14. The Reckoning
The Reckoning
Xor
I have kissed her and the knowledge has rewritten my operating system.
Not gradually. Not in stages. One moment I was a male with a framework — damaged, cracking, compromised by a woman with a notebook and a blaster named Betsy — and the next moment her mouth was on mine and the framework evaporated like atmosphere through a hull breach.
There is no framework. There is Flossie's mouth.
There is the taste of her mouth through the iron of my own blood and the sound she made when my hand closed over her breast and the way her spine arched against my palm.
These data points have replaced years of SRS conditioning with the ruthless efficiency of a system upgrade.
I am sitting in the co-pilot's chair — her chair, my chair, the chair that has become a territory I did not claim and cannot vacate — running tactical assessments on the Drask transmission data, and I cannot concentrate.
She is in the pilot's seat. Three feet away.
Flying the Petal through the last hours of the corridor with the casual proficiency that made me hard before the fight and is making me hard again now.
The mineral light catches the line of her jaw.
Her lip gloss is still on my jaw. Her thumbprint is still in the dried blood at the corner of it — she wiped the smear once and the print remains, dark against my skin, and her mark in my blood is doing something to the possessive centres of my Xarthian brain that I am choosing not to examine.
Her mouth is swollen. I did that. The lower lip fuller than the upper, flushed a deeper pink, kissed to the edge of bruising because she pulled me closer, and I answered with a thoroughness that had no authorization, and she made a sound into my mouth and the sound went directly through my nervous system to the knot.
Above her eye, the cut is a closed seam of thermal thread.
My work. Her jaw in my hands, her pulse under my thumbs, the first field repair of my career that required me to relearn breathing halfway through.
Every time she turns her head, the mineral light finds the seam, and the same corrupted file re-runs: the tactical weight, the wall, her blood mapping the side of her face.
An inch to the left. I do not complete the calculation.
The purr drops into a register I do not recognize and she glances over and I do not explain.
She catches me looking.
"Stop staring at my mouth, lovey. We've got three hours of corridor left and I need to concentrate."
"I am not staring."
"Your pupils have been the size of dinner plates since the corridor fight and your pheromone output is doing something that's making Sprout's environmental filters work overtime.
You are staring." She does not look at me when she says this.
She keeps her eyes on the corridor. But her pulse is visible in her throat and the flush is creeping back and the scent in the cockpit — her scent, the dark note underneath, the one that means she is thinking about what my hands felt like and her body is responding to the memory — is thickening.
"Sprout's filters are adequate for standard atmospheric conditions. The current conditions are not standard."
"The current conditions are you being turned on in my cockpit while I'm trying to navigate a mineral corridor."
"I am also trying to navigate the mineral corridor. The navigation is being complicated by the fact that you bit your lip forty seconds ago and the visual input was —"
"Finish that sentence. I dare you."
I do not finish the sentence. The sentence does not need finishing.
The sentence lives in the air between us alongside the pheromones and the mineral light and the knowledge that her leg was around my hip an hour ago and the ridges of my shaft were pressed against her belly and she gasped and I swallowed the gasp and the taste of it is still on my tongue.
She glances at my lap. The fourth time in twenty minutes.
Her eyes drop and return and the flush darkens, and she presses her thighs together in the pilot's chair — a small, involuntary movement that she thinks I cannot see and that I can see and that I catalogue with the obsessive precision of a male who has lost all pretense of professional detachment.
Neither of us says it aloud. The promise sits between us like a lit fuse.
Ten hours is a specific form of torture.
Long enough to want. Short enough to endure. Long enough that the enduring is its own agony, the waiting a second operation running parallel to every tactical assessment and every navigational input and every attempt to concentrate on the Drask transmission data.
I catalog the facts of her at three feet.
The pulse visible in her throat. The flush she is suppressing with Morrison’s discipline and losing, incrementally, with every minute since the corridor.
The specific press of her thighs when she thinks I am not watching.
