I am aware of every point where her body contacts mine: her thigh against my hip, her arms around my neck, the grip of her around me tight and slick and pulling me toward an edge I can see but haven't reached.
She gets there first, a second time, and I feel it before I hear it. The tightening starts deep, her body clenching around me in rhythmic pulses that pull the breath out of my lungs and the thought out of my skull. Her back bows against the rack. Her leg tightens around my hip, and the heel of her foot digs into the back of my thigh, and the sharp edge of that sensation combined with the slick, gripping heat of her is enough to shatter every remaining circuit in my head.
The sound she makes is raw and shattered and honest, and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard in this room full of machines I built with my own hands.
My orgasm hits like a cascade failure, every system going offline at once. My hips stutter against hers. My hands grip the equipment rack on either side of her head, knuckles white, the metal cold under my palms while the rest of me burns. I can feelher still pulsing around me, aftershocks pulling at me in waves, and I bury my face against her neck and let it take me apart.
The hum fills my skull. Her hands grip my shoulders. The world narrows to the pulse between us, the warmth of her, the cold of the room, the smell of her skin, and the sound of both of us breathing like we've sprinted the length of the mountain and back.
We end up on the floor on the cold tile with our backs against the equipment rack.
I reach for her hand slowly, giving her time to pull away, to rebuild the firewall, to shelve this under controlled variables.
Dar looks at my hand. Looks at me.
She takes it.
Her fingers lace through mine, and the gesture is simple and enormous.
My chest fills with something I can't encrypt, can't compress, can't store in any format my systems recognize.
The server hum surrounds us, steady and low, the heartbeat of Echo Base. For the first time, it sounds like it belongs to both of us.
Her thumb traces the back of my hand in a deliberate pattern. She's writing code on my skin, tapping a message in the only language she fully trusts.
I close my eyes and read her fingers, and the words she's pressing into my hand are the ones neither of us has said out loud.
The hum holds us. The cold tile presses into us. Her hand stays in mine, and her fingers keep tapping, and the message repeats because some code is worth running more than once.
14
DAR
Icatch myself listening for his keyboard rhythm when I enter the workspace, and the recognition of the habit stops me inside the door.
During my time inside this mountain, I've mapped its corridors, memorized its security rotations, analyzed its communication infrastructure, had sex with its system administrator twice, and apparently trained my auditory processing to use the sound of Tommy's typing as an environmental baseline.
His rhythm reaches me before I reach my workstation: rapid, even, steady, present.
Something in my stomach settles into a resting frequency I didn't authorize.
This is a problem.
The sex I can file under controlled variables. A biological function complicated by proximity, adrenaline, and the reality that Tommy's mind operates at a frequency I've spent my entire life searching for without knowing I was listening.
That the rest of him operates at an equally compelling frequency is a bonus I wasn't expecting and am handling poorly.
The keyboard thing is different. The keyboard thing means I've started calibrating my nervous system to another person's presence, and the last time I did that, the person died in an extraction gone wrong because the system I trusted failed in exactly the way I said it would.
I sit down and open my laptop.
Tommy glances over. His glasses are slightly askew, and there's a chocolate smudge on his left thumb, and the combination of genius and mess that constitutes Tommy Hale in the morning is unfairly appealing.
"You're staring at my hands," he says.
"You have chocolate on your thumb."
He looks at his thumb, then at me. He sucks the chocolate off without breaking eye contact.
