Chapter 9 #2
The world tilts. My vision greys at the edges, and for a moment the pain is everything, a solid wall of it radiating from the wound site.
I lock my jaw. Breathe through my nose. Wait for it to become manageable.
Below me, Dexter's hands find my thighs, steadying me, and his marks pulse with something I recognize as my own pain reflected back.
"You're hurting."
"I know." I look down at him. My hands find his chest, and I can feel his heart slamming against his ribs. "I don't care."
I'm still wearing the remnants of my tactical gear.
The undersuit, peeled down to my waist when they bandaged me, the fabric stiff with something dark and dried along the right sleeve.
His blood. From when I first cut him, days ago, a lifetime ago, before the laboratory and the bullets and the truth I couldn't keep buried.
His blood is on my clothes and his body is beneath me and nothing about this is tender.
Good. I don't want tender. Tender would break me.
I reach between us. He's hard, has been since I kissed him, and when my fingers close around him he sucks air through his teeth and his marks flare so bright the whole med bay goes gold.
I position myself and sink down, and the stretch of him inside me tears a sound out of my throat that I don't recognize as my own.
For a moment neither of us moves. The sensation is too much, too full, the physical reality of this colliding with the emotional wreckage of everything we just said to each other.
I can feel his fingers digging into my thighs hard enough to bruise, and his marks are cycling through colors I've never seen, amber to gold to something almost white, and through whatever connection his biology creates I can feel everything he's feeling.
My pleasure and his pleasure feeding into each other, a loop that doubles and redoubles until the edges blur.
I move. Slow at first, because my back is a live wire and every shift of my hips sends sparks of pain lacing through the pleasure.
I brace my hands on his chest and I ride him with the careful, controlled violence of someone who has spent her life mastering her own body, finding the angle that makes the pain manageable and the pleasure blinding.
Then I put my hand on his throat.
His eyes go wide. His marks blaze white. I can feel his pulse hammering under my palm, and I tighten my fingers just enough to feel the tendons shift, just enough to compress, and his hips buck up into me so hard my vision blacks at the edges.
"You don't get to be careful with me." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Lower, rougher, scraped raw by everything I'm feeling. "Not now. Not ever."
He could throw me off. He's stronger, uninjured, and my grip on his throat is more symbolic than structural. But he doesn't move. His hands slide up my thighs to my hips, and he holds me there, and he lets me take what I need.
I set the pace. Hard and controlled and relentless, each roll of my hips a deliberate act, each upstroke a denial, each downstroke a surrender I refuse to name.
The pain in my back feeds into the pleasure until I can't separate them, until they become the same frequency, the same signal, and I'm riding the edge of both with my hand on his throat and his marks painting the ceiling in light.
He feels everything I feel. I can see it in his face, the way his jaw clenches when pain spikes through me, the way his breath stutters when pleasure crests.
He's drowning in it, in the doubled sensation, his body processing my signals and his own simultaneously, and the look on his face is something I will never be able to unsee. Ruined. Reverent. Annihilated.
"Astra." His voice is a wreck, barely a rasp under the pressure of my hand. "Please."
I don't know what he's asking for. I don't care.
I tighten my fingers and grind down and his hips snap up to meet me, and the sound our bodies make is graceless and wet and real, and the smell of sweat and recycled air and something underneath that is just him, just Dexter, the scent I've been trying to forget for six years, fills my lungs until I can't breathe anything else.
Neither of us pretends this is making love. It's not. It's war conducted through skin and sweat and the sounds people make when they're past language. It's six years of silence broken open. It's hate and love and the space between them where nothing is clean or kind.
I come with his name on my lips and his throat under my hand, and the orgasm tears through me like a shockwave, starting where our bodies meet and radiating outward until even my wound pulses with it, pain and pleasure fused into something that feels like being rewritten at the molecular level.
His marks explode into white light. He follows me over the edge with a sound that has no pride in it, no control, just the raw and ruined noise of a man feeling too much to contain.
The light fades slowly. His marks dim from white to gold to amber, pulsing in diminishing waves, and the med bay settles back into its usual half-dark. I can hear both of us breathing. Ragged, uneven, the kind of breathing that comes after violence.
I climb off him.
My back screams. I ignore it the way I've ignored every inconvenient signal my body has ever sent me.
I find my undersuit on the floor, pull it on with hands that are steadier than they have any right to be, and zip it to my throat.
I don't look at him. I can feel his eyes on me, can feel the pulse of his marks in my peripheral vision, warm and questioning.
I walk out of the med bay.
