“Like heat blooming under my bones,” she pants. “Like I could split open from pleasure and you’d hold me together with your body. Like I’m not just wanted—I’m worshiped.”
“You are,” I tell her, kissing the thin skin at her throat where her pulse trips. “You are.”
I slide the hand at her back under her ass, lift, brace her on my forearm so I can angle deeper. The next stroke finds that sweet, unbearable place and she cries out, back bowing, pussy clamping hard around me. I groan, bury my face against her neck, fight to keep the rhythm while everything in me wants to rush. I do not rush. I give her what she asked for: savor. My thumb works her clit in small, ruthless circles, and her breath goes ragged, then higher, then breaks.
“I’m—Rayek—I’m—” She can’t finish because pleasure takes the word and tears it into bright pieces. She goes tight, then tighter, pussy milking my cock, and I keep moving, slow, sure, coaxing, praising. “Yes,” I whisper, because I need her to know I see it, I feel it, I am with her. “That’s it. Come for me. Let me feel you.”
She shatters, not like glass, like light—pulse after pulse, a beautiful surrender—crying my name with a sobbing laugh that might be the bravest sound I’ve ever heard. The squeeze drags me to the edge; I brace, curse, kiss her throat, her mouth, the corner of her eye, and thrust through the clutch until the world sharpens to a blade’s-thickness. I hold her gaze, gold drowning in green, and let go.
Release hits like a flood after siege. I bury myself to the hilt and spill inside her, gutted and made, groaning into her openmouth as heat pulses out of me in deep, helpless waves. She takes all of it, legs locked around my hips, hand crushing mine. The ship hums; the bed sighs; the universe minds its business for once.
We breathe in pieces, then in sync. I do not collapse; I lower, big as a storm, careful as a lullaby, keeping most of my weight in my arms so she can feel full without being flattened. I stay inside her because leaving would feel like dishonor. Her fingers find the short ridge at my nape again and stroke until my heartbeat slows.
“Rayek,” she whispers, kissing the old jagged scar over my eye as if to change the story it tells. “Tell me the truth.”
“All of it?” I ask, chest still heaving, forehead on hers.
“All of it,” she says, smiling like a woman who already knows and wants to hear the music anyway.
“It feels like I’m finally allowed to live in the same skin I fight in,” I say, tasting salt and lemon and her. “Like my cock learned your body before my mind did. Like the noise in my head packed its bags. Like I’m home.”
“Good,” she answers, smug and soft, squeezing around me one last time just to watch me shudder. “Because that’s exactly how it feels to me.”
We drift apart only enough to rearrange, a lazy tangle. I roll to my side and bring her with me, still joined, her thigh thrown over my hip, her hand splayed over my chest where my heart has decided to be domesticated. In the hush, the ring I made for her catches a seam of light and winks. I touch it with one claw-tip and tell myself again that hands meant for killing are allowed to build.
“Again?” she asks after a while, wicked and hopeful, voice frayed in a way I want to wear on my bones for the rest of my life.
“Always,” I say, and mean it, and let my mouth find hers, patient, hungry, reverent—a soldier re-learning the only orders that ever mattered: be gentle; be honest; don’t let go.
She drifts,then rouses, then drifts again. I watch her the way a man watches the first weather he’s liked in months. She reaches lazily for the sheet; I give it; she drags it up and tucks it under her arm like a small, satisfied dragon. The engine purrs a key lower as CynJyn adjusts something clever. The stars beyond the hull go on being indifferent to our small declarations. I won’t hold that against them.
“Tell me a last thing,” she murmurs, heavy with sleep but greedy for one more word. “A truth we trained ourselves not to say.”
“I wanted to carry you, in the garden,” I say into her hair. “When you asked me if I hated you. I wanted to pick you up and walk until the heat left your face. I wanted to take you somewhere without cameras and sayno one gets to tell me to be proud of losing you.”
She smiles against my chest, and the curl of her mouth warms my skin. “I wanted you to be the one to stop that dance,” she says. “I wanted you to put your mouth on the part of me that still apologizes to everyone and make it forget how.”
“It will remember,” I say. “We will remind it again.”
She nods, sleep tugging harder. “Rayek?”
“Yes.”
“I love you,” she says, simple as the first note of a song you’ve been humming your whole life without words.
I close my eyes and let the shape of it live in my chest. “I love you,” I answer, the vow needing no volume to be true. “Now. Later. After. Even when we are old and I am ugly and CynJyn writes plays about us.”
“She will,” Star mumbles, already halfway gone. “Make sure she gives me good lines.”
“She has nothing else,” I promise.
Her breath lengthens. Her weight settles. The ship holds its course through the dark we were both born into and both learned to outrun. I lie awake a while and listen to the constant under the chaos, the one thing the medic told us to find and match. It is her. It will be her until someone wrests the stars from their sockets and even then, I think, I’ll still hear it.
Reentry paintsthe canopy in fire. The hull hums under my palms; the shuttle’s skin ticks like it’s cooling while we’re still hot. Akura swells in the glass—a blue-green shoulder I know by the scars on its coastlines, the combed vineyards, the river that refuses to run straight. Star’s breathing changes the instant the planet fills the window. I feel it where her knee touches mine, a small stutter, then discipline dropping over her like armor.
“You okay?” CynJyn asks from the pilot’s chair, easy hands, dirty corridor behind us, polite air lanes ahead.
“Define okay,” Star says, voice even, eyes gone distant. “We have appointments with ghosts.”
