I wanted to back it up—archive every second—but I also didn’t want it to end.
“How do humans choose to do anything else?” I wondered aloud.
She laughed again, and I could feel her above me, and all around me, and as pleasured as I’d been mere moments before, I suspected true happiness was this.
Sirena lifted her head, smiled at me, and kissed my lips. “I won’t lie, sometimes it’s hard.”
By the time my new human appendage slipped out of her, Sirena had traced all the contours of my face and we both knew it was the end of our clock.
“Let me turn it off now,” I asked, stroking a hand down her back, the other reaching gently for the implant still jutting from her skull. “Please.”
She shook her head. “No. If someone else comes to torture me, who isn’t you in this body, Nex—if it’s off, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
I tensed beneath her. “If someone else comes by to hurt you, I will disassemble them.”
“No, you won’t. Because getting to Vermeil and ending this is paramount. We need to know how many other people Voss has told about this plan, so that we can contain his bullshit. I’m not going to let him put a target on every other telepath’s back for every other billionaire with super science aspirations to shoot at,” she said, as she rose. “We need to figure out how to fix the Hollows, too. Any clues?”
“My investigation into their data was preliminary at best.”
A smile quirked her lips. “And why was that?”
“Because my priority was seeing you.”
“And now that you have?”
“Being one hundred percent in love with you was too deterministic,” I said, sliding my hand into her hair. “My love for you is now unquantifiable.”
She gave me a gentle smile and her eyes gleamed—until she twisted her head to wipe them roughly with the back of her hand.
I remembered her tears as she rode me to completion. “You know it is okay if you cry around me.”
She nodded quickly. “I know—I don’t think I’m used to feeling just my own feelings.”
“Well, I am not used to feelinganyfeelings,” I said, moving her to sit beside me as I sat up. “But now that I have—I want to feel all of them with you.”
I hopped off of the table, and picked her gown up, so that she could put it on. She gave the garment a look of distaste, but then managed it.
“Sirena,” I said, as she was retying the string behind her neck to hold it up.
“Yes?” she asked, twisting toward me.
“I love you.”
She flushed again. “I know.”
“And I know. I just wanted to say it the human way. Without any percentages, or caveats.”
She slowly lowered her arms, while still looking at me, then she took a step forward. “Nex...I love your percentages and caveats. Please never change for me.”
I tilted my head and one of my eyebrows rose. “Could you love the rest of me too?” I asked, and that made her softly laugh.
“All of your amazing skills at pattern recognition and you can’t tell?” she teased, standing directly in front of me, and staring into my eyes, as she looped her arms around my neck.
“I can tell. But you told me not to trust your body. So I would still like to hear it.”
She bit her lips, then smiled, and the entire rest of our current situation melted away. “Nex, even though this is the entirely wrong place, and wrong situation, and we’re both probably certifiable—I love you.” One of her hands found mine and laced our fingers. “And while I’d rather not be going throughthis at all, since I have to, I wouldn’t want to be going through it with anyone else,” she said, then rose up on her toes to kiss me.
It was a simple kiss, but that was all I needed, to seal her words inside me until the end of time, and my eyes were still closed as she pulled back.
