12. Saren
SAREN
Igo where the ship is quietest, which is the forward observatory, because after the current I cannot trust myself near anyone who might need their captain steady.
I am not steady. I came that close to losing her in a current of grinding rock, and the bond, denied for two weeks, has stopped pacing the inside of me and started clawing.
I sit in the dark with the dead stars and I try to be a captain and I am only a man who almost watched the one thing fate ever gave him die at a console.
The hatch opens. Of course it does. She never could leave a locked thing alone.
"You keep doing this," Althea says. "You bleed for us, you fly us out of a grave, and then you crawl off to a cold room to fall apart by yourself."
"Go back, Thea."
"No." She crosses the chamber. The blue light finds the scar I took shielding her, the bruise along her jaw, the fury and something underneath the fury.
"You'd let yourself break in here alone before you'd let one of us see it.
I've watched you do it for two weeks. What is it you're so sure you'll lose if you let it out? "
"You." The word leaves before the captain can stop it. "Everything I touch, the galaxy comes to take. My world. My people. Every name I have ever had to cut. The bond chose you and all I can think is that I've just told the dark exactly what to aim for."
"So that's it. You'd rather feel nothing than feel that.
" She steps in until there's no distance left to keep.
"I've spent my whole life being the box nobody told what was inside it.
Disposable. Used and dropped. And the one time I'm wanted — wanted, not needed, not used — the man doing the wanting is too noble to let himself have it.
" Her voice cracks on the last of it. "Want me badly, Saren.
Just once let something want me badly and not be ashamed of it. "
Whatever I've been holding shut gives all at once.
I kiss her, and there is nothing careful left in it.
She is small and fierce against me and she gives back everything, both fists knotted in my hair, dragging me down to her height like she means to keep me there.
The chord that sounded the first time I touched her opens wide, and I stop hearing the ship, stop hearing the war and the dead and the eighty souls who need me whole.
There is only her mouth and the sound she makes when I lift her off her feet.
I set her on the broad sill beneath the viewport, where the dead stars lay their cold light over us, and I lift the patched jacket from her shoulders with hands that have no business being steady and somehow are.
She is scarred the way I am scarred, smaller maps of harder years, and I put my mouth to each one — the old line at her collarbone, the fresh bruise along her jaw — until she shudders and says my name like a complaint and an order in the same breath.
"Less reverence," she gets out. "More of you."
So I give her more. I strip the rest from her, and she pulls at my harness with single-minded fury, and when there is nothing left between us she goes still for the length of a heartbeat, taking in the size of me, the gray and the scars and the bone, the whole monstrous truth the galaxy raised her to run from.
She does not run. She lays her palm flat over the center of my chest, over the place my heart is trying to break its cage, and says, "There he is," soft, like she has found something she'd misplaced.
I lay her back against the cold metal and I learn her — hands first, then my mouth, slower than the want clawing through me wants.
I trace the sharp lines of her collarbones with my tongue, follow the valley between her breasts, feel her breath catch and stutter as I take one tight nipple between my lips and suck, hard enough to make her gasp.
Her hands tangle in my hair, pulling, and I graze the sensitive peak with my teeth before moving to the other, giving it the same attention while she writhes beneath me.
"God," she breathes, "Saren—"
I don't stop. I work my way down her body, pressing open-mouthed kisses to the hollow of her stomach, the jut of her hip bones, the sensitive skin of her inner thighs.
She's already trembling, already wet for me, and when I finally put my mouth on her she cries out, a broken sound that I swallow greedily.
She tastes like salt and heat and everything I never knew I was starving for.
I lap at her, broad strokes of my tongue, and when she tries to arch away I hold her hips down and devour her properly, finding the tight bud of her clit and circling it until she's a shaking mess beneath me.
"Saren, I can't—" She's gripping my hair hard enough to hurt. "Please—"
I slide two thick fingers into her, feel her walls clench around me, and I don't stop my tongue's work. She comes apart on my mouth with my name torn out of her, her whole body bowing off the sill, and I drink every last tremor until she goes limp and panting.
I should stop. I should let her recover. But the bond is roaring in me, a fire that doesn't care about recovery, and when she reaches for me, drags me up the length of her, guides me to her, I cannot find it in me to deny either of us.
"Now," she says, ragged. "All of it. Don't you dare be gentle with me."
I sink into her by degrees, reading her face for the edge where want turns to too-much, ready to stop — but she only locks her legs at the small of my back and takes the rest of me in one slow pull that tears a sound from my chest I have never made for anyone.
She's so tight, so hot, and I have to stop for a moment or I'll lose myself entirely.
Her eyes flutter open, find mine, and she smiles with that infuriating, fearless expression.
"Better than you imagined?" she asks, breathless but smug.
"Shut up," I growl, and then I move.
I am careful with my strength the way I am careful with everything, and she will not allow it; she meets me, urges me deeper, harder, until the care burns off us both and there is only the rhythm of it, her name in my mouth and my own ragged in hers, the sill rocking under us and the dead stars wheeling past the glass.
She feels so impossibly good around me, clenching and dragging, and when I shift my angle slightly she screams — a real scream — and I know I've found the spot that makes her see stars.
"There," she gasps, "right there, don't stop—"
I don't. I drive into her, deep and relentless, watching her face contort with pleasure.
She's so beautiful like this, open and unguarded, all the careful armor stripped away.
I want to brand this image into my memory forever.
My thumb finds her clit, circles it in time with my thrusts, and I feel her start to crest again.
"Come for me," I command, my voice rough and dark. "I want to feel you come apart around me."
She does, with a cry that echoes off the observatory walls, and the clench of her takes the last of my control with it.
I follow her over with my face buried in the curve of her neck and the bond roaring through every nerve I own, spilling myself into her with a groan that's almost a growl.
For one weightless stretch I am not dying and my people are not dying and the universe has narrowed to the woman shaking in my arms.
After, the cold comes looking for us, and I gather her to my chest and pull the discarded jacket over her bare shoulder. Her breathing slows. Mine matches it without being asked. The marks I cut for my dead catch the starlight overhead, and for once they do not sit on me like a debt.
"You're still here," I say, when I am certain she is asleep, so it is safe to be afraid of how much I mean it.
"Mm." Not asleep at all. "Get used to it."
I sleep. No old ghost comes to drag me back through the worst of my years. It is the first night in longer than I can count, and I will not understand until morning that the gift was never the heat of her. It was the quiet she left behind in me.