And yet, we can feel the terror in a single missed beat.
Fear that the final number has been reached. Our heart unable to catch its next strike, our pulse failing to find its next flutter.
Because there is a number.
And it terrifies me that Orion could know the exact number of mine. That he will count every one, measure my life in intervals of seconds. That I will see those fleeting seconds rushing past in his beautiful teal eyes, waiting for the last crash of a wave, the tide gathering for the final break.
The last breath drawn, never released.
He’s stolen so many of my beats already. My heart races for him, skips for him, entrains to the strong pulse in his veins, trying to keep pace. Now he possesses my breath, too.
Even as I try to hold this one in my lungs, a breath too precious to surrender, I can feel it slipping. I try to hold it past the ache, like I can make this one moment last, make time suspend, if I just don’t let it slip past my lips.
But when his bare hand—rough and warm without the leather—grazes my hip, it expels in a shaky rush, spent.
Orion has half my body tucked beneath his on the bed, his solid weight and heat a comfort. A thin sheet drapes the upper half of my body. His trim waist is nestled between my thighs, his heartbeat a guiding, steady pulse over my most intimate part. His chin rests on my belly as his fingers strum the curve of my hip, pausing to tap a melody into my skin. So intimate, it steals another trembling breath.
The air down here is cool and filtered, controlled by Orion’s obsessive need to regulate his environment. The silence is also a making of his space. We’re both too aware of this fragile thing hovering between us. The tension gathering beneath this tentative truce, where—if we keep touching, keep kissing, keep the words from spilling out—we can keep the bubble from breaking.
Down here, there are too many wounds scraped open. Painful breaks that never properly set or healed. Toxins bled out like a bloom of blood in the water.
And somewhere aboveground, Darby is hunting for a wanted serial killer. He’s looking for me. There’s a body in the ocean. Orion will know soon enough what I’ve done.
I seal my eyes shut against the thought, and my breath hitches.
His strumming halts. Sliding his hand up the side of my ribs, he takes my forearm and turns it over. His thumb strokes the pattern of stars along my wrist. “Tell me about this,” he says, the vibration of his roughened voice a tantalizing drag of friction between my thighs.
I swallow, lifting my free hand to touch his tousled hair, committing the way he feels to memory. Finding it just as difficult to keep my hands off him, yet still cautious.
Those rising stormwaters within him reached a crest. His dark urges fed and sated. At least, for the time being, after balance was found between violence and fear. And now he’s tranquil in the aftermath, unafraid to touch, to taste, to map each pulse point of my body, making up for what he’s denied himself.
He’s wearing an extra pair of wire-rimmed glasses, so there’s no concealing the distress in my expression when I say, “It’s the last thing I did for myself before everything changed.”
Understanding flickers through his eyes, followed by an unguarded flash of something darker. My gaze drifts to the jagged scar that mars his forehead, knowing he does, in some capacity.
“Is he still breathing.”
The question cuts through the quiet. My breath lodges in my chest, fingertips stalling mid-caress in his hair. The way he says it, an edge beneath the calm, as if there’s an unspoken threat to make it otherwise.
I ease out the breath, fighting to maintain his fierce stare as I try to forget how deep we are down here, surrounded by all this concrete and dirt.
“I think so,” I say, offering him the closest thing I can to the truth.
A muscle flexes along his jaw, and I feel his forced swallow against me. His thumb continues to brush my inner wrist, lightly tracing the constellation.
My chest pangs with a dull ache, still sore and vulnerable, and I shift to find a comfortable position, letting the sheet drop lower.
Orion’s eyes turn heated, drawing another unstable breath from me. “You did that on purpose,” he accuses.
I smile. “Maybe. You’re easily distracted.”
He releases a low groan as he presses a kiss beneath my navel, and I let my gaze fall to his tattooed hand resting protectively over my sternum.
His body is a celestial tapestry of ink, each mark a secret etched into his skin. Delicate spirals sweep his shoulder, flowing into the constellation Ophiuchus inked over the center of his chest, its stars bleeding toward his heart, where spectral lines and waveform patterns converge into a threaded heartbeat along his ribs. There are musical notes there, like a song scored into his flesh. My gaze follows the scattered stardust down to cones of hourglass-shaped spacetime across his forearm, and farther to quantum bars and intricate symbols mapped into his hip.
I rest my fingers over his, gently tracing the glyphs marked across his knuckles. I pause over the symbol for phi—the golden symmetry he’s constantly hunting.
“Why starlings?” I ask, further diverting his thoughts as my thumb brushes the outline of the bird on his hand.
