Everything Edi-Veen did was intense.
"Coreni," he said, his words hoarse and deeper than usual.
"I know," she said. "Come here."
What followed was not brief. It was not uncertain. It was the cargo hold of a transport ship on a commercial dock on Trevort, cold metal and poor light and the looming shapes of stasis chambers waiting at the edges of their attention, and none of those things mattered at all.
She had her hands in his hair and his mouth at her throat and the solid weight of him against her and the knowledge that this was the last night on the planet she had lived on her entire life, and she was spending it here, in this hold, with him, and she had made that choice with full information and was not sorry.
His hands were careful at first — deliberately so, she understood, in the way he was deliberate about everything. His fingers traced her slowly, mapping her with the same thorough attention he gave all things that mattered to him, and she felt the specific quality of being the thing that mattered.
His mouth followed, warm against her skin, and she let herself make sounds she had no professional composure left to manage.
They stripped away the remaining distance between them with a shared efficiency that had nothing mechanical about it — hands and mouths and the particular discovery of someone you have been watching for days finally being allowed to know.
When his fingers found the center of her she was already ready, and she shifted against his hand to show him how, and he learned it the way he learned everything she showed him — immediately, completely, applying it back to her with a focus that made her breath uneven.
His eyes found hers when she responded, and she saw it in them then — not just desire, which she had expected, but something that had been sitting behind the management and the careful distance since a dock and a dark and a word she hadn't known.
Something that had been true for longer than either of them had acknowledged.
She pulled him closer.
When he entered her they were both still, looking at each other in the poor light of the cargo hold, and she understood that this was the most honest either of them had been — more honest than the kitchen and the confession and the conversation about later, because this had no words in it, only the specific true fact of them.
He moved slowly at first, drawing it out, and she wasn't sure whether he was being careful with her or careful with himself or both. She shifted against him to answer the question, and he took the answer and gave her what she'd asked for, and she held on and stopped thinking about anything except this — his weight and his warmth and the rhythm of him and the sounds he made when she moved with him, which she committed to memory with the same precision she committed everything that mattered.
The release when it came was not quiet. She didn't attempt quiet. The cargo hold had no opinions about it.
He followed her, and she felt it in the way his arms tightened around her — not a performance, just the involuntary truth of it, the specific undone quality of someone who had been certain and controlled and was briefly neither.
They held one another and she pressed her head against his chest, not wanting to let go.
She committed it to the part of her memory that didn't let things go.
She listened to his heartbeat slow from something urgent back toward something steady. His hand moved in her hair, slow and absent, the way a person moved when they had stopped thinking about the movement and were simply present.
The stasis chambers waited in the dark.
She felt him become aware of them at the same moment she did. A shift in his breathing. A slight change in the quality of his stillness.
"We should," she said.
"Yes," he agreed. Neither of them moved for another moment.
Then she pulled back and found her clothes and put herself back together with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been doing that since she was sixteen, and he did the same with the quiet economy of a man who had been trained for worse situations than reassembling himself in a cargo hold.
When they were both standing again in the poor light with the dock sounds coming through the hull she looked at him and he looked at her and there was nothing left that needed saying.
She stepped forward and kissed him once more — brief this time, actual brief, the kind that was a period at the end of a sentence rather than the beginning of one.
"Get in your pod," she said.
"Yes," he said. His voice was not entirely steady, which she found she was going to think about for a very long time.
She turned to her chamber. The panel responded to her palm. The door opened with a soft exhaled sound, the same kind the transport floor had made descending into the deep, and she understood that she had been practicing this — all of it, every threshold she'd ever crossed — without knowing what she was practicing for.
She looked back once.
