He reaches up slowly and brushes a curl behind my ear. His knuckles are warm. The back of his fingers graze my cheek and for a second I close my eyes because it’s worse when I’m looking at him—the sincerity makes me want to bolt. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. “I keep doing it anyway.”
“Then stop hiding,” I say. It comes out steadier than I feel. “If you can’t give me choices, give me facts. I can survive ugly if it’s real.”
His hand turns and his thumb finds the place at my jaw it seems to know. He leans down and kisses me without the usual calculus, without making it a test or a demonstration; it’s just a mouth on mine, warm, cooled by the wind, faint taste of coffee and desire under it. I want to be angry. I am. I kiss him back anyway. Because I’m tired of pretending that what I want and what is good are always in opposite corners.
He breaks it slowly, as if he’s setting something down he doesn’t want to drop. “Come here,” he says, voice low and not loaded. He pushes off the hood and goes to the back of the SUV, lifts the hatch, and pulls out a rolled cotton blanket that looks like the kind you keep for emergencies, picnics, and a thousand other things life argues for. He spreads it on the grass, near enough to the overlook that I can see the river shift but far enough I won’t imagine falling. He sits and waits with his knees up and his hands loose between them.
I go to him because my body answers some things with a speed my brain can’t police. I fold down next to him and look at the line of his forearm where old scars feather into new. I place my palm over the place he puts my hand when he’s trying to get my breathing back during a panic. His breath deepens once. He turns and kisses me again and this time the slide of his mouth on mine is exploratory, like he’s mapping a city he has run through at night and never seen in daylight. One hand finds the back of my neck and holds.
The blanket is warm from the sun where the car’s shadow doesn’t cut it. He pulls me into his lap, and I shift to straddle his thighs. He sits back on his hands for a second and looks at me, eyes moving over my face like he’s cataloging what comes next. He keeps a hand on my hip, his other knuckles trailing the curve of my jaw to my mouth, his thumb resting in that small notch under my lower lip until I sigh. He kisses me slow. I kiss him back slower.
The wind lifts my hair and the strands that escaped my clip tickle his cheek. He smiles into my mouth, and I feel it in my spine. I reach under his open collar and trace the old scar at the base of his throat and the skin there goes hot. He watches my hand move, then covers it with his, pressing my fingers into his pulse like he wants me to learn the beat.
Clothes come off in the way they do when you aren’t rushing to beat a sense of danger. He pushes my blazer off my shoulders and finds the hem of my shirt with a touch that says I can stop this with a single word and I believe him. I lift my arms and he peels it up, then pauses to kiss the center of my chest through cotton when he realizes I wore one of his T-shirts again and didn’t bother making it presentable. He laughs once, huffing into my skin. “This works better on you,” he murmurs.
He shrugs out of his shirt and the cold hits his skin in a rush that raises gooseflesh along his arms. I run my palm down his sternum just to watch the texture change. He’s so human like this without the armor, I almost want to make a list of the ways to remind myself later. I lean down and kiss his shoulder where the old burn fades. He inhales like he isn’t used to anyone loving that part.
We slide onto our sides in the grass, and he tugs the blanket up to the small of my back so it’s not cool earth against skin, it’s warmth and woven cotton and his palm. The music from the SUV hums so faintly I can’t tell what’s playing, only thatthere’s a steady line under everything that sounds like patience. He kisses my mouth, then the hinge of my jaw, then the place where my collarbone says yes before the rest of me catches up. His hand cups my breast through cotton, thumb circling, not testing, just making sure he can build this kind of heat without taking any other kind. It turns out he can. I make a sound I wouldn’t know how to transcribe and his mouth hitches into a smile against my throat.
I push him onto his back because I need the moment where I decide what happens next and not because I think he’ll steal it from me. He lets me. He laces his fingers behind his head and watches me with that expression that used to read as predator and now looks like a man thinking,yes, take me apart slowly, I will not complain about the order. I climb over his hips, drag my palms over his ribs, and lower myself so the heat between us has a path. The first press is always a surprise no matter how often you do it—the way your body recognizes the weight of another person like a code, the way your breath finds a new pace and calls it normal. I sink onto him slowly using my hands on his chest to measure the line between pleasure and pain. His eyes go dark and he shuts them for half a second, a muscle jumping in his jaw like he’s holding still out of respect and hunger. He breathes, “Jesus, Aurora,” into the space between us and it isn’t the kind of prayer that asks for anything.
I set the rhythm because that’s the point of this version of us: I say when and how. He meets me easily, hips lifting just enough to make my thighs tremble, hands steadying me without guiding. The way he touches my sides under my ribs makes me want to confess to someone what it’s like to be seen and not controlled. I won’t. I press my palms into his chest and ride the wave up, down, forward, a circle when straight lines feel too much like someone else’s rule book. My hair falls into my face and he reaches up and brushes it back tenderly, thumb trackinga damp line at my temple, palm cupping my jaw like I’m a thing he swore to carry and isn’t tired of yet.
“Tell me what you need,” he says. It’s quiet. It’s not a dare. I hear the man he is with his residents in that question, and it makes me tighten around him, a reflex I don’t plan and can’t stop. His breath stutters: he says my name like it’s a password.
