Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(83)
So fucking amazing she wanted to—needed to—share it. With him.
Turned out she could. Com room, right? She knew how to use one of those. She knew how to merge her thoughts with another person’s. Show him her feelings. Let him into her head. And at the same time, closet away everything he oughtn’t see there, shhhh.
Emotion casting was totally her wheelhouse.
She swept one hand over the communications board. The bulkhead separating the com module from the rest of the sub lowered, slowly. Hissed. Sealed.
“When we were out by the car looking at the ocean in the dark,” she told him, making her voice into a lullaby, “I watched you get into your dive kit. I watched your body in the moonlight, and you know what I couldn’t stop thinking?”
“That you’d better ought give a man his pride and look away when he’s that goddamned cold?”
“That somebody with a gift should carve your likeness. And I would put it by my bed and go to sleep every night, enchanted by such beauty. And I would never have a nightmare again.”
“Y’know, you can spout poetry till your voice goes, gal, but sayin’ a thing, even a real pretty thing, don’t make it true.”
“I know.” Her throat was so thick with tears, she could hardly speak. “I am a fantastic liar, though, and just once, I need to show you my best lie, my myth and fantasy. I need to make you believe. Please let me.”
? ? ?
He couldn’t read her mind, had never been able to, but right then when he looked up, he read her face clear as glass, the expression on it, like a book of fairy tales, a thousand free wishes scattered on the surface of reality. He couldn’t see the end of their story and didn’t want to. He could only see the beauty of it as it was. And also, he could give her the thing she wanted. He could give her all of him. He could give her his faith.
Tell me your tale, oh princess mine, and I’ll quest the world for you.
She pulled him to his feet, and he let her. A helm dangled from the ceiling, a psych-emitter contraption, and he let her secure it on his head. He let her unfasten both suits, first hers, then his, and peel away the smartfabric until their two bodies were bare and rippled like gooseflesh in the stark recycled air. He let her lay their clothes on the hard floor, a blanket to cushion their fall.
The communications room was close, and cold. But her hands were warm, drawing him down.
He felt those same hands from the inside, stroking his shoulder, the hard ridge of his clavicle, the wild percussion of his pulse. Warm and sweet as she felt to him, so he felt to her. Touch sensation poured from her fingertips into his skin, then cycled back, one loop connected end to end, that insatiable snake of desire, eatin’ its own tail.
“I never plugged in to a holoporn suite, even though of course I had one in my home,” she said, painting him with her breath. He could feel the brush of it, and her own urge to taste. Salt on her tongue, swallow of tears. “It seemed so wrong to fuck a stranger, to know what they felt with their hands without ever making an attempt to feel their reasons, you know, the imagery. Holoporn with psych-emitter reception only goes one way. It feels interactive, but it’s actually passive. Merely science, no myth.”
“Which is why folks still get themselves nekkid and together,” he said. “If you could science a thing like love, there’d be no hunting for it, and no wishing. No made-up might-have-been. Folks wouldn’t need to put all their souls into it.”
She moved over him, fierce. “I can make it more than science.”
He had no doubt. Just went on letting her.
With her hands, a molasses-slow loop of want unwinding between their bodies, melding one to the other. With her mouth, closing over his, sleek and hot, both victor and vanquished. And then lower, at his throat: taste of sweat and trace chemical detox, wet of her tongue, scrape of her teeth. The shiver of candy sucked against the soft palate too long, too sweet.
Kellen closed his eyes, no longer able to discern which touch was his and which was hers. It didn’t matter anyhow. He could feel her touch, touching him.
“You’re casting all these sensory inputs with that doodad in y’head,” he said, lying back against the floor, covered by the warmth of her body. “But I still only feel the surface. Guess there are limits to your science.”
She laughed low against his chest, her hand on his hip, moving inward. “Well, the porn stars don’t get the kind of training I did, and I haven’t really started yet.”
“Did you sort of just tell me to hold on and enjoy the ride?”
“Possibly. You did say I was bossy.”
“Point.”
Her hand had found what it was looking for and sheathed him in delicious agony. He gasped, curling his fingers against her back. Still just the sensory input, but good God, so that was what it felt like. What he felt like, to her. Not just the stroke and friction and surge and ache, but the clasp of power, holding another person’s pleasure, literally, in the palm of your hand.
He inhaled, and desire filled his head, seeping into every part of him. Overwhelming desire, amplified on each feedback cycle, each body’s need consuming the other. He couldn’t contain it all, but at the same time needed more. Needed all of her. All of himself. All of whatever beast was both, and everything.
“Can you feel how much I want you?” she asked in a voice made of promises.