My quarters are at the end of the hall. I've walked this path thousands of times over the decades. Tonight, it feels different. Charged.
I stop in front of my door. Turn to face her.
She's watching me with those dark eyes, waiting. Patient. Thering glints at her chest, catching the dim light from the wall sconces.
"You should rest," I say.
"So should you."
"Celeste."
"If you're about to tell me to go to my room like a good soldier, don't."
Something shifts in my chest. A lock turning. A wall crumbling.
I tried to do this right. Tried to give us time, space, the opportunity to come together without fear or adrenaline clouding the decision. I wanted our first time to mean something. To be a choice, not a reaction.
But she almost died tonight. The memory of it hits me fresh. The stake buried in her shoulder. The blood soaking through her shirt. The split second where I thought the next blow would find her heart, and I wouldn't reach her in time.
I'm done waiting.
I close the distance between us. Her back meets the door, and I brace one hand beside her head, leaning in until my mouth is inches from hers. I can smell her. Blood and underneath it, something that's purely her. Something I want to drown in.
"I wasn't going to tell you to go to your room."
Her breath catches. I watch her pupils dilate, feel the subtle shift in her posture as she leans toward me.
"Then what were you going to say?"
I don't answer. I'm done talking.
I kiss her like I've been starving for it. Because I have. Weeks of restraint, of pulling back, of telling myself I was being noble when really I was just terrified. All of it burns away the second her mouth opens under mine.
She gasps against my lips, and I swallow the sound, my handfisting in her hair, tilting her head back to deepen the kiss. She tastes like blood. Hers and mine and theirs, all mixed together, and I don't care. I want more of it. More of her.
Her hands grab my ruined shirt, yanking me closer. The movement pulls at my wound, and I don't care about that either. Pain is nothing. Pain is background noise. The only thing that exists is her mouth and her hands and the sounds she's making against my lips.
I reach behind her and shove the door open.
We stumble through together, still kissing, her fingers working the buttons of my shirt with desperate urgency. She gets three open before she gives up and just tears. Buttons scatter across the floor. The sound of them hitting wood is obscenely loud in the quiet room.
"That was expensive," I manage against her mouth.
"Bill me."
I laugh.
She pushes the shirt off my shoulders, and her hands find bare skin. I shudder. Her touch is cool, but it burns everywhere it lands, tracing the planes of my chest, the ridges of my stomach, the edges of the wound across my ribs.
"Does it hurt?" she asks.
"Yes."
She kisses it.
Something snaps in my chest. The last thread of control I was clinging to.
I walk her toward the bed, my mouth never leaving hers. Her knees hit the mattress, and she falls back, pulling me down with her. I catch myself on my forearms, hovering over her, looking down at her face in the darkness.