“Don’t leave me in my head,” I say. It’s the closest I’ll get to poetry today. “Stay.”
“I’m here,” he says, the words landing and staying, not floating off like steam. He shifts, slow, and rolls us so I’m under him on the blanket and the sky frames his shoulders. His face looks different from this angle—less set, younger, like the light is offering him back to himself. He kisses me and I lift my legs around his hips and pull him deeper, and it feels like a hard answer to a question that has been vibrating in my bones for months.
He takes his time. He is patient in a way I haven’t earned and maybe never will. He uses his mouth on my throat, his hand on my hip, his body like a sentence with clauses that build and build and then stop before they become a paragraph you can’t remember how to finish. I put my hands on his face because touching his face makes me feel like we are not just doing a useful thing with heat; we are telling the truth with our bodies the way a painting tells the truth and lets strangers look. He groans into my mouth when I do that; his hips jerk; his control flickers and returns. I don’t want it to return entirely. I don’t want him to hold a line that hurts. I want the line that means, you’re here, I will not let you fall. He runs a thumb along my throat, not pressing, just acknowledging, and I feel the knot in my shoulders loosen a degree I didn’t know was available.
The river below us throws up a cooler breath. The first real shiver moves through me and he breaks away to nuzzle my jaw and murmur, “Cold?” It’s ridiculous and necessary.
“Not from that,” I manage. “Don’t stop.”
He laughs under his breath, that low sound that used to unnerve me and now feels like it opens a door. He slides his hand between us, finds me with the kind of ease that means he paid attention in rooms without light, and I stop thinking. The build is quick because I am already here, because he’s been steady longer than anyone has been steady around me, because the sound the wind makes in the trees matches the syllables of my name if you’re a little unhinged and listening wrong. I come with my hands in his hair and his mouth around a soft swear and my chest warm and tight and open. He follows, not with a roar, not with an act—just a shudder that goes through him like thunder and a breath that breaks and a press of his forehead to mine that feels like a vow he hasn’t made yet.
After, he stays where he is for a beat, not heavy, just there, like he knows the moment after matters as much as the one before. Then he slides to my side and pulls the blanket up and tucks me in against his chest like I am a person and not a task he completed before lunch. The sky has shifted to amber with a hint of bruised purple at the edges. The tops of the pines look dipped in honey. The SUV clicks once as its metal remembers it is cooling. Far below, the river doesn’t care; it keeps going where water goes.
I lie with my ear over his heart and count. I used to do this with radios—one, two, three, four—until the noise matched my body and I stopped feeling like a thing without edges. His heartbeat steadies me faster. His hand lies at the small of my back, palm broad and warm, every now and then rubbing a slow circle like I’m a skittish animal you have to remind that it is allowed to be still.
“This is who you could be,” I say to the sky, not to him, because making it about him would make it smaller and I want itto be big enough to hold us both. “The man who drives to a river and tells the truth.”
His chest expands under my cheek. He doesn’t say he can be anything else because he knows better. He squeezes my hand, that’s all. It’s enough. We lie like that long enough for a chill to come back into the air. He sits up then, reluctantly, and I make a face and he laughs and pulls me up with him and we both scramble to find pieces of clothing like teenagers who don’t want to get caught. The blanket gets folded badly and thrown in the back in a heap. My hair is a lost cause. His looks like he fought a storm and won. The music in the car shifts to something with a beat you could drive to for a week if you needed to cross three state lines and think.
He doesn’t start the engine yet. He sits sideways in the driver’s seat with his legs out, feet on the dirt, hands loose on his knees, and stares at the horizon like he expects it to admit it’s a trick. The sun touches the line of trees and flares once like a match. I tuck my knees up in the passenger seat and watch him watch the light go.
“Cassian,” I say. He tips his head toward me. “I’m not naïve. I know you didn’t bring me here to fix what’s broken. This is an intermission. The act changes after. I can feel it. I just—” I look at my hands. Paint under my nails again, somehow. Maybe it never leaves. “I needed to remember I’m a person with a body and a voice and not just a piece you move to block a senator. Thank you.”
He nods. “You are not a piece,” he says softly. “You are the part that makes the board worth having.” Then he finally starts the car.
For a breath, the Sanctuary, the Senator, the contract—all the nouns that keep marching—drop through a trapdoor. The world goes quiet enough for me to hear my own voice under the rest. I cling to it like a ledge and try not to look down, try not tolook up either, because hope is just another word for fall if you aim wrong. The last thing I see before the light goes for good is the river in my mind, flashing coin-blade-mirror, and the shape of his hand on my hip when no one was watching. Then the dark comes in, soft and complete, and I let it.
Chapter 51 – Cassian
The elevator doors part on the command center with their usual hydraulic sigh, and blue light breathes against my face like the inside of an aquarium. The day’s clean air peels off me at the threshold. Inside, we are back to screens, switched-off clocks, and the soft insect hum of processors doing things ten thousand times faster than the room ever looked.
“Hold the fort while I was gone?” I ask, slinging my jacket onto the back of my chair. It kept the grass-stain I didn’t let anyone see.
