14. Chapter 14 #3
He tastes like whatever he was drinking. He kisses me while Torres's hands find my hips and slide up my back, warm and broad, and I make a noise into Luke's mouth that isn't a word.
Luke stops.
Goes back. Does the exact same thing with his thumb.
I do it again.
"There," he says into my jaw.
Torres's hand moves at once. Same place. Heavier.
" Christ —"
"Found it," Torres says.
"You didn't find it. I demonstrated it."
"Both of you," I say, " shut up ."
And they do, which is the actual point of the exercise.
I have never in my life felt so thoroughly wanted.
Luke's shirt is somewhere on the floor. So are my jeans. So, eventually, is everything else, and the room's gone warm and low-lit and my whole world has collapsed down to about three feet of bed.
"Slower," I say at one point, to Torres.
He slows.
"Not you," I say to Luke, who has taken it as a general instruction, and Luke laughs against my hip and does the opposite.
That's the part I'd forgotten I was allowed to have.
Because for eleven hours today my body has been an argument. It's been evidence. It's been a bloodline and a legal question and a security file, and twelve adults sat in a room deciding what should be done about it while I kept my hands flat on the table and let them.
And now the only question in this room is what I want next.
"Torres."
"Yeah."
"Up here."
He comes up the bed and I get my hand around the back of his neck and put my mouth by his ear and tell him exactly what I want, and he says, "Okay," against my throat like I've asked him for a glass of water, and then does it.
Luke's hand goes still on my thigh.
"Say that to me as well."
"You heard it."
"I'd like it addressed to me."
So I address it to him, in detail, and I get to watch every ounce of that famous composure come off his face.
After that neither of them needs telling.
Torres gets an arm under my back and lifts me up against him, and I'm on my knees with him behind me and Luke in front, and Luke's hands come up to hold my face while Torres pushes into me.
"Good?" Torres, rough, at my shoulder.
" Don't stop. "
"Wasn't going to."
Luke's hand slides down between my legs and finds where I need it and stays, and I don't have a single thought left in my head — there's just the two of them, working around me without one word of negotiation, one hand at my throat and one on my hip and a mouth somewhere under my ear.
And both bonds open at once.
It's one enormous wave of wanting coming into me from both sides at the same time, and I can't tell whose is whose, and I don't try.
It takes about nine seconds after that.
I come with my hand fisted in Luke's hair and Torres's arm crushed around my ribs.
Luke's mouth comes to my ear.
"You can let go," he says.
And that finishes me all over again.
Torres goes about half a minute later with my name against the back of my neck, and Luke — who has been holding on to something for the last twenty minutes with a discipline I intend to raise with him later — doesn't last much beyond that.
Afterward I'm somewhere in the middle of my own bed, which is significantly less impressive than it was two hours ago, and I have gone entirely boneless.
Torres is on his front with one arm across my stomach, mostly asleep already, doing the thing where he makes a small noise every time I move.
Luke is propped on an elbow tracing something on my shoulder, and I know that look, and it's the look of a man about eleven seconds from a sentence.
"Don't," I say.
"I wasn't going to."
"Liar."
"I was going to say something adjacent ," Luke says. "Which is different."
"It's not."
"It's marginally—"
"Luke."
He puts his head down on the pillow beside me, laughing, and lets it go.
We lie there for a while. The heating clicks.
"Everybody looked at me differently today," I say.
Torres, without opening his eyes: "I didn't."
"Neither did I," Luke says.
"You absolutely did. When I came in tonight. You looked at me like—"
"Yes," Luke says. "That had nothing whatsoever to do with royalty."
"Oh."
"Mm."
"...Right."
My phone buzzes on the floor where somebody kicked it.
I ignore it.
It buzzes again.
Then again, twice, and Luke turns his head toward the sound.
"If that's one more person wanting to discuss my constitutional significance," I say, "I'm throwing it out the window."
Torres, eyes still shut: "Open the window first."
I reach down and get it.
It's not the Council. It's not the legal office. It's a plain academy calendar update, pushed automatically, for tomorrow.
Six entries where there used to be two.
Escort at 07:40. Leadership rotation moved. Legal office at eleven. Security review at one. Communications briefing at three. And a final line that just says TBC — Chancellor's office , which is somehow the most frightening thing on the list.
On Monday there were two things on this. Both mine. I put them there.
I scroll down and there's nothing left of tomorrow that anybody asked me about.
I hold the phone up so Luke can see it.
He looks at it for a moment.
"Welcome to royalty," he says.
I hit him with a pillow.