I shatter.
Not like before. Not the sharp, violent decompression of the first orgasm he tore from me against the view port. This one starts deeper. A pressure low in my center, building slow and massive like a gravitational collapse, and when it breaks it doesn't break outward. It breaks inward. Pulls everything into itself. My fingers go numb. My toes curl so hard the tendons in my feet ache. The room dissolves at the edges, white and formless, and I hear myself saying his name. Not the title. Not the surname the station whispers like a curse. His actual name, the one that tastes different in my mouth than any word I've ever spoken, and his marks flare so bright that even behind my closed lids the world turns cyan.
"Fuck Zane."
He follows me.
The sound he makes is not the controlled groan of a man who parcels out his responses in measured doses. It's raw. Torn loose from somewhere he keeps locked, somewhere no one gets to hear, and the cost of it is written in the way his whole body shudders against mine. I feel him pulse inside me, hot and deep, and the bond does something cruel and beautiful. It carries his release back to me like an echo in a sealed chamber, his pleasure layered overthe aftershocks still rolling through my own body, sensation folding over sensation until I can't sort his from mine.
For one terrible, perfect, annihilating moment, I don't know where I end and he begins.
His forehead drops against my collarbone. His breath comes in ragged pulls against my skin, each exhale damp and hot, and his heart is hammering so hard I can feel it through his chest where it presses against mine. Two heartbeats. Out of sync. Then not. Then out again. Like two clocks trying to agree on the same time and failing, and succeeding, and failing.
His hand is still on my hip. Still grinding into bone. I will be purple tomorrow. I hope I am.
Afterward,he carries me to the shower.
I could walk. My legs work, probably. But he lifts me without asking and takes me into the bathroom, which is all dark stone and recessed lighting and a shower wide enough for four people, and he turns on the water and holds me under it while the heat sinks into muscles I didn't know were clenched.
He washes me himself.
Methodical. Thorough. His hands soaped and careful, moving over every part of me with the clinical attention of someone performing a necessary task. He washes my hair and his fingers in my scalp are firm enough to be real and gentle enough to make my throat ache. He washes between my legs where I'm swollen and tender and his touch there is so careful that I have to close my eyes and press my forehead to the cool stone wall because if I look at his face whilehe does this, I will cry, and I have not cried since I arrived and I will not start now.
He doesn't speak. Neither do I.
The tenderness isn't in the words. It's in the staying. In the warm water and the steady hands and the fact that when he finishes, he wraps me in a towel and carries me back to bed and the sheets have been changed, clean and cool and smelling of nothing, and he lays me down and pulls the covers over me and then lies beside me.
Not touching.
The space between us on the mattress is maybe six inches and it feels like the void outside the view port, vast and cold and full of things neither of us is ready to name.
I stare at the ceiling. His marks have dimmed to a low, steady glow, like embers banking for the night, and in the faint light I can see the shadows his body casts on the dark walls.
"This doesn't change anything," I say.
Silence. Long enough that I think he might not answer.
"It changes everything." His voice is quiet and certain and infuriating. "You just don't know it yet."
I want to argue. I want to roll over and put my back to him and prove that I am still the woman who was dragged onto this station in restraints, still defiant, still unbroken.
But my body is liquid and warm and the place where our bond connects us is humming with a low, steady contentment that isn't mine and isn't his but belongs to the thing between us.
I knowbefore I open my eyes that he's gone. The bond tells me, a sense of distance that wasn't there when I fell asleep,like a string pulled taut between two points that have moved further apart. The sheets beside me are cool. He's been gone for a while.
I open my eyes.
The view port shows a different slice of sky than last night, the station having rotated through its cycle while I slept. The stars are unfamiliar from this angle. Everything is unfamiliar from this angle.
There's a tray on the bedside table. Fruit I don't recognize, something golden and soft-skinned. Coffee in a sealed thermal cup that's still hot, which means someone brought it recently.
A note. Paper, not digital, which is an affectation or a security measure and with him could be either.
His handwriting is precise and slanted and entirely without flourish.
Dexter arrives today. Stay in your quarters until I send for you. Don't make me regret trusting you.
Trust.
