I cross the room in three strides. She's on her feet by the time I reach her, not retreating, not bracing, just rising to meet whatever I'm bringing through her door. My hands find her waist and I pull her against me with a force that should frighten her, and maybe it does, maybe that slight catch in her breath is fear, but her hands come up to my chest and she doesn't push me away. She grabs the front of my shirt and holds on.
"Then don't talk," she says.
I kiss her like I'm trying to leave a mark on the inside of her mouth. She makes a sound against my lips, surprised, hungry, and her fingers tighten in my shirt and pull me closer. The anger in my chest has nowhere to go except into her, and she takes it, opens for it, meets it with something of her own that tastes like defiance and need and the same caged fury I've been carrying since I heard my father's voice tell me to let him go.
Her back hits the wall. The sound her body makes against the metal is dull, solid, real in a way that cuts through the noise in my head. She gasps, and I swallow it, pressing her harder into the surface until there's nowhere for her to go, nothing between her and the cold steel except the thin fabric of that shirt and the heat pouring off both of us.
"Tell me to stop." I don't know why I say it. I don't want to stop. I won't stop, not unless she makes me, and even then the stopping might break something in me that I can't afford to lose right now.
Her eyes find mine. Close, so close I can see the flecks ofblue in the grey and the way her pupils have gone wide and dark. "No."
I pull her shirt over her head. She lets me, lifting her arms, and the wall is cold against her bare skin and she hisses at the contact but doesn't move away. I press my mouth to her throat and bite down, not gently, and the sound she makes goes straight through me like voltage. My hands are rough on her, rougher than they should be, fingers digging into the curve of her waist, her hip, pulling at the waistband of those loose pants until they're around her ankles and she kicks them away.
She reaches for my belt. I let her open it, let her shove my pants down far enough, because I need to be inside her more than I need to be in control and that terrifies me in a way my father's disappearance didn't. She wraps one leg around my hip and the angle is imperfect, desperate, both of us grabbing at each other like we're trying to get purchase on something that keeps sliding away.
I pin her wrists above her head with one hand. She tests the grip, once, and finding it immovable, makes a sound in her throat that's half frustration and half relief, and something in that sound strips the last rational layer off whatever I'm doing. I push into her and she cries out, loud, her head falling back against the wall with a crack she doesn't seem to feel. I don't give her time to adjust. I don't give myself time. I fuck her hard, each thrust driving her shoulders into the metal, and the sounds between us are obscene, wet and rhythmic and underscored by her breathing, which comes in sharp, punched-out gasps that I can feel against my collarbone.
"You're going to take all of it." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Lower. Wrecked. The voice of something that'scome unmoored. "Every fucking thing I'm carrying tonight, you're going to take it."
"Give it to me." She says it through gritted teeth, her eyes glassy, her wrists straining against my hand. "Stop holding back and give it to me."
I shift my grip. My free hand finds her throat, fingers settling over the pulse that hammers against my palm like a living thing trying to escape. I don't squeeze. Not yet. I let her feel the weight of my hand there, the potential of it, and her whole body goes taut against me, a wire pulled to its limit, vibrating.
"Breathe in," I tell her.
She does.
I close my hand.
Her air stops and her eyes go wide and her body clamps around me so hard I nearly lose the rhythm. The sensation is staggering. She's squeezing me like she's trying to pull me deeper, and I can feel her pulse under my fingers, fast and frantic and completely at my mercy. I hold the pressure for three seconds. Five. Seven. Her face flushes, her lips part, no sound escaping because I've taken the sound from her along with the air. Then I release.
She drags in a breath that sounds like a sob. I fuck her through it, through the rush of oxygen that hits her system like a drug, and her legs are shaking, both of them wrapped around me now, her full weight suspended between my body and the wall. My marks are blazing. I can see them in my peripheral vision, bright enough to cast shadows, the bioluminescent lines along my arms and chest throwing blue-white light across her skin. They've never done this before, never burned this hot, and the light makes her look like something sacred, something profane, something I'm desecrating in real time.
I close my hand again. Lighter this time, enough to restrict but not cut off, and I set a pace that matches the squeeze: thrust when I tighten, breathe when I release. She catches the rhythm before her conscious mind does, her body learning the pattern, and soon she's moving with it, riding the edge of air and deprivation and pleasure with an instinct that would humble me if I were capable of humility right now.
"That's it." I press my forehead to hers. Our breath mingles, hers rationed, mine ragged. "That's it, take it, let me hear you."
She comes with my hand on her throat. The orgasm rips through her in a long, shuddering wave that starts where we're joined and rolls up through her body until she's arching off the wall, her mouth open on a sound that's been building since I walked through her door. It's raw. Wrecked. It sounds like grief and rage and release all tangled together, and it doesn't stop. I keep moving, keep the pressure on her throat calibrated to the razor edge of too much, and she comes again, or she never stopped, her body convulsing around me in pulses that destroy what's left of my control.
I bury myself in her and let go. The release is violent, savage, pulled out of some depth I didn't know I had, and my vision whites out for a second, two seconds, long enough that when I come back she's the first thing I see and the first thing I feel and the only thing in the room that's real.
We stay like that. Pinned to the wall, tangled together, both of us wrecked. Her breath comes back in stages, each inhale deeper than the last, and I release her throat, letting my hand slide down to rest at the base of her neck where the pulse still runs wild. My marks dim slowly, the lightfading from incandescent to a low, steady glow, and in the shifting luminance I can see what I've done to her. The red print of my fingers on her throat. The bruises forming on her wrists. The place on her shoulder where I bit down hard enough to leave the impression of my teeth.
She should look damaged.
She looks like she's entirely and completely mine.
I carry her to the bed because her legs won't hold her. She doesn't protest, doesn't joke, just lets me set her down and then pull the thin blanket over both of us when I lie down beside her. She fits against me in a way that defies geometry, curling into my chest with her face tucked under my jaw, and I wrap myself around her and hold on.
Neither of us speaks. The silence fills the room like water, slow and total, and it's the most intimate thing I've ever experienced. More intimate than the sex. More intimate than my hand on her throat. This, the quiet after, the two of us breathing in the dark while the station hums its endless mechanical lullaby around us. She doesn't ask what happened. I don't offer. She traces patterns on my chest with one finger, slow, idle, and I let her, and the touch is so gentle after everything that came before it that my throat closes around something I refuse to name.
I stay. I don't get up. I don't leave. I don't retreat to my quarters to process in solitude the way every instinct I have is screaming at me to do. I stay in her bed with her body pressed against mine and her heartbeat slowing under my palm, and I let the silence hold what words would ruin.
That's new. I know it's new. She knows it too, because at some point her hand stills on my chest and she exhales, long and slow, with a quality of settling into something that feels like the opposite of temporary.
Minutes pass. Maybe longer. The artificial night cycledims the corridor lights beyond her door, and the only illumination left is the faint residual glow of my marks and the standby light on her datapad across the room.
Her voice, when it comes, is quiet. Almost conversational, except nothing about it is casual.
