I move, and she meets me, stroke for stroke. My cock drags almost all the way out of her before I drive back in to the hilt. Again. Again. Her nails drag down my back hard enough to leave marks I'll find tomorrow.
The pace climbs and the storm climbs with it, every drive of my hips a strike somewhere over the green, the room going blue, dark, blue. I don't ground the charge. It stands off my skin and arcs where we're pressed together, current jumping between her breasts and my chest. It should hurt. It doesn't. Nothing about this hurts, which scares me more than the storm does. She gasps and pushes up into it instead of away. Of course she does. She's never once flinched from any part of me—not the storm, not the grief, not this.
"Atlas." My name, wrecked. "Atlas—harder?—"
"I've got you."
I give her harder. I don't think about my mom. I don't think about anything—that's the gift of this, the only one I've let myself take all night. I get a hand between us, my thumb on her clit, and she's climbing again. I feel it gather up the thread before her body shows it, pulling tight and low in her. I chase it. I want her over the edge before me. I want to feel her go first.
She does. The lightning goes with her. A strike close enough to shake the floor. The lights blow out down the corridor. The room goes pure white, then pure dark.
She clenches around me. All of me. Pulsing tight around my cock.
It's too much and it isn't enough, both at once, and I don't want it to stop, and it's going to anyway.
That's what finishes me. I drive in deep and hold there. I come with my face pressed into her neck, the thunder landing right on top of us, storming somewhere over the green at the same time it's storming in me, the whole thing emptying out of me into her at once.
For one second there's no grief in me anywhere. No mom. No registry. No name in a notebook. Just heat, and her, and the rain on the roof. Then the second ends and all of it comes back—but I had it. For one second, I had it.
I don't feel the mark burn. I don't feel anything but her.
After, the rain eases. I let it. It goes from arriving to falling to a normal gray drizzle, and the room's dark except for the dim from the window, and she's tucked against my side with her hand flat on my chest like she's keeping count of my heart.
The mark throbs on the back of my hand, raw and red where the boundary's been chewing on it the whole time. I look at it. The skin's blistered along the curve of the half moon, same pattern it always blisters in, and I'll wear it for days and tell no one where it came from. I'd pay a lot more than that and not think twice.
Somewhere across campus the other three felt the bond go bright and knew one of us reached her tonight, and knew it wasn't them, and had to lie in their own beds with the thing on their hands and endure it. I should feel bad about that. I will, tomorrow. Tonight I don't have it in me.
"I keep thinking I should feel different now that I know," I say. The words come slow. "I don't. I just know who to point at. And I want to break every single one of them in half."
"That's not nothing."
"No." I turn my hand over so the burn faces down, away from both of us. "It's not nothing."
She shifts, props herself up, looks at me in the storm-light with rain still drying in her hair. She doesn't tell me it'll be okay.That's how I know she's the real thing. Anyone else would have said it by now, would have reached for the soft lie, and she just looks at me and lets the truth stand in the room with us, ugly and ours.
"I'm going to burn it all down," I tell her. Quiet, this time. Not a threat thrown at a sky. A fact. "Catalina. The Administration. Whoever decided my mom was worth more to them as an experiment than as a fucking person. All of it."
She doesn't promise me it'll work. She doesn't promise me I'll come out the other side. She holds me tighter, her arm across my chest, her forehead against my jaw, and she lets me mean it.
Outside, the last of the thunder rolls off east and goes quiet over the river. I made that. I'll make worse before this is done. Good.
She's here anyway.
20
EVERLY
I've got leverage. The man across the desk has spent his whole life making sure no one ever had any on him, which is exactly why I need it. My heart's going hard enough that I can feel it in my wrists. So I knock on Wheeler's door at the hour I'm not supposed to know is his, and I wait, and when he sayscome inI do it like a girl who's brought him a gift.
In a way, I have. I just haven't decided yet how much of it he gets to keep.
His study is the third-floor room I've been into twice without his leave, and it looks different with him in it, smaller, the way a cage looks smaller once you've seen the animal. Old plaster cracks in a thin vein above the window, painted over so many times the crack barely shows unless you already know to look for it, and I always know to look for it. The amber jars catch the lamp. The notebook is closed on the blotter, squared to the edge, and I'd bet anything he closed it the second he heard the stair creak. The covered cage sits in the corner where it always sits, and the thing inside it breathes its slow wet breath, and I don't look at it, because looking at it is a tell and I can't afford tells. Notin this room. Not with this man. My skin still crawls anyway, a slow cold walk up the back of my neck.
I made cookies at midnight last night, because I couldn't sleep and because flour is the only thing in this house that does what I tell it to. I left the Tupperware on the kitchen counter, and I thought about it the whole walk up here, the ordinary weight of it, the sugar under my nails. It's the kind of thing I do to remind myself which one of us I am. I'm the girl who grinds her own cinnamon. He's the man with a living thing under a cloth in the corner. I keep that straight on purpose. It's the only edge I came in with that he can't take off me.
"Miss Grey." He doesn't stand. He gestures at the chair across the desk like he's granting me an audience, and I take it, and I fold my hands in my lap, and I let him think the folding is nerves. "You've never come to me before. Outside the sessions, I mean."
"No," I say. "I haven't."
