CHAPTER 18 #2
"Eleven. " His voice has dropped a quarter step — the banking-down of a man feeding a fire he means to use later. "The starburst on the right shoulder."
I twist my shoulder into the amber. The small black-star burn is a pinprick, almost invisible to anyone not cataloguing me; he has had it filed since the first night he stood behind me at the projection and read what the collar of my shirt did not quite cover. "Soldering iron."
"Fourteen?"
"Fourteen."
He steps close and sets the prosthetic palm flat against my sternum, between my breasts — the metal cool against me, deliberately so, because he wants me to feel only the press, only the steady stay of his hand against the bone.
He has not touched my breasts yet; he is choosing the order, naming what he can see and then asking me to name what he cannot.
"The wrist," he says.
The two-finger nerve-tell on the inside of my left wrist. I have not touched it in front of him for seventeen days. He is asking me to touch it now — to do my own ritual in front of him, which is a different thing than letting him do it for me.
I lift my left hand. I put my right two fingers on the surgical scar that runs three inches along the inside of my left wrist, and I touch it twice.
"Tell me," he says.
"My mother put a thumbdrive port in this wrist when I was nine. It never integrated. They cut it out at twelve. The scar is the only thing she left in my body that I can touch from the outside. The gold rim in my left iris is the only thing she left in my body that I cannot."
His prosthetic hand comes up from my sternum to my jaw. He turns my face until the gold rim of my left iris sits full in the amber. He looks at it directly — first time; he has been counting it in reflective surfaces and never naming it. He takes it in for a long beat.
"I see her in you," he says.
The low pivot of my hips goes molten and heavy — a slow soft give inside the muscle, the heat at the seam of my thighs there for him to take if he dropped his eyes a hand-span.
He keeps them where they are, on the gold rim, on her, and that discipline — the want held to the smaller target — is what tips my breath over the edge of even.
"Adrian."
"Eliza."
"The starburst," I say.
He undoes three buttons of his shirt with the human hand; the prosthetic stays on my face.
The shirt falls open. The starburst is a four-inch knot of pale scar tissue at his lower left abdomen, faintly pink at the rims still, healed but not gone, the dermal patch shaved to a clear membrane.
The hair on his stomach is dark with a single streak of silver to the right of the navel, a detail I find before I have a name for it.
I put my hand on the starburst. My palm covers it. He breathes out through his teeth. The prosthetic at my jaw stays cool — the same deliberate stillness he set against my sternum, asking me to read every other heat in him instead.
"Yours," I say.
"Three years four months ago. Vexis Sector-3 lab.
Tarn's countermand from live extraction to lethal.
The round was meant for Holst. I took it through the brachial artery.
Cade found me. Ashby cut what was left of the arm off.
Renner built me this. " He flexes the prosthetic fingers in the one, two, three, four; three back calibration sequence I learned is his — the same four-count he runs when he is thinking.
"I have not died of it. I have considered it dishonorable to die of it. I have not been touched on the scar in three years and four months."
"Not Wren?"
"Wren has hands on the scar professionally. Quinn. " His voice cracks at the edge. He does not let it open. "Eliza. Not — not for this."
I lean in. I put my mouth on the starburst. He swears quietly into the top of my head — Christ — and the prosthetic at my jaw twitches once and then locks, held at zero by an act of will I can feel through the metal.
He has calibrated himself to hold; if his hand moves, he has told me without telling me, he is not sure he will stop.
"Adrian."
"Yes."
"On the cot."
He sits. He takes my hips with both hands — human at the left, prosthetic at the right — and pulls me into his lap.
The cot springs tick. The wool of his trousers is rough against the insides of my thighs.
He has not even unbuttoned them yet. He moves at the pace of a man holding a position he has waited weeks to take; to rush it would be to throw away the waiting, and he does not waste ground he has already won.
He kisses me. The first one. The kiss is slow and exact and runs from the corner of my mouth across to the bow of the upper lip and back to the lower, and he tastes of cold water and the iron of snow and a small sweetness — the last of the bread Marcus made at dinner.
He ate with us, and I did not know he was thinking about the door of Bunkroom D the whole time.
