The magnetic pull started around midday.
I'd felt it before. The subtle compulsion to move toward him, to close the distance, to be near his scent. But this was different. This was a physical force, as real as gravity. My body wasn't asking anymore. It was demanding.
I found myself moving before I decided to move. One foot on the floor. Then the other. Standing on legs that shook.
I stopped myself. Gripped the edge of the platform. Tried to force my body to obey my mind.
It didn't work.
I crossed the chamber without choosing to, my body overriding my will with ruthless efficiency. The tonic had spent nine days preparing me for this moment. It wasn't going to let pride get in the way.
I made it halfway across before my legs gave out.
I fell to my hands and knees. The impact sent pain through my fevered muscles. I stayed there, gasping, trying to gather the strength to stand.
My body started crawling instead.
I watched it happen like I was outside myself. My hands reaching forward. My knees dragging across the bone floor. Crawling toward where he sat against the far wall, watching me with those amber eyes.
"No." The word came out broken. "No, I won't—I'm not?—"
My body didn't care. Hand. Knee. Hand. Knee. Closing the distance with humiliating slowness while he watched and waited and didn't move to help me.
I stopped. Tried to turn back. My arms trembled but wouldn't obey. My knees wouldn't push me upright. Every part of me that should have been under my control was focused on one thing: getting to him.
"Please." I wasn't sure if I was begging myself or him. "Please, I can't?—"
My body resumed crawling.
Hand. Knee. Hand. Knee. Ten feet. Five feet. Two feet.
I collapsed at his feet, face pressed against the cool bone floor, shaking with fever and humiliation and need so intense it was consuming me from the inside.
"Please." My voice was barely a whisper. "I'll tell you. I'll tell you everything. Just please."
His hands slid under my arms and lifted me. Gently, carefully, as if I weighed nothing. He settled me onto his lap, my back against his chest, my body cradled in the curve of his.
I could feel his cock beneath me. Hard and hot, pressing against my ass through his armor. Even now, even suffering, he was aroused. Had been aroused the whole time.
"Tell me," he said. His voice rumbled through my back, low and gentle. "Tell me everything."
I told him.
Jonah. The co-sign at twenty-two. The debt that had crushed my future. The three years of overtime and meal bars and converted storage units. The career I'd built despite everything, the structures I'd designed that still stood somewhere.
My parents. The way they'd always looked at Jonah with pride and looked at me with expectation. The way I'd never been enough, no matter how much I achieved. The phone call that had broken something in me, when my mother had asked me tohouse the brother who'd ruined my life without ever once asking if I was okay.
The walls I'd built. The armor I'd constructed around my heart. The way I'd learned to need no one because no one had ever needed me.
I talked until my voice gave out. Cried until I had no tears left. Let him hold me while I emptied myself of thirty years of accumulated pain.
When I finished, I was hollow. Wrung out. But somehow lighter than I'd been in years.
"That's what you were running from," he said. "What are you running toward?"
I turned in his lap. Looked up at him. His face was strange and alien and somehow the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
"I don't know how to want things anymore," I said. "They taught me that wanting just leads to disappointment. That hoping just leads to hurt."
