20. Mine #4
She does not finish it because I find the angle that finishes it for her.
She comes apart under me and I get all of it.
Every register at once: her climax arriving in my blood while mine builds in hers, the mark at my throat and the mark at hers and the purr and the rosettes at saturation and the pulse at one hundred and fourteen in two bodies.
She soaks me. She bites my shoulder because my throat is already taken and she needs somewhere to put the rest of the claiming.
My rhythm goes. My muscles lock.
“Let me see,” she says.
Her words from the bunk on my ship, given back to me at the moment they cost the most.
My eyes stay open.
I come apart watched, which is the thing I have spent nine years arranging never to be, and the bond takes all of it across to her: the heat, the pleasure, and underneath the pleasure the whole unperformed remainder of what I have been carrying since day one, delivered without editing, because there is no longer a mechanism between us that would allow me to edit it.
“I see you,” she tells me.
I do not pull out. My forehead against hers, still in her, breathing like a male who has been handed his life back and cannot identify which organ to thank.
My mouth finds her throat. The mark. My teeth gentle on it, holding, not piercing.
“My good girl.”
She comes again on the my. Smaller. Meaner. A locked aftershock that pulls another pulse of heat out of me and her nails down my back, and my name out of her mouth with nothing else attached to it.
I do not roll off her.
I stay in her until the shaking drops to a tremor, and then I take her again, slower, filthy and unhurried, through the mess we have already made, until she comes a fourth time with her face in my throat and my tail around her waist and no language left in her except yes.
Only then do I lie on her for some count of minutes, and only then do I move.
We do not talk. What we do instead is smaller than talking; the sounds a bonded pair make at each other while two bodies do the slow work of metabolizing what their biology has been told. She kisses my mark. I kiss hers. Both of us shudder, quieter now.
She curls against my chest without either of us arranging it. There is come on her thighs. There is a bruise coming up around the clean fresh scars at her throat, and a matching dark bloom at mine, and she puts her mouth on it anyway.
Her nose at my sternum. My hand in her hair. Her pulse in my chest at our rhythm.
The comm at the bulkhead chimes once. A message, not a call.
Tea moved to breakfast. Both of you. Sleep. — F.
Florence knows. The pool has almost certainly paid out.
“My mother would have approved,” she says into my sternum, most of the way gone already.
The sentence arrives with nothing attached to it and no instructions.
There is a woman somewhere back in her who gets a vote on this, and my mate has just cast it in my favor, and I have no idea what the woman was like or what the approving would have comprised.
Whatever it is, it is the first piece of herself she has handed me that was not evidence.
I will not ask her for the rest of it tonight.
“Copy, sweetheart.”
Her breathing goes long against my chest. She sleeps between one breath and the next, the way she went down on my bunk this morning, except that this morning she was burning at 40.4 and I was counting her pulse out loud in an empty cabin.
JINX, on the private channel, at a volume I have not heard him use:
“Tael?”
“Quietly.”
“Resting cardiac output has corrected four percent in eleven minutes. Core temperature is down point-six. Scent register has reorganized at every marker I hold a baseline for. The cascade has reversed. I am not modeling. I am reading.”
“Copy.”
A pause. JINX has been carrying that file since before I would let him open it in my hearing.
“I have deleted the countdown.”
“The cascade clock reset five days ago. There was nothing left in it to delete.”
“Not that one.”
A pause.
“I would like it noted that I kept mine for four hundred and thirty-one days, and never once said the number to you out loud.”
Fourteen months of an operating system watching a male run off-book with no mate, no medical file worth the name, and no particular interest in the far end of any job. Running the arithmetic. Keeping the answer to himself.
“JINX.”
“Tael.”
“What was the number.”
“It does not resolve any more. She has moved every variable I had.”
“…Goodnight, Tael.”
The channel closes.
Her field jacket is on the shelf where I moved it to make room for her head on the pillow. Her mark is warm under my mouth. My mark is warm under hers. My tail finds her ankle and settles and keeps.
Seventeen months and twenty-four days.
The number has nothing below it. What there is instead is a woman asleep on my chest who came down one floor with her boots back on to tell me she had decided, and a quantity of time I have not been issued a figure for, and the unfamiliar problem a mated male who is going to have to work out what to put on a shelf.
I sleep.