"I'm memorizing."
Something shifts in her eyes. The awareness of why I might need to memorize, the tomorrow of it pressing in at the edges. She catches my face in her hands and kisses me with a fierceness that's grief and want braided together, and I let her, I open to it, I give her everything she's taking because it's hers. All of it.
I lay her back on the bed. She pulls me with her, legs wrapping around my waist as I settle over her, and the press of her body against mine through the remaining fabric is enough to make my vision blur. I kiss her throat. The hollow at the base where her pulse drums against my lips. The slope of her collarbone. The soft skin of her breast, and I take my time there, mouth closing over her nipple, tongue slow and deliberate while she arches under me with a sound that I want to record and keep in the dark part of my chest where nothing else survives.
"Ethan." My name in her voice, shaped by want. I will never stop being wrecked by the sound of it.
I work my way down her body. Kiss the flat of her stomach, the jut of her hip bone, the crease where her thigh meets her pelvis. She's already trembling, and when I hook my fingers in the band of fabric and pull it down, she lifts her hips to help, and the trust in that small motion knocks something loose in me.
"May I?"
"God, yes. Stop asking and just..."
I put my mouth on her.
She tastes like salt and heat and something sweet underneath, and the sound she makes when my tongue slides through her folds is low and broken and mine. I learn her again, the way I learn her every time, because every time she's a little different. A little more open. A little more willing to let me hear the sounds she'd choke back with anyone else. Tonight she doesn't hold anything back. Her fingers thread into my hair, and her hips roll against my mouth, and I give her everything, slow licks and deliberate pressure and the careful, ruinous attention of a man who knows this might be the last time.
Not the last time. I won't let it be the last time.
She comes with my name on her lips, her thighs shaking against my shoulders, and I stay with her through it, gentling my mouth as she rides out the aftershocks. When I lift myhead, she's looking at me with an expression that guts me. Soft and wrecked and furious with tenderness, like loving me is something she has to fight through to get to.
"Come here." Her voice is raw. "I need you closer."
I strip off the rest of my clothes. She watches me, and there's no embarrassment in the watching, no coyness. Just hunger and something deeper. Knowledge. She knows this body. She knows what it's done, what it's capable of, what it becomes when she's underneath it. She knows, and she's reaching for me anyway.
I settle between her thighs. The head of my cock presses against her entrance, and I hold there, watching her face, because this is the moment I always want to keep. The edge of it. The almost. Her pupils blown wide, her lips parted, her body tensing with anticipation.
"Yes," she says before I can ask. "Yes, Ethan, please."
I slide into her. Slow, so slow it's its own form of torture, and the feeling of her around me is something my body will remember after everything else is gone. Tight and warm and wet, her walls gripping me as I fill her, and she gasps and pulls me closer, nails digging into my back.
I set a rhythm that's nothing like the frantic collisions of our earlier encounters. Slow rolls of my hips, deep and deliberate, each thrust a sentence in a conversation we're having with our bodies. Her legs wrap tighter around me. Her hands slide up my back, over my shoulders, cup the back of my neck. We're pressed together from chest to hip, and the friction of her skin against mine is its own devastation.
"Look at me," she says.
I look at her. In the dim light, her eyes are black, bottomless, holding galaxies I'll never fully chart. My bioluminescent markings are glowing faintly along my arms and ribs, triggered by arousal, by emotion, by whatever mechanism my altered genetics decided was appropriate for this moment. The softblue-green light paints her skin in colors that belong on no human spectrum.
"You're glowing," she whispers.
"You do that to me."
Her laugh breaks into a moan as I shift my angle, and the sound is the most honest thing I've ever heard. I press deeper, find the spot that makes her spine arch and her fingers claw, and I stay there, grinding into her with a precision that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with wanting to give her this, this feeling, this pleasure, this proof that my hands can do something other than damage.
She comes again, clenching around me so tight I have to bury my face in her neck and breathe through it, and her voice breaks on something that might be my name or might be a prayer in a language neither of us speaks. I follow her over, spilling inside her with a groan that starts in my chest and ends somewhere in the foundations of who I thought I was. The orgasm rearranges me. Takes apart the architecture I built to survive and leaves something rawer in its place.
We stay tangled together afterward. Her legs still around me, my face still in her neck, our breathing slowly synchronizing in the dark. My bioluminescence fades to a soft, steady glow, and she traces the patterns on my forearm with one finger, following the light like a map.
"I've never been fully honest with anyone," I say into the warm space between her neck and shoulder. "Before you."
"I know." Her finger follows a line of light from my wrist to my elbow. "That's why I married you."
"You married me for political advantage."
"I told myself that." Her hand stills on my arm. "It was a useful lie."
I lift my head and look at her. She's serious. The Consortium mask is nowhere in evidence, just Aura, stripped of everything but this moment and the truth of it.
"If we don't come back," I start.
