Her pulse is fast at her wrist. She's not nervous exactly, something more like standing at the edge of a thing she's already decided to step off.
I tip my forehead to hers and wait. She's holding the wrecked coffee cup for one more second. She sets it on the floor.
"You made the rain," she says.
"Yeah."
"For the seminar?"
"No." I called it an hour into training when the storm in me got too loud to keep off the ceiling, which isn't a fact I need to hand her. "It helps."
She's quiet for a moment. Her wrist is turned over, her pulse beating in my palm.
"This is different," she says. "Being here. The space between—" She makes a small gesture with her free hand. "Between you and me is different from the space between me and?—"
She doesn't finish. I know what she means. I'm not Ren, who reads her through her own blood. I'm not Felix watching her futures through his deck. Not Callum who plans twelve steps ahead before he takes one. The space between Everly and me is charge—something building, the kind of weather that sharpens right before the strike. She can feel that same as I can.
"Yeah," I say.
She tips her head back far enough to look at me. Her eyes are on mine, dark in the low weight-room light, and she's reading something in my face I couldn't name if I tried. I just have my hands on her wrist and the rain I made still coming down and the charge that's been sitting in this room for three hours looking for somewhere to go.
She kisses me first.
Just—decides, and leans in.
The bond surges.
Both my hands—mark and all—slide into her wet hair, and she makes a sound that goes straight through my sternum, and I'm done holding anything at a distance. Her shirt shoves up and I can feel how cold the rain made her and then how fast the cold goes, warmth spreading where I touch her, the charge that lives in me and the heat of her finding each other and arriving somewhere neither of us planned.
She laughs a little at the electricity, a low shocked sound when the current runs between us, not afraid of it. Right. She grabbed a lightning-charmed fence outside Gallup last summer because I told her don't and she wanted to see what it felt like, and when she let go she saidhuhin the tone of someone writing it down for later. Not scared. Just curious. I've been gone since then, probably. I've been careful not to count it.
Her hands are in my hair, on my shoulders, sliding under my shirt at the waist. My hands slide up her back, under the hem of her shirt, the current running with them—low, not dangerous, nowhere near that, just the ambient charge that leaks when I stop filtering. She gasps at it, sharp, and then laughs again, breathy, and the laugh goes into my mouth and?—
The storm answers.
I feel it before I hear it—the pressure drops, the air pulls tight the way it does when the sky has caught what I'm feeling and decided to run with it. Lightning flashes outside, white through the high weight-room windows. Thunder comes a beat later, close. She pulls back just far enough to look up.
"Atlas."
"Yeah." The storm's mine. It'll get louder.
"Should we?—"
I pull her back in because the alternative is stopping and I'm not ready to stop. Her mouth, warm after the cold rain. Her hands still moving—her shirt around her ribs, my hands at her waist?—
The mark detonates.
I go rigid. Not her—me—a sear up the back of my hand so sharp it goes white behind my eyes, and I wrench back, and she goes with me half a step before the gap opens between us. Reflex. Pain does that.
I look at my hand. The mark sits there, dark and pulsing red at its edges, the skin beneath it pink and hot. Not quite blistered yet. Heading there.
The storm keeps going. Lightning again, closer. The rain doubles.
"That was—" she starts.
"The bond." When it surges hard the mark catches it. I'd known that was possible since the first morning in Catalina's office; I'd thought I had more distance before I learned it firsthand. "When the bond goes like that. The mark's calibrated to the surge."
She's looking at my hand. Something moves across her face—not guilt exactly. Understanding. The kind that comes from learning what a thing really costs after you thought you already knew.
