thumb traces the back of my hand in a deliberate pattern. She's writing code on my skin, tapping a message in the only language she fully trusts.
I close my eyes and read her fingers, and the words she's pressing into my hand are the ones neither of us has said out loud.
The hum holds us. The cold tile presses into us. Her hand stays in mine, and her fingers keep tapping, and the message repeats because some code is worth running more than once.