"Look at me." His voice is raw in a way his humor never allows.
I do. His eyes are stripped of every defense, every performance, every layer of glass and wit and deflection, and what's underneath is a man who sees me the way I see his code. Completely.
The seeing is what breaks me open.
I come with his name in my mouth and his eyes on mine and the orgasm hits like a system crash, total and absolute, every process offline. He follows with a sound I will carry in permanent storage for the rest of my operational life, rough and open and entirely his, his forehead against mine and his hands shaking on the desk.
For a handful of seconds the system is offline and there is nothing but sensation and the sound of his breathing and the server hum underneath everything, steady as a heartbeat.
After.
The workspace is quiet. The screens glow. The evidence is written across us both and across the desk surface, and the monitors are displaying login screens because my shoulder hit the keyboard at some point and the keystroke registered as an input command.
The absurdity of my body accidentally committing code while his hands were dismantling my capacity for syntax is the first thing that makes me want to laugh in this facility.
I put my clothes on in the glow of monitors. My gloves go back on last, finger by finger, and the reversal of the way they came off carries a weight I don't examine.
Tommy watches from his chair, his glasses back on, his hair destroyed, his jeans and briefs pulled up. His shirt unbuttoned and untucked with marks on his shoulder that I put there. He's watching me with the expression of a man who has just confirmed a hypothesis he's been running for days and doesn't know what to do with the results.
"That doesn't change anything." My voice is level, controlled, the lie flawless in its construction.
"It changes everything." His voice is quiet, stating rather than arguing, the way he writes code comments, with the certainty of someone who has observed the data and trusts the conclusion.
Neither of us is wrong. The paradox sits between us like a variable that resolves to two values simultaneously, and neither of us is willing to be the observer because observation would require committing to one truth over the other, and commitment is the territory we've both spent our lives avoiding.
I walk to the door. Behind me, Tommy's keyboard starts, rapid and even, building something new.
The corridor is dark. The taste of him is on my mouth. My hands are steady. The weapon is still counting down.
11
TOMMY
My brain replays the previous night in fragments, served up in a loop I didn't authorize and can't terminate.
I keep seeing her hands fisting my shirt, keep hearing the sound she made when I pressed her back against the edge of my desk, half surprise and half challenge. Her eyes stayed open the entire time, watching me watch her, and neither of us blinked because blinking meant missing data and we're both too greedy for that.
The image that hits hardest is the look on her face when control stopped being the point.
I shove my glasses up my nose and stare at the diagnostic report scrolling across my center monitor. I've read the same line of output multiple times and could not, under oath, tell you what it says.
My head is running a different subroutine, and that subroutine involves the curve of Dar's lower back and the specific sound she makes when you find the right frequency.
"You look like someone who slept exactly zero hours," Sarah says from her station, not looking up from her own screens.
"Bold of you to assume I ever sleep."
"You sleep. You just pretend you don't because the mystique serves you." She pauses. Glances over. "Coffee's fresh. You look like you need it more than usual."
What I need is a factory reset on the part of my mind that decided the warmth of Dar's skin under the blue-white glow of my monitors is mission-critical information deserving permanent storage. What I need is to stop memorizing the way her fingers traced the edge of my collarbone like she was mapping a system she intended to crack.
What I need is for the diagnostic report to be more interesting than the memory of her mouth, which is a high bar because that memory is, objectively, the most compelling data set I've ever encountered.
The diagnostic finishes. All systems nominal.
No residual effects from last night's Committee probe, the one Dar and I neutralized together while the argument was still hot in the air between us, before it stopped being an argument and started being something else entirely.
I pull up the perimeter logs. The outer defenses held. The probe was sophisticated but still preliminary, a test run designed to measure our response times and map our capabilities.
