"They're sensory organs. They feel you back. Every contraction. Every pulse."
"That's incredibly unfair biology."
"You initiated the bond."
"Best decision I ever made." Her rhythm increases and my thumb finds where she needs it, jade patterns vibrating against swollen, slick nerves, and her head falls back. The claiming mark on her throat catches the gym lighting. The claiming color pulses opalescent in both our skins.
"The bars," she gasps. "I want the bars."
She shifts, lies back on the bench, hands gripping the support bars above her head. The position arches her spine, opens her completely, and when I drive forward the sound she makes is something that gets filed directly into sensory memory I'll carry for however long the bonded lifespan gives us.
"There.Harder. I want to feel this tomorrow."
I give her harder. The bench provides leverage and the angle is devastating, and my thumb is still vibrating, and the feedback loop runs hotter than it's ever run. Joyful. Unrestrained.Free.Two people who survived everything and are discovering what their bodies do when the only instruction ismore.
"Want to feel you come," she says, voice dropped low, close. "Want it from both sides."
Her words and the feedback loop and the sight of her beneath me, hands white-knuckled on the bars, body arching, marking visible, opalescent color blazing, push me to the edge and her with me. The bond doesn't allow separate climaxes anymore; when she breaks, the wave crashes through my chest and my own follows, pleasure cascading back and forth until neither of us can tell where one body ends and the other begins.
She screams. I roar. The pleasure is genuinely unattributable, something the connection created that belongs to both of us.
The bench makes an ominous sound.
A crack. A metallic shriek. The support bar under her left hand gives way, and the entire structure lists sideways with a groan of protesting engineering.
I catch her before she falls. Instinct. Reflexes scooping her off a collapsing bench and pulling her against my chest. Both of us breathing hard, the claiming color blazing, the feedback loop still echoing.
We stare at the bench. Left support snapped clean. Adjustment mechanism bent beyond design parameters. Permanent indentation in the mat.
"We broke it," Krilly says.
"Thoroughly."
Then she starts laughing. Full, bright, helpless, shaking against me as pure joy. The kind that comes from the absurdity of two people who survived a murder jungle and a corporate tribunal and are now explaining a broken training bench to station maintenance.
I'm laughing too. Rough, unpractised. Real.
"There's a maintenance form," she gasps.
"What do we write under 'cause of damage'?"
"'Enthusiastic protective escort training.'"
"Specifically accurate." She's wiping her eyes, still draped across my chest on the mat. "If Crash finds out—"
"The Velogian will find it amusing."
"He'll tell everyone. Station legend. We'll never live this down."
"I don't care." My hand traces her spine, the claiming color pulsing where I touch her. "I have never broken furniture in joy before. I intend to make it a habit."
"We can't break all the furniture."
"We can replace what we break."
She looks up at me. Happy. Thoroughly satisfied. Alive in a way that has nothing to do with survival. "That's actually really romantic. In a destructive sort of way."
"I'm learning."
