Page 34 of Cloverleaf Station

Kieron smirked. “Wait until I get going.”

“You’re not going to be able to hold me up for long, we should—”

All right, talking over. Kieron pulled away, then pushed inside again. He started slow, both to test his grip and to make sure he could handle thrusting like this. He didn’t want to come yet—it felt so good, being this far inside of another person, inside this person, who he actually liked and wanted. Elenus clenched around him, holding him tight, and Kieron turned his face again, this time to bite the inside of Elenus’s thigh as he slowly fucked in and out. “Don’t rush me.”

“Don’t tease me,” Elenus begged. “I want—you should be—how are you not desperate yet?”

“Why would I be desperate?” The heat, the tightness, the way Elenus was looking at him—it felt so good. “Why would I want to rush the best thing I’ve ever felt?”

His lover’s face did something complicated, eventually settling into “soft but snarky.” “I’ll feel even better if you put your back into it. C’mon, I’m not going to break, and we can do this again.” He reached up and stroked Kieron’s face. “I promise, we can do this again.”

Kieron thought he understood. “You want to come?”

“Don’t you?”

“I want to watch you come more. Here.” He sat back to free his hand and began stroking Elenus’s cock again as he hammered into him harder, making sure to hit that spot every single time. He watched as Elenus’s face contorted with pleasure, leaving behind the artifice that was so much a part of him until nothing but raw human emotion was left. It was gorgeous. He was so beautiful, so honest. How could he bear to let himself be so open?

“Perfect,” Kieron murmured, and suddenly Elenus reached down, grabbed Kieron’s knees to steady himself, and slammed their bodies tight together as he began to come.

Sticky jets of white coated his stomach and Kieron’s fingers, and it was a mess, but it was also somehow hot, triggering a strange reaction in Kieron. He didn’t wait to watch Elenus calm down, didn’t keep holding his own desires back, just bent forward so both his hands were on the bed and lost himself to the chase. When he came, he was buried as deep inside of Elenus as he could go—yet he still felt untethered as though his heart would fly right out of his chest if he wasn’t careful.

When Elenus’s long-fingered hands cupped his face, Kieron shuddered. The touch grounded him, pulled him back to reality the way the fucking hadn’t.

The afterglow was spent panting with the exhaustion that had finally caught up with him and getting cleaned up by Elenus, who went about it without the brisk efficiency Kieron had expected. Instead, he touched Kieron like he was savoring him.

“Was it good?” Kieron asked once Elenus was finally under the covers with him, curled up to fit. He put his head in the crux of Kieron’s shoulder without asking, and Kieron was surprised by how good the weight felt.

“So good,” Elenus confirmed. “Was it for you?”

It really had been one of the best things Kieron had ever felt in his entire life. That was probably too much to say twice, though. “So good.”

Chapter fifteen

Getting the Lizzie back turned into a protracted event, thanks to the time it took for Kieron to heal. She’d ended up wedged into a precarious position between two meteors, and instead of being able to go in and tow her out directly with Catalina, Elenus decided to create an entirely new AI-drive connection between his ships and force-upload the program to Lizzie. That way, Catalina could maneuver the other ship out on her own, without either of them needing to be in the driver’s seat, so to speak.

“This is a big add,” Kieron commented after the third straight day of Elenus’s almost nonstop programming spree. Even with Catalina’s help, creating a custom program like this required a lot of work, not to mention testing—he ran thousands of simulations of different variables to increase the Lizzie’s chances of coming back in one piece. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I just spacewalked to her again? Kidding!” he added quickly when Elenus turned bloodshot, incredibly irritated eyes on him. “I’m just kidding.”

“I will tie you to the bed and sit on you, don’t fucking think I won’t,” Elenus warned him. “Spacewalk, blackest night, what the ever-loving fuck …” His insults and threats deteriorated into mumbles at that point. Kieron, realizing that the best thing he could do was stay out of the way, went back to his own simulations. The challenge of finding Zakari, for the first time since he had set the goal, now seemed like a rather daunting prospect. Almost impossibly so.

Honestly, what were the chances that their old ship was still out there after three years and not crushed between meteors or hit in just the right way to send it on a path straight into the quasar? Or so pummeled by radiation that there was simply nothing left of it—of him—to bring back? None of those things were assured—the last two weren’t even likely—but Kieron still felt an unaccustomed sense of hopelessness as he looked at his data.

It was strange. Why should he feel this way? Things were good for him, better on a personal level than they’d ever been before. Elenus, for all that he was a jackass, was also fun, attentive, and an excellent lover. He was working his ass off to bring his other ship back to the station, but Kieron didn’t begrudge him that—he understood the impulse all too well. Yet he still spent every break with Kieron, dragging him into conversations with Catalina, telling them stories, and soliciting information in return.

It didn’t feel like an interrogation, like it had at first—now it just felt … like interest. Like Elenus wanted to know for the sake of getting to know Kieron better, rather than as a tool that he could use to lever Kieron into the position he wanted.

Kieron was happy for the first time in years. So why was he suddenly becoming so depressed about the singular goal that was keeping him there on Cloverleaf Station?

Maybe because you know you don’t deserve to be this happy. If you confirm it, if you find that you’ve really lost him for good and failed his family and done everything wrong, then you won’t be able to keep this. How could you? Failure deserves punishment, not reward.

Kieron closed his eyes and breathed in slowly, trying to exorcise his mother’s voice from his head. Failure, failure, nothing but a miserable failure. You don’t deserve to stay here. You don’t deserve to be a part of this. You’re the worst of me, I never wanted you, I would have taken you to the tundra and left you there the minute after you were born if it were up to me.

Mother was particularly strong today. He opened his eyes and sighed. Time for a session in the gym. Maybe a workout would help him drown out the sound of her voice.

It didn’t, and the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Kieron couldn’t run as far or as fast as he was used to, or lift as much weight, or swim as far. His usual two-hour workout had to be cut down to an hour and forty-three minutes, which was disgraceful. His body was back, it was healed, all the tests confirmed it. Maybe it was his mind that was the problem. Maybe so much joy was making him soft, unable to do his duty toward his best friend. Maybe it was time to start distancing himself from Elenus again.

After all, he was going to leave as soon as it was safe, go back to Gania and resume his position as one of their most elite inventors and corporate titans while Kieron was going to be … here. Unless he found Zakari, which he wasn’t any closer to now than he had been at the beginning of the shutdown season. Why punish himself by getting used to pleasure, when it wasn’t going to last?

It was almost enough to convince him to resume the casual dismissiveness and cruelty he was so good at, except … then he’d have to be cruel to Catalina too. Ignore her, reject the pictures she created out of light and sound for him, spurn her childish attempts to communicate, which were getting better all the time. He would have to take the trust she’d put in him and turn it on its head, which would make him no better than Deysan. He would have to break a piece of her, perhaps permanently. She might never trust a person outside of Elenus again.