"Tommy." She says my name like it's a variable she's testing, and whatever it's outputting is already overwriting her defenses.
Dar reaches over and takes my glasses off. She sets them on the terminal without looking away from me, and the deliberateness of the gesture sends something electric down my spine because she's choosing to remove the one barrier I hide behind. The room goes soft at the edges, and her face resolves into impressionist brushstrokes of sharp angles and vivid color and dark eyes watching me with nothing between us.
I pull her up by the hand. She rises into me, palms flat against my chest. The cold of her fingerless gloves and the warmth of her skin through the gaps send a signal that overrides every rational thought I've generated since she walked into this mountain.
The first time was a fight. Competitive, urgent, mutual aggression that burned through days of friction in a single detonation.
This is different. This time I want to understand.
I kiss her slowly. Deliberately. The way I approach a system I'm mapping for the first time, reading inputs, measuringresponses, building a model of how she works from the ground up.
She tastes like Mountain Dew and the dark chocolate she stole from my drawer, and the combination is so perfectly, absurdly her that something behind my ribs cracks open like a partition I forgot to encrypt.
Dar's hands slide from my chest to my shoulders. Her grip is firm, holding rather than fighting, and the shift from the first time is seismic. She's choosing to trust the pace I'm setting, and that choice matters more than she probably realizes.
I walk her backward until her shoulders touch the equipment rack. The LED lights blink around her head, green and amber and red, and the hum vibrates through the metal frame into her back and through her body into my hands where they rest on her waist.
"You're studying me," she says against my mouth.
"I study everything."
"You study systems."
"You are a system." I press my lips to the angle of her jaw and feel her pulse under my mouth, rapid and strong. "The most complex one I've ever encountered."
"That's the nerdiest thing anyone has ever said to me with their hand up my shirt."
"Is it working?"
"Shut up and keep going."
I grin against her skin, and the grin feels like the first honest expression I've made in days because this is who I am with her: sharp and stupid and desperate and completely incapable of playing it cool.
My hand slides higher under her shirt, and the skin underneath is cool from the server room air and impossibly soft. She inhales when my fingers trace the curve of her hip.
"Slower," she says, and the word is half command, half plea.
I go slower.
Her shirt comes off first because she pulls it over her head with the efficient economy of a woman who doesn't perform for an audience.
The server room light paints her skin in blue-white and amber, and the freckles scattered across her collarbone are data I haven't collected yet.
The black bra is practical and unadorned, and it's the hottest thing I've ever seen because Dar doesn't dress for anyone's gaze. The fact that I'm seeing this is permission she chose to give.
My shirt follows. Her hands land on my chest before the fabric hits the floor, fingerless gloves rough against my skin.
The combination of cold leather and warm fingertips pulls a sound out of me that I'm glad there's no one else around to hear.
"Here," she says, and guides my hand to the clasp at her back. Her voice is clinical. The instruction is anything but.
I unhook it with one hand because some skills you acquire out of optimism, and this one has been waiting for its operational deployment.
The bra drops, and the server room cold tightens her nipples before I touch them. When I do, when I cup the weight of her breast in my palm and brush my thumb across the peak, the sound she makes is low and involuntary and goes straight through me like a current through copper.
"That," she says. "Again."
I do it again. Then my mouth replaces my hand, and her back arches against the equipment rack, and her fingers fist in my hair with a grip that stings and that I want her to maintain indefinitely. The hum of the servers vibrates through the metal into her body and into my lips, and I can feel the tremor in her breathing before I hear it, a stutter that tells me her composure is starting to fragment at the edges.