The corridor is dark. The ship hums around me like a living thing, recyclers and gravity generators and the low throb of engines pushing us through the black toward Veridian-7.
I make it four steps before I have to lean against the bulkhead, my hand pressed to the cold metal, my wound pulsing heat against the bandages. My legs are shaking. My eyes are dry.
Behind me, through the half-open med bay door, I can see the faint amber glow of his marks in the darkness.
He doesn't move. Doesn't call after me. Just lies there on the cot where I left him, marks slowly dimming, and the silence between us fills the corridor like atmosphere venting from a punctured hull.
I walk to my quarters. I close the door.
I sit on the edge of my bunk and stare at my hands, at the faint tremor I can't quite control, and I do not think about what just happened.
I do not think about the way he said my name.
I do not think about how his pulse felt under my palm, strong and steady and alive because of me, because I put my body between his and a bullet without thinking, without calculating, without being the person I've spent my entire adult life becoming.
I do not think about any of it. I am a professional. I have a mission.
My hands stop shaking by the time I fall asleep.
Morning. If you can call it morning on a ship where the lights cycle on a timer and the sun is a concept measured in light-years. I surface from sleep to find the pain has retreated to a dull roar, manageable, the kind I can file away and function through.
I shower. Dress. Run a diagnostic on the wound site with the med bay's portable scanner while standing in the corridor, because I am not going back into that room. The tissue regenerator has done its work. Nerve inflammation is down forty percent. I'll be functional within another day.
When I enter the galley, Dexter is already there. Coffee. Two mugs. He slides one across the counter without looking up from his data pad, and the gesture is so domestic, so normal, that something in my chest clenches before I crush it.
"The lab data needs analysis," he says. His voice is neutral. Professional. His marks hold at a steady, unremarkable amber. Nothing in his face suggests that twelve hours ago I had my hand around his throat while I fucked him in the med bay.
"I know." I take the coffee. It's bitter and too hot, and it tastes like his world. Expensive beans, real ones, not the synthesized powder that comes standard on ships like this. I drink it and let it burn.
We don't mention it. We're professionals. We have a mission. The laboratory data sits on the ship's secure drive, encrypted layers we've been peeling back since before the ambush, and there are answers in there that matter more than whatever is festering between us.
We work. Side by side in the cramped cockpit, his data pad synced to the ship's main display, my fingers moving across the console as I run decryption protocols and spatial analysis algorithms. We trade observations in clipped, clean sentences. No banter. No loaded pauses. Two people doing a job.
But everything has changed. I can feel it in the space between us, in the way the air shifts when his arm brushes mine reaching for the display, in the way I track his breathing without deciding to, in the way his marks pulse faintly brighter every time our eyes meet and then dim again, controlled, deliberate, like he's holding himself on a leash.
We both know. We just aren't saying it.
The decryption finishes mid-afternoon, or what passes for it. The data unfolds across the main display in layers of coordinates and spectral analysis and energy signatures that make my breath catch, and for a long moment neither of us speaks.
Not one anomaly. Not one tear in the fabric of space-time, not the isolated incident we'd been told about, not the singular phenomenon that justified a two-person retrieval mission to a dead station.
A network.
Tears scattered across the galaxy like fracture lines in glass, dozens of them, connected by energy signatures that pulse in synchronization, as if something on the other side is breathing and each tear is a nostril.
The display renders them as points of light, and the pattern they form is too regular to be natural. Someone made these. Or something did.
"How many?" My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
"Forty-seven confirmed." Dexter's fingers move across the data, pulling coordinates, cross-referencing known systems. His marks have gone very still, the kind of still that means he's processing something that scares him.
"Twelve more probable. And these aren't new.
Some of these energy signatures date back decades. "
Decades. Decades of tears in space-time, hidden, unmonitored, unreported. The scope of the cover-up alone makes my head swim.
Then he stops. His hand hovers over the display. His marks flicker once, a cold blue I've never seen before.
"There's a tear." His voice goes flat, stripped of everything, the way it gets when he's delivering information that might kill someone. "Right on our doorstep. And someone has been using it."
The coordinates pulse on the display. I know them before I even read the numbers, know them the way you know the coordinates of home, the way your body recognizes danger before your mind catches up.
Veridian-7. Close enough to touch. Close enough that whoever has been using it could walk to work.
The secret is bigger than we knew. It's been hiding in plain sight, sitting right next to us, breathing through the wall of the universe while we lived our small, violent lives and never looked up long enough to see it.
I stare at the display. Dexter stares at me.
We have forty-seven problems, and we're flying straight toward one of them.