In the long-odds branches, the ones I keep going back to like a bruise I want to press, she stands at the lip of the Well and shechoosesit, smiling, the way you'd choose a warm bed. That's the one Ren can't say out loud and the one I can't stop seeing.
Every time that branch deals itself, something behind my sternum stings, the same low spot, precise as a splinter.
The odds on her have been bad since June. Tonight they're worse than I've let any of them know, and I'll carry that quietly, because there's no version where saying it helps. I've checked.
There's a cruelty to my discipline that the others don't have to live with. Atlas's storm only shows him the weather. Ren's blood only tells him what's true right now, in the room, in the body in front of him. Callum's shadow keeps his secrets and nothing else's. Mine shows me the funeral before anyone's even dead. I have walked through the wake for everyone I've ever cared about while they were still standing in the kitchen asking if I wanted tea. You learn to grin through it or you don't survive yourself. I learned early. I was seventeen and I learned in one afternoon, and I have never once unlearned it. Grief with a grin on it is still grief. It's just better at parties, and it doesn't ruin everyone else's night while it's at it.
So I don't say it. I close the door. I let the lock turn.
What I want is one hour where the future is a blank card. One hour where the deck hasn't been dealt yet.
I know exactly one way to get it.
She's still in her coat, rain still beaded in her hair, watching me the way she watches when she's already read most of the page and didn't love the ending.
"Felix. Where are the others?"
"Their houses. Behind their own marks. Being good." The cards go onto the desk. I don't usually put them down. I clock her eyes following them there, the small startle of it. "It's just us. I checked the odds on someone walking in. They're long. I made them long."
"You made them long."
"It's the one thing I'm any good at." I close the distance. I let the grin go—not drop, not collapse, justgo,the way you set down something you've been holding so long your hand forgot it had a choice. And the second it's gone I watch her see what's under it, and she doesn't flinch from it, she never flinches from it, and that's the whole fucking problem with her, that's the thing that's going to be the death of me one way or the other. "I had a shit day at the table, Grey. The worst kind. I want one hour where I don't have to deal the next hand, and you're the only thing in this haunted little kingdom that buys me one. Call it a flaw in the house rules."
I don't say the rest. The rest lives below the line.
She lifts her hand to my jaw, and the entire room goes quieter, every branching corridor of tomorrow pulling back to a hush. Then she kisses me, and her mouth is a door closing on all of them.
That's the only way I can put it. Every future I've been standing in the draft of all day—the Well, the lip of it, her face going soft and wrong—the door shuts on the lot of them. There'sjust this. Her lower lip between mine. The rain-cold of her skin going warm under my hands.
She makes a small sound when I back her into the desk, and it goes straight through me, low and hot and greedy, my pulse dropping into my groin like a coin into a slot. I'm half-hard before I've even gotten her coat off. I want to make her make that sound again. Want to take it apart and find out exactly what built it. Want her loud enough that every wired-up dead thing in this campus has to sit there and listen.
"Slow," I tell her, against her mouth. For me. So it lasts.
"Since when are you slow?"
"Tonight I'm a patient man."
I am lying and she knows it and the odds say I last about four more minutes at slow before the want wins, and I decide I'll cheat that too when I get there.
I get her coat off. I get the sweater under it off, drag it over her head, and she laughs when it catches and I grin into her collarbone because the laugh is the best sound there is, it's the sound of a branch where she's alive and warm and here. I put my mouth to her throat where the pulse is. I feel it kick under my lips. Mine, somewhere, is doing the same, and for once I don't care who could feel it down the leash, let every wired-up dead thing in this place listen in, let whoever reads the feed make of it what they want. Good luck to them.
I lay her back on the bed and strip the rest off her, slow. And Christ. The sight of her bare in the streetlight does something to me I've got no card for. I'm fully hard now, aching against my zipper like it's got opinions about my pacing, and I ignore it, because tonight isn't about the quickest road to the finish.
I kiss down the center of her: her throat first, then the slope of one breast, closing my mouth over the nipple until it's a hard peak and she's arching up for more. I give the other the same treatment, slow, until she's gasping and her hand's fisted in thesheet. Then lower: the soft of her stomach, the jut of her hip. Spread her thighs with both hands. She's already wet when I get my mouth to her, slick against my lips, and I tell her so, because she likes being told and I am not above filth. Never have been.
"Felix—"
"Got you." I drag my tongue up the length of her, slow, and settle on her clit, and she arches clean off the bed with a sound I'd lose money to hear again. "My hour. You come first. House rules."
And here is the thing I can do that none of the others can.
I don't feel her the way Ren does. Her pleasure isn't pouring up some thread into me, I'm not riding her nerves. That's his trick. Mine is a colder one, and a stranger one.
I work her with my tongue and sink two fingers into her, feel her clench tight and slick around them, and underneath the heat of her on my mouth the branches are running. A hundred versions of the next five seconds fork off at once—this angle or that, faster or this exact unhurried drag—and I don't just pick the good one. I lean on it. I nudge the damn odds until it stops being a coincidence and starts being rigged, until her body isn't lucky, it'scheated—same crooked odds I ran on the door, just aimed somewhere a lot more fun.
There's a version where I'm clumsy about it and she ends up doing half the work herself. I fold that hand, toss it face-down where it belongs. There's one where I get lucky on the fourth pass by pure dumb chance, so I skip the first three and go straight to being lucky. I curl my fingers, find the spot that makes her hips buck off the mattress, and I stay right there like it's the last good seat in the house.
And the taste of her, the sounds she's making, her thighs starting to shake against my ears—it's winding me tighter by the second. My cock is throbbing where it's pinned under me against the bed, a dull insistent drumbeat I keep having to talk down.Not yet. She first.I give her the best branch on offer every single second, one after another, cheating her higher than luck alone would ever let her climb, grinning against her wet cunt like a man who's finally holding cards. Because steering the odds is the one place in my whole godforsaken life I am never, ever helpless—and being this hard for her and choosing to wait is the closest thing to prayer I've got.
