Page 42 of Kavan

"Let me finish." I touch her jaw, trace the line of it with my thumb. "If we do this, I won't be able to think about anything else. I won't be good for⁠—"

"I don't want you to think." She shifts, swinging a leg over my lap so she's straddling me, settling her weight against my thighs. "I want you to feel. For one hour, Kavan. Just feel. Before the universe asks us for everything we have left, I want to give you everything I've got."

My working hand finds her hip and grips it. The other arm is useless in its sling, a dead weight I'm not used to accommodating.

"You need to be on the console in ninety minutes," I say.

"Zuri is on the console. Zuri knows more about that reader than I do, and she's been taking notes for fifteen days." She leans in, her mouth brushing my jaw. "I'm the only person who can read the fourteen elements. But right now, right this second, the fourteenth element isn't in a fragment. It isn't on a wall. It's here." She presses her palm flat to my chest, over my heart. "And if you're going to walk out that aperture and not come back, I need to know that I chose you. Not because you were noble. Not because you were waiting for permission. Chose you. Do you understand?"

There's no mask on her face, and no armor, only the raw terrified certainty of someone who has decided to stop leaving.

I understand.

"Then choose," I say.

She kisses me again, harder this time, and something in me breaks open that has been locked since Hesper. The thing I've been carrying, the loneliness, the penance, the long solitary watch, doesn't vanish, but it loosens its grip. Just enough. Just for this.

Her hands find the fastenings of my jacket. The zipper is loud in the silence of the blister, a harsh metallic rasp that echoes off the transparent walls. She works it open with shaking fingers, pushes the fabric off my shoulders, and I hiss as the cold air hits the burn from the housing vent.

She stops.

"Does it hurt?"

"Yes."

"Kavan."

"It isn't the burn." I catch her wrist. "Being seen. Being looked at. That's what hurts."

She stops where she is, her thighs pressed against my hips, her hands hovering over my chest.

"You have never let anyone look at you," she says.

"I have let you."

She makes a small, broken sound, and then her fingers are moving again, slower now, a deliberate reverence as she strips my shirt away. The scars are a geography of my service, old and new, a map of every world I have bled on. I watch her read them. My grandmother's phrase comes back to me: you stop looking for what you expected and start looking at what is there.

And what Sophie sees isn't a warrior. What she sees is a man who has been counting his sins for a decade, and she doesn't look away.

"These," she says, tracing a line across my ribs where a fragment from the plaza caught me, "are a record of every time you chose someone else."

"Sophie—"

"Shut up." Her voice breaks. "Just let me⁠—"

She leans in and presses her mouth to the scar.

My breath stops entirely.

She kisses each one. The line on my ribs, the burn on my shoulder, the old marks from an anti-smuggling boarding. She maps them with her lips, slow and thorough, and my hand finds the back of her head and holds her there because I can't do anything else.

When she pulls back, her eyes are wet.

"Now," she says. "You let me carry it."

She reaches for the fastenings of her own shirt, and I stop her.

"No."