“August, want to come for a drink?” Shashi asks a pale and aghast Assassin August.
“Yes. Please. Desperately.” He’s up, Jon’s running after him, and the last thing we hear is the enormous burst of laughter before they all slam the door, leaving me and August alone in this tiny room, staring at one another.
Two men, one desk, and several hundred universes to save.
I guess you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.
For science.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
GOOD AUGUST
HARD SCIENCE
“So, you can just ignore them,” I rush to assure him. “They’re being weird. You know what they’re like. And I wouldn’t ever, um, put that sort of pressure on you. Sex, just so we don’t have to camp out here for a week or two, that’s?—”
“August—”
“That’s absurd. The height of absurdity. Who would even think something like that up?”
“August—”
“It was only really, you know, very recently that we were both pretty upset about destroying universes. And I think the ethical considerations are worth probing, deeply, especially when you consider?—”
“Slayer?”
My pulse quickens at the word. “Mmhmm?”
He sidles over, coming to lean against the wall next to me, not touching but so close, from our shoulders to our toes, a hair’s breadth away. “We do not have to have sex to destroy and then ultimately save this world.”
I hate that he can see the hot flush on my cheeks. A heady sting of rejection. “No, I know. That’s all I was saying. We don’t have to?—”
“But if you want to…”
A delicious elixir of silence drops over us.
Is this really happening?
“Uh…” I respond. Another one of those full sentences I’m so good at whenever he talks to me like this.
His eyes run down my body, and I wonder how well the crease in my jeans is hiding that throb in my cock. Especially when he asks, “Is it bad that I’m not feeling terribly conflicted about this?”
“Define ‘bad.’”
When he tilts his head, his breath tingles across my cheek and down my neck. “Is it bad that I would fuck this world into oblivion for five minutes alone with you?”
“Probably.” My entire body is on fire. “But then you are a supervillain.”
“And you’re a Slayer,” he says. “So where does that leave us?”
“Right about… here.” I lunge for him, his easy compliance like a dream beneath my hands, our lips clashing together, his nicely pressed, stolen shirt getting creased by my own fingers.
Okay, I won’t say we’ve been terribly good at staying apart, or that it’s been a terribly long time since we touched. But it feels like it. The very ideas of either complete separation or nearness without touch were working in tandem to wear me down. Even now, throwing my leg across his thigh to straddle him, pulling at the buttons of his shirt, he feels too far away. It’s a desperate, messy rush to get as much of him as I can, to lock him away in my heart, trapped in that cage where no one can take him away from me.
I get his shirt open, run my hands over his chest, feel the rise and fall of his ribcage as they run around to his back, pulling himcloser. He’s working my sweater off—my hastily flung on sweater from this morning—and again I feel, for a fleeting moment, like I’m on the back foot, not nicely dressed for him. But when it hits the floor, when he gasps out that perfect sigh at the sight of me… I feel adored. He looks at me like he worships me. Like every curve is divine. “You’re beautiful,” he tells me. And I believe him. What it is to be with someone you can feel gorgeous around.
Every sweep of his tongue over my neck, I arch for him. Every time he presses my nipple, I sigh for him. He loves it. And when he slips his hand into my jeans… I’m already so hard for him.
