But the searing fusion of his mouth shocked her into silence, his touch a live wire and a nuclear explosion. His mouth, and—
Forster.
He knew. He knew that name.Hername.
How?
She could’ve wrenched away to slap him and demand an answer. She should’ve—but her free hand was fisted in the collar of his vest, hauling him nearer. Had she meant to strangle him? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think, mindless, thoughtless, ravenous in his arms, an orbit collapsing, logic collapsing with it, desperate, fierce and angry, starving for his single-minded focus, for this break in his control—and she sank her hungry teeth into his lip.
“Ah!”
His gasp was electric. Erin swallowed it.
Pulling Ethan with her, she backed into an operator desk under the monitors. He must’ve released her wrist while exhaling his surprise, because her other hand was free now to drag through his hair as one ankle hooked around his calf, urging him closer,closer. She stole his balance as she stole his breath; he collapsed beside her onto the desk, a palm at the nape of her neck raking along her braid and the other clutching the base of her spine while she clawed her fingers under his fleece and his shirt.
He hissed at the scrape of her nails up his back. “Erin—”
“No—don’t tell me to go easy, don’t youdare—”
Click.
The door into the control room unlocked.
A system maintenance engineer in a safety vest stood in the hall outside, frozen with a key for the emergency deadbolt in her hand. “Uh.”
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck—
She pushed Ethan off the desk.
Off her.
“The… the XCS hutch is…um, closed for maintenance. The scanner’s malfunctioning, so I had to manually reopen the room after the system check…” The engineer backed away, eyes wide and oscillating between them, hands raised. “But I can come back later.”
The door closed again. Erin did the only thingshecould do, and ran for the hall.
“Wait—” His voice was raw, rasping.
She didn’t. Stomach churning, eyes blurred under the harsh lights in the corridor, she staggered past the gawking system maintenance engineer and the hutches for Macromolecular Femtosecond Crystallography and Coherent X-ray Imaging. His footsteps beat hard after her, but if she could just reach the parking lot outside, reach her bicycle, she’d be so much faster, could get away from him and herself—and her hallucination, her memory,what the hell?—so she smacked into the West Experimental Hall’s exterior door—
“Forster!”
—and stopped.
Again, that name.
A gust of wind smelling of sunbaked metal whipped inside the vestibule and against her cheeks for a moment, before cutting off as the door ricocheted against its stopper and closed again. She didn’t block it. She remained where she stood, facing an Exit sign and staring straight into a pocket dimension, down the sinkhole of some quantum tunnel, those syllables spoken in Ethan Meyer’s voice echoing through her head…
“Forster.” He was behind her now, breathless. “Erin.”
Her names. Both of them.
“W-what?” She reached for the door a second time, but not to shove it open: to brace herself. Her palm squeaked and slid on the metal, and it turned her a hazardous inch away from her goal outside, toward him instead. Was the steel magnetized? Was she? “What… w-what did you say?”
“You’re Forster. The writer.” He took a step nearer. “AaronForster. It… it’s a homophone. Isn’t it?”
“Uh.” She couldn’t look away, couldn’t breathe.
