Chapter 14 Brecca #3
He pulled me close. His other hand came to my face, long fingers against my jaw, cool and warming, the subdermal vibration humming against my skin.
I tilted my head back to look at him and his silver eyes were so close I could see the striations in his irises, the subtle fracture patterns that made them look like cracked ice.
"I am going to kiss you," he said. "If that is—"
"If you ask permission I'm going to kill you."
The almost-smile became a real smile. Small, tentative, but unmistakable.
The first full smile I'd ever seen on his alien face, and it was beautiful the way unexpected things are beautiful, the way a flower growing through rubble is beautiful, and I didn't have time to catalogue it because his mouth was on mine.
Cool. His lips were cool. The same below-human temperature as the rest of him, and the contrast with the heat building between us, the connection, the glow, the fire of two consciousnesses merging, made me shiver.
He kissed the way he did everything: measured, precise, attentive.
Learning my rhythm the way he'd learned my language, with the focused intensity of a mind designed for connection and starved of it for three hundred years.
I kissed him back and the connection surged.
His emotions flooded through: desire, tenderness, a psychic hunger so deep it ached, the need to be known fully by another mind.
What I felt like to him poured back into me — the warmth of a human body against his cool skin, my rapid pulse that he'd been tracking for weeks, the taste of my consciousness against his, like light after years of dark.
His skin was glowing. Everywhere we touched, the light intensified.
My hand on his chest lit up the network of veins beneath his translucent skin, turning his torso into a constellation.
My fingers in his silver-white hair sent light cascading down his neck.
His hand on the small of my back, warm now, almost hot, and the vibration of his body hummed through my spine — the subdermal frequency that preceded combat speed but was, I realized, also the frequency of need.
"Is this—" I breathed against his mouth. "Is this the connection? Or is this—"
"Both." His voice was raw, the harmonic undertone so thick that the second frequency was almost dominant, a deep vibration I felt in my chest and my stomach and lower. "The bond and the body. They are not separate for my kind."
"They're not separate for mine either. We just pretend they are."
He made a sound, low and harmonic, something between a laugh and a groan, and pulled me closer, and everything between us opened wider, and for a long time there was nothing in the world but his consciousness against mine and his body against mine and the silver-blue radiance that lit us up like two stars colliding in the dark.
* * *
Afterward, we lay on the flat stone at the edge of the ridge with the sky full of unfamiliar stars above us and the camp's lights below.
His arm was around me and my head was on his chest and I could hear his heartbeat, both through my ears and through the thread between us, the external sound and the internal pulse woven into a single rhythm.
"Your heartbeat is twenty beats per minute," he said.
"What?"
"Your resting heart rate. Twenty beats per minute. Elevated slightly from the baseline I measured before."
"My resting heart rate is sixty-eight. You're feeling it through the link; it probably registers differently."
"It registers as warmth. A persistent, rhythmic warmth. Like a fire that never goes out."
I pressed my face against his chest and breathed in the scent of him. Metallic and clean, like ozone after lightning, the smell I'd first noted as "machine-like" and now associated with safety and desire and the complicated ache of caring about someone you might lose.
"You'll come back," I said. Not a question.
"I'll come back to you."
"If you don't, I'll kill you myself."
The almost-smile. The real smile. The one that was becoming mine.
"That seems redundant," he said.
"I'm a medic. I know where all the organs are."
He pulled me closer. The luminescence was fading to its resting state, a faint ambient shimmer, barely visible, like the last ember of a fire that would reignite at a touch.
His hand traced a line down my spine and the warmth between us hummed with something that didn't need words or psychic transmission or any translation at all.
We lay there until the stars shifted and the air grew cold and the camp below us quieted into the deep-night silence that meant most people were finally asleep.
And for the first time in three years, for the first time since the invasion, since the world ended, since I'd built a life out of detachment and distance and the absolute refusal to need anyone, I fell asleep in someone's arms and I wasn't afraid.
The bond pulsed between us. Two pulses. Two species. One frequency.
And the silence that had been my armor was replaced by something stronger: the sound of not being alone.