Chapter 26 #2
Her hand flies to my shoulder. “Reyes.”
I look up.
Her face is flushed, eyes bright, mouth parted. Want and terror and command all there together because Maren doesn’t become simple under pleasure. Thank God.
“Yes?” I ask.
“You’re very far away down there.”
I nearly smile. “Tactical issue?”
“Severe.”
I move back up her body and kiss her. She tastes herself on my mouth and makes a sound that turns my blood hot and useless. “Better?” I ask.
“No.”
“No?”
“I liked that too.”
The laugh comes out of me before I can stop it.
Her eyes widen. Then her hand slides between us and closes around my cock through my open pants, and the laugh dies.
She watches my face while she strokes me.
My eyes close. My hips move once into her hand. Her thumb drags over the head of me, and I brace one hand beside her shoulder hard enough that the cot complains again.
My eyes open. There are too many systems failing inside me to name.
She gets the rest of my clothes open with less patience now. I help. She lets me this time. When I reach for the small storage drawer beside the cot, she follows the movement.
“Condoms in the maintenance hub?”
“Preparedness.”
“That’s either bleak or optimistic.” She laughs into my shoulder while I deal with the condom, and the sound becomes a gasp when I settle between her thighs.
The cot is too narrow. The room is too small. The facility is dying by degrees around us.
Maren’s hand rests on my jaw, thumb against the corner of my mouth. “Look at me,” she says.
I do as I push into her slowly.
Her body takes me in with tight, wet heat, and every part of me tries to become too careful again. She feels it. Her legs tighten around my hips, pulling me closer, deeper, refusing the distance before I can build it.
“Reyes,” she says, and my name is permission.
I give her more. She takes it.
When I’m fully inside her, I stop because the room has narrowed to the place where we’re joined. Her hand moves to the back of my neck. Mine is braced beside her head. Her breath is unsteady. Mine is worse.
I move. Deep enough that she grips me harder. Slow enough that every thrust has to be admitted. She meets me each time, hips lifting, body opening under mine, her breath catching against my mouth when I find the angle that makes her lose the next word.
The cot knocks against the wall. The sound should pull me back to structure. Load. Failure. Weight. It doesn’t.
I let my body cover hers. Let my hand slide under her thigh and lift her closer.
Let myself want the pressure, the heat, the impossible fact of her holding me inside her and asking for more.
I kiss her throat. Her jaw. Her mouth when she turns toward me.
I feel the bandage on her hand scrape across my shoulder and the old scar at my ribs pull when she wraps around me tighter.
The cot is terrible. It holds.
She breaks in pieces. Her breath stutters. Her nails drag across my back. Her body tightens around mine, and she says my name like she is losing patience with the universe for making her feel this much in a room with bad coffee and emergency maps.
I keep moving.
“Reyes,” she says, less steady.
I drive into her harder, past the last polite edge of restraint. She meets it with a sound that goes through me.
She comes with her mouth against mine, her whole body locking around me, and I feel the moment she stops holding anything back.
I follow her over. Quietly, I think. Maybe not.
For a few seconds, I’m nowhere but inside her, against her, held by her, weight and heat and breath and no counting at all.
No exits.
No steps.
Just Maren.
When I can move again, I do it carefully.
She complains under her breath when I withdraw, which shouldn’t be as satisfying as it is.
I deal with the condom and return before she can decide the space beside her is empty.
The cot still barely fits both of us, so we solve it by giving up on dignity.
Her head ends up on my shoulder. One of her legs hooks over mine.
Her hand rests in the center of my chest like she is monitoring something.
My breathing slows. Hers doesn’t slow as much.
She’s still awake inside the crisis. I feel it in her body. The part of her listening for comms, alarms, footsteps, the next impossible thing coming through a wall.
I close my eyes. Just for one second.
Maren’s fingers move once on my chest. “You’re drifting,” she says.
“No. Observing.”
My body is heavy in a way I don’t trust. Just done. “I should stay awake,” I say.
“You should sleep for twenty minutes before your body starts filing complaints with management.”
“I’m management.”
“Then consider this a hostile memo.”
Her lips touch my chest once. Then she begins easing away.
I tighten my arm around her before I decide not to.
She stills.
I open my eyes.
The room is dim. Her face is close. Soft in a way the facility almost never lets her be. Alert in a way that means she’s already halfway back to the work.
I let go.
“I’m coming back,” she says.
The words are simple. I believe them more than I should.
“Don’t promise routes you can’t control,” I say.
“I’m not.” She presses her palm over my heart one more time. “I’m telling you my intention.”
I close my eyes again before the look on my face becomes something she has to carry into the next room.
The cot shifts as she stands. I hear fabric. The soft curse when her shirt catches. The quiet snap of her bra. The rustle of her pants. The tap of her fingers against the desk as she finds her tablet.
She moves around my hub carefully. The blanket comes over me.
I open my eyes. “Maren.”
“Don’t argue. You’re naked and outvoted.” She turns toward the door with her tablet in one hand. Then she reaches up and switches off the overhead light.
The hub drops into the softer glow of the desk lamp. Enough to wake if needed. Not enough to keep a man pretending he’s on watch.
“Sleep,” she says.
The words come slowly because sleep’s already found the seams. “Your hand needs another dressing in four hours.”
Maren’s laugh is quiet and real and wrecks me more than anything the tunnel did.
“Romantic,” she says. She opens the door.
The facility noise slips in.
I don’t count the steps from the cot to the exit.
I know where she is.
That’s the route.
The door seals softly behind her.
I fall asleep before I can make myself stand.