I put my hand in the silver at his right temple. The streak has the texture of a violin string, slightly coarser than the dark hair around it. He lets me have his head, lets me move him, and the trust of it is the part I am not ready for.
I break the kiss. "Stand still."
He stays.
I unbutton the rest of his shirt and push it off his shoulders.
The shirt comes off the prosthetic last — he lifts the arm to clear the cuff, and the matte black bicep shows me the bronze seam at the shoulder where Luca's weld closed the deltoid, smooth as a coin's rim.
I put my mouth on the seam. He breathes through his teeth and lets me, not a muscle of the arm moving under my lips.
"Quinn. " His voice is almost gone.
"On me. Come here."
He lifts me off his lap and lays me on my back on the cot.
He stands between my knees and finally unbuttons his trousers and pushes them down with the heel of his prosthetic, because he is not letting go of my hip with the human one.
His cock is thick at the base, tapered cleanly, the line of it a little to the left at rest, the head a half-shade darker than the rest of him in the amber.
I have not seen him before. He has not let me. Seventeen days of reading the shape of him through wool.
He comes down over me. He does not put his weight on me; he takes it on the prosthetic forearm against the cot rail at my left shoulder.
His human hand smooths up the inside of my thigh and finds me with two fingers — the pad of his middle finger, then the index — slides into the slick of me, and stops.
"Quinn. You are — you are ready."
"Yes."
He fits himself to me. His prosthetic palm comes down on my sternum, flat — and then, deliberate, lifts a half-second clear of the bone.
The space where the metal was goes cold.
He holds above me, waiting; the lattice glows faint at the edge of my vision.
I push up into the air where his palm was until my sternum finds him again, and he eases the weight back down on me and lets the lattice warm — the slow banked-coal heat pulsing against the bone between my breasts in the steady rhythm of his pulse, a warmth he is giving me on purpose.
He slides into me by inches. He watches me the entire way down.
"Yes."
"Yes."
The first inch is pressure. The fourth is a stretching that takes the breath out of my chest in a clean steady push.
He takes his time. He has been a soldier since he was nineteen and he learned the value of taking his time at a corner; he is taking a corner now.
By the time he is fully inside me, my hands are on his ribs and my mouth is open against his collarbone and I have stopped tracking the room.
"Eliza."
"There. Stay there."
He stays. He holds himself still — his cock buried in me, his forehead pressed to mine, his human fingers laced into mine above my head on the pillow.
He reached for them and I did not notice until they were laced.
The bunker is silent. Somewhere on the upper level a kettle clicks off, water having boiled and gone unattended; Marcus will get it.
I can hear my own pulse in my throat, behind my eyes, in my teeth.
He starts to move. Slow — the deliberate slow of a man laying claim by degrees, every stroke measured against the last. He holds the same length for nine; on the tenth he tilts his hips and the new angle puts pressure inside me against the place where everything I have ever known about my own body becomes one bright point.
"That. Don't change it. " Then, because the instinct in me is always to find the live line and push the current through it as hard as it will carry: "Faster. Now. Don't hold it."
"No. " Flat. Certain. The only contradiction he has given me all night, and he gives it without breaking stride.
"You are reading it wrong. It is not faster you want.
" He holds the slow, exactly the slow, and he is right — the bright point widens instead of sharpening, spreads from the one place out to my hips, and the wrongness of my own instruction unspools in me as heat.
"Right there," he says, correcting me onto the thing I did not know I was asking for. "Stay with me at this one."
"Stay. Don't move," I say, surrendering the angle to him, and the giving-over of it undoes me.
He stays. He fucks me at one length for ten strokes, twelve — I stop counting because I have started to come, and I come around him slowly, building, the tension at the base of my spine drawing up to my hips and pouring out through my thighs, and the sound I make against his collarbone is a small clean yes.
He holds himself inside me through it. He lets me ride it out around him.
"Adrian."
"Yes."
"Again. — More."
He moves. Faster, but not much; he does not pound.
He strokes, each stroke a vector, the warm bone-deep press of metal at my sternum keeping pace with his hips so I will know, every second, exactly where his hand is.
The heat between my breasts is the part that does me in — a tenderness I have not paid for.