I walk her backward toward the bed. She lets me, which is itself a kind of surrender she wouldn't have allowed a week ago. Her calves hit the mattress and she sits, then lies back, pulling me with her, and I follow her down into the narrow military bunk that smells like both of us now.
I take my time.
She's given me her scars, and I want to honor every one of them. I kiss down her throat, her collarbone, the hollow at the base of her neck where her pulse hammers fast and hard. My mouth finds the shrapnel marks on her shoulderand I linger there, tongue tracing each raised point while her fingers dig into my shoulders and her breathing goes ragged.
"Dex." My name in her mouth like a wound reopening.
"I'm here." I move lower. Kiss the burn on her forearm, then the inside of her wrist where the skin is thin and unmarked and I can feel her pulse against my lips. I close my eyes and count the beats. Alive. She's alive, and she's here, and every scar is proof that she survived the years I should have been beside her.
My marks are glowing steady now, soft gold light that paints her skin in warmth. She watches them, watches the light move across her body as I move across it, and her expression is something I've never seen on her face before. Open. Unguarded. The armor she wears like a second skin has been set aside with her clothes, and what's underneath is not soft. Not fragile. Just true.
I kiss down her stomach, over the scar that crosses her hip, and lower. Her thighs part for me, and I press my mouth to the marks on her inner thigh, then move inward, and when my tongue finds her she arches off the bed with a sound that's half moan and half something broken.
I worship her with my mouth. There's no other word for it. Slow, deliberate pressure with my tongue, learning again what makes her breath catch and what makes her hands grip the sheets and what makes her thighs press against the sides of my head as her body coils tighter and tighter. She's wet, slick against my lips and chin, and the taste of her is salt and heat and something that's just Astra, just this woman who carries six years of war in her skin and still opens for me like this.
"Please." The word tears out of her. Astra Venn doesn't say please. Not to me, not to anyone. The echo of my brother's "please" earlier hits me in the chest, and I understand, suddenly, that this is the same thing. The cracking. The moment the structure can't hold the weight anymore and something gives.
I give her what she's asking for. My tongue moves faster, firmer, and I slide two fingers inside her, curling them forward, and she comes apart under my mouth with a cry she muffles against her own forearm. Her body shudders around my fingers, clenching and releasing, and I stay with her through every wave of it, gentling my touch as the aftershocks roll through her.
Then I rise over her and she reaches for my belt with hands that aren't steady, and I let her unfasten it, let her push my pants down, let her wrap her fingers around my cock and stroke once with a grip that makes my vision blur.
"Inside me." Not a request. A command. The first one she's given tonight, and I obey it because there is nothing in this universe or any other that could stop me.
I slide into her slowly. The heat of her is staggering, tight and slick, and she gasps and I hold still, letting her adjust, letting us both feel the fullness of it. Her legs wrap around my waist. Her heels dig into the small of my back, right over the scar she can't see, one of mine, and the symmetry of it makes something crack in my chest.
I move. Slow. Deep strokes that press us together from chest to hip, her breasts against my ribs, her breath against my neck. This isn't the desperate, furious coupling of our first time. This is something else. Something that has weight and grief in it, something that acknowledges what we've both lost and what we're both terrified of finding.
Her hands are on my back, her nails scoring lines into my skin, and I hope they mark me. I hope she leavesevidence on my body the way her years without me left evidence on hers.
"Look at me," she whispers, and I do.
Her eyes are wet.
So are mine.
I don't stop moving. Neither does she. We hold each other's gaze and fuck slowly while tears track down our temples into the pillow, and neither of us acknowledges it, and neither of us looks away. The marks on my skin pulse in rhythm with my heartbeat, gold light washing over both of us, and I can feel what's leaking through them. Guilt. Want. Love, the kind that doesn't redeem you, the kind that just is, enormous and terrifying and as much a part of me as my bones.
She comes again, quieter this time, a long rolling shudder that tightens around me and pulls me with her. I press my face into the curve of her neck and let go, spilling into her with a sound I don't recognize from my own throat, something raw and unfinished, and her arms tighten around me and hold.
We stay like that. Tangled, breathing, the mess of us soaking into the sheets. My marks dim slowly to a low, steady glow, and her heartbeat against my chest finds a rhythm that matches mine, or mine matches hers, and I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
She doesn't leave.
I don't pull away.
For the first time, neither of us moves toward the door, toward clothes, toward the armor we've both been wearing since long before we found each other again. We shift just enough to pull the thin station blanket over us, her back against my chest, my arm across her waist with my hand resting over the scar on her hip.
Sleep comes like something stolen. Unexpected and undeserved and warm.
She's therewhen I wake.
The realization hits before I open my eyes. The weight of her against me, the heat of her body along the length of mine, her hair against my collarbone and her breath, slow and even, fanning across my chest in a rhythm that means she's still asleep.
I don't move.
The bunk is narrow. Military standard, built for one, barely tolerating two, and we've migrated in the night to a configuration that shouldn't be comfortable but is. Her head on my chest. My arm around her. Our legs tangled in a way that will make getting up an engineering problem, and I don't care. I don't want to get up. I want to lie here in the grey half-light of station morning and feel her breathe and pretend that this is a life I get to have.
I've never had this. Not with anyone. The women before Astra were transactions, arrangements of mutual convenience that ended when the convenience expired. I've woken up next to other people, but I've never woken up to this, the intimacy of morning, the quiet of another person's sleep, the knowledge that she's here because she chose to be here and she'll be here when she opens her eyes.
