My brain, because it's my brain and it never fully shuts up, supplies the observation that I am going down on Dar in a server room surrounded by the infrastructure I built over years of work, and that this is either the most on-brand thing I've ever done or a sign that I need therapy. Probably both.
I work lower. My mouth traces a path down her ribs while my hands deal with the button and zipper of her jeans, and she lifts her hips to help me without my asking, which is a level of cooperation that Dar does not extend lightly.
The jeans come off. Her underwear matches the bra: black, practical, and destined for the floor.
She watches me look at her. The flat affect is gone. What's in her eyes is raw and fierce and challenging, like she's daring me to be worth the exposure this is costing her.
I drop to my knees on the cold tile. She swears once, sharp and breathless, when she realizes what I intend.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"If you're doing that, I need the rack behind me or I'm going to fall."
"I've got you."
My hands grip her hips, steadying her against the equipment rack, and my mouth finds her. She is warm and wet and the taste of her makes my brain white out for a full second before the system comes back online.
Her fingers tighten in my hair. Her thighs tense against my shoulders.
The physical evidence that Dar is trusting me with this, is letting me have this version of her, is the single most erotic thing I've experienced in my life.
I learn her. This is what I do. I find the patterns, the sequences, the specific input that produces the specific output,and Dar's body under my mouth is the most rewarding code I've ever read.
She directs with words and hands, the same way she runs offensive ops: short commands, precise adjustments, clinical voice stripped raw by what her body is doing against her instructions.
"Right there."
I stay right there.
"Harder."
I give her harder.
"That rhythm. Tommy, that exact—" The sentence fractures. Her hips answer for her.
I don't stop. My tongue works a steady rhythm against the spot she specified, and her hips roll against my mouth, and the sounds she's making have abandoned language entirely and become something pure and desperate. Her fingers are gripping my hair so hard my scalp aches, and the ache feels like exactly where I belong.
I feel her orgasm build before she announces it. The tightening of her thighs. The stutter of her breathing. The way her whole body goes taut like a wire under tension.
Then it hits, and her hips jerk against me, and the sound she makes is my name torn beyond recognition. Her body shudders in waves against my mouth while I hold her hips and keep going because the rhythm she asked for is the rhythm she's getting until she tells me otherwise.
She pulls me up by my hair. The urgency in the gesture is new, raw, and the kiss she gives me is open and graceless, tasting herself on my mouth without hesitation.
"Inside me," she says against my lips. "Now."
My clothes become obstacles I address with the kind of focused efficiency that combat training was supposed to teach me and that this woman actually motivates.
She wraps around me when I push inside her, one leg hooked over my hip, her back against the rack. The sound we both make is involuntary and identical and lost in the hum of the servers.
I move slowly because she said slower and I take instructions from Dar the way I take them from Kane: immediately and without question.
She matches my rhythm, her body rocking against mine, and the collaboration mirrors the simulation so precisely that the parallel would make me laugh if I had any breath left.
Her forehead presses against mine. Her breath is hot on my face. "Faster now," she says, and the "now" cracks in the middle.
I give her faster. The equipment rack groans under the combined weight and force, and the LED lights above us flash in patterns that have nothing to do with system status.
