Page 44 of Kavan

"Do it," I say. "Do it, Sophie⁠—"

She guides me to her and lowers herself, and there is nothing in nineteen years of discipline that prepares me for it.

She braces her hands on my shoulders and her fingernails find the ruined skin of my back and I welcome it.

"Oh—" Her mouth opens on a silent sound. "Kavan⁠—"

I find her hip with my good hand and hold her steady. “Do shut up.”

She laughs, and the laugh turns into a gasp halfway through, and she sinks the rest of the way.

Then she's fully seated on me and everything stops. She rests her forehead on mine. Her pulse is everywhere we're joined, quick and hard and impatient, and my own is not better, and for four seconds we simply stay there and let it be enormous.

"Move," she says.

"Not yet⁠—"

"Move."

So she does it herself, because of course she does. She lifts and settles, finds the angle she wants, adjusts it once, and then she rides me at a rhythm entirely her own choosing, and my hand on her hip is not steering anything. I'm being read. She watches what her own movements do to my face and she files the results and she uses them, and it's the most humbling thing that has ever happened to me.

Below us, through the transparent floor, the dead city lies exactly as dark as it has for twenty thousand years. The fortress hums somewhere above, building its solution. None of it reaches this blister.

There's only her. There's only the sound of her breath, and the slick unhurried meeting of our bodies, and the fractured noise she makes when I finally grip her hip hard enough to lift and set the pace myself.

"There you are," I say. "Coming apart on me and still deciding everything."

"Kavan." Her voice breaks. "Kavan, I⁠—"

"Say it while you take it."

She forces her eyes open. The tears on her cheeks catch the low amber glow off the sphere, and I have never seen anything more beautiful than a woman who has spent her life leaving choosing to stay.

"I love you," she says.

She says it as she comes apart.

It goes through her in long shuddering waves, and she locks around me and arches into it, and the sound torn out of her throat is nothing but surrender. I feel every pulse of it. She holds nothing back and hides nothing from me, and that is what finishes me.

I follow her over.

Whatever leaves me isn't a decision either. My vision goes to nothing but light. My hand closes on her hip hard enough that I'll find the marks of it later and be sorry. There's heat and there's her and there's the wholly undeniable fact that I have never once in my life been this present anywhere.

When it ends, she collapses against me.

My forehead drops to her shoulder. We're tangled, sweat-soaked, breathing in ragged unison. Through the blister wall the towers hang in the dark and the count spins toward its conclusion, and I can't move and I can't think. I can only hold her.

After a long moment, she laughs.

"What?" I manage.

"I don't have a speech for this." Her voice is wrecked. "I've had a speech for everything else, but not for this."

"Then don't."

"Kavan." She raises her head, and her smile is the most devastating thing I have ever seen. "You let me carry it."

"Yes."