He's exhausted.
And as I'm kissing him, I get the bright idea to go down on him, unbuckling his pants and putting my mouth around his dick, sucking him there for five minutes, my tongue doing its magic.
There’s a weird noise, and I notice him starting to get a little flaccid. ‘
There’s the noise again, and when I look up, he is fast dead asleep, snoring and everything. My man hasneverfallen asleep to a blowjob before. And that tells me that he is reallylegitimatelyexhausted.
And now I feel horrible.
-??-
Chapter 3
Lincoln's POV
The shuttle doors slide open, jerking me out of sleep I didn’t even remember falling into. My neck hurts from the angle I was slumped in, and my mouth tastes like metal. Great. Another blackout commute.
Stepping into Helion’s lobby, my brain is still foggy. The lights are too bright for how early it feels, even though it’s well past eight.
I don’t even remember how I got into bed last night. Hell, I barely remember getting home.
"Rough morning?" Mark from Calibration claps my shoulder as he passes. The guy’s way too cheerful for someone who lives in a lab.
"Something like that," I mutter. "Long night."
"Again? They gotta stop pulling you past ten, man. You look dead."
I give him a tight smile as the lift opens. "Tell that to the board."
He snorts. "They don’t listen to me either."
When I get to Level B, Sarah is already at her station, typing something with her usual laser focus. Her eyes flick up the second she hears me. She always looks at me a little too interested.
"Morning, Lincoln," she chirps, brushing a piece of hair behind her ear. Always the same move.Alwaysdirected at me.
"Morning," I reply, keeping it short.
Sitting down, I try to wake my brain up, reviewing today’s schedule.
Calibrations, joint modeling, motion training, debugging… standard Friday.
But everything feels like a heavier burden lately. Even just prepping the sensors for the morning tests takes more energy than it should.
"Damn you look so tired. You fell asleep on the shuttle again, didn’t you?" Sarah asks.
"Yeah," I say, rubbing my eyes. "Long week."
She softens a little, her voice a bit quieter. "You should take a day, babe."
"I can’t."
And it’s true. There’s too much to do. The AI models don’t wait for me to catch up on sleep.
“I'm sorry. I know you work very hard and it sucks seeing you so beat down.”
“I promise I'm fine. Just growing pains, that's all.”
When 9 am hits, the three of us, me, Sarah, and Tom, head into the sim room. Tom yawns hard enough to crack his jaw.