I am always watching. I was watching before I admitted it and before the kiss and before I understood what watching her had already cost me, and I am watching now with the full awareness of what her mouth felt like and the watching has become something I cannot classify in any framework I was given.
Three feet is a moderate range. I can cover three feet in 0.4 seconds. I know this because I have calculated it four times in the last twenty minutes.
She stands. Crosses the cockpit. For a moment I think she is coming to me — to finish what the corridor started — and the anticipation fires through every nerve.
But she reaches past me to the emergency kit mounted above the co-pilot's station, and her body leans across mine.
Her hip presses against my shoulder. The warmth of her belly is against the side of my face through the thin shirt and I can smell her skin at this range — warm, close, the dark scent rising — and the proximity is annihilating.
I go very still. Not restraint — geometry.
The cut above her eye is inches from my horns, and I have already adjusted the angle, the way I did in the corridor while she was bleeding, an accommodation my body now performs without being asked.
"You're bleeding again." She pulls the medkit down. Thermal thread. Antiseptic cloth. "The shoulder. Same one as the first day."
The tactical suit is torn. The Saar fight re-opened the gap — the same shoulder, the same exposure of crimson skin and geometric markings.
I had not noticed because the adrenaline and the kissing and the catastrophic processing failure of having her tongue in my mouth had eclipsed minor tissue damage.
"Sit still." She pulls the torn edge of my suit back.
Her fingers on the fabric, then on my skin — cool against the heat of me, callused fingertips tracing the wound's edge.
The touch is clinical. The touch is devastating.
In the first chapter of us she offered to patch this shoulder and I refused and now she is doing it anyway, her fingers on my bare skin, and the distance between that first offer and this moment is the distance between the male who walked onto her ship and the male who kissed her in a corridor.
"Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"You are purring so hard the medkit is vibrating on the console."
She is correct. The purr has escalated since her fingers made contact with my skin.
The resonance travels through my chest into her hands and I can see the goosebumps lifting along her forearms and the flush climbing her throat.
She is close. Her collar has fallen open, and I can see the line of her collarbone and the shadow of the curve beneath and my claws cycle twice before I lock them in.
She threads the thermal needle through the suit edge.
Her face is inches from my shoulder. Concentrated.
The braid has escaped — loose strands against her cheek — and she tucks one behind her ear and the motion pulls her shirt taut across her chest and I close my eyes because the visual data is exceeding capacity.
I can feel her breath against the side of my neck.
The warmth of it, the rhythm—slightly elevated from her resting rate, the measurement I have been cataloguing since day one and have now committed to biological memory.
I can feel the heat of her scalp through her hair at four inches.
I can smell her skin at this range with a precision that is unfair to us both: warm, close, the dark note that has been building in the cockpit since she stepped back from my mouth and is now, at four inches, operating directly on my bloodstream.
I am very carefully not turning my head.
"You can look." Quiet. The thread pulls tight. "I didn't say stop looking. I said stop staring at my mouth. Looking at the rest of me is —" She pauses. Considers. "Allowed."
I open my eyes. She is looking at me. Not my shoulder. Me. Brown eyes, warm, the Morrison assessment and the woman and the want all present and layered. Her fingers rest on bare skin. The thread is done, but her hand has not moved.
At this distance I can see the closed cut above her eye.
The thermal thread—my field kit, my thread—the edges held cleanly together.
She has not mentioned it since I put it there.
She has not drawn my attention to it and I have not drawn hers.
But at this distance I can see it precisely and my chin adjusts—two degrees, three—angling my horn line to keep the point clear of the right side of her face.
A small accommodation. She doesn’t notice. I do not announce it.
I simply know where it is, and my body builds around that knowledge without being instructed to. The weapon choosing gentleness without authorization. The most deliberate thing I have done in thirty years.
"Patched." Her voice is lower. "Like the first day."
Her thread in my shoulder. My thread above her eye. We are keeping each other closed.
"The first day I refused."