"For now," Atlas agrees, like it costs him, and the corner of Ren's mouth tugs, and then nobody's joking anymore.
Atlas reaches me first. He gets a hand into my hair and tips my face up and kisses me, and it's not soft—it's the kiss of a man who's been holding lightning behind his teeth for three days, all heat and pressure, the charge of him buzzing against my lips so that I feel it spark down the back of my throat and pool low. I open to him without deciding to. His tongue strokes into my mouth and the storm comes with it, a live prickle over my lips and tongue, and underneath it something that's just him, and my hands come up and fist in the front of his shirt and pull, and he lets me drag it off over his head, breaking the kiss only as long as it takes the fabric to clear.
Then Ren's hands are on me from the side, turning me, and his kiss is the opposite of Atlas's: slow, deep, devastating, a man who feels exactly what his mouth is doing to me and adjusts to it in real time. He kisses me like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it. I make a sound into his mouth and feel him answer it through the bond, a warm pull low in my chest, and his fingers find the hem of my sleep shirt and skim it up my ribs,knuckles dragging over bare skin until I lift my arms and let him take it off me.
Then I'm naked between the two of them in the dark and there's a beat where they both just look, and I feel the want spike off both of them at once and crash together in the bond, doubled.
"Back against him," Ren says, low.
Atlas draws me into him, my spine to the broad heat of his chest, his mouth already at my throat and working down. "Both of us are going to touch you," he says against my skin, "until you can't think. That's the part you asked for. That's the part you get."
Hands move over me in the dark—Atlas's rough palms sliding up my sides from behind, Ren's lighter ones following the line of my inner thighs from the front, both of them learning me by feel and by the bond, finding what makes my breath stutter and going back to it. Mouths follow the hands. Atlas's teeth graze the slope of my shoulder; Ren kisses a slow line down between my breasts, over my stomach, lower, until his breath is warm against the crease of my hip and I'm already shaking, already so wound up I can barely hold still for it.
That's how they put me between them.
Atlas at my back, solid as a wall, and I feel him everywhere I'm not used to feeling him, the charge he never fully grounds running off his skin onto mine, a low electric hum that lifts every fine hair on my body and drags every nerve up to the surface to wait. He gathers my hair in one fist and draws it off my neck, baring my throat, and sets his teeth to the side of it. "Like this?" he says against my skin. Then he lets my hair fall and both hands come around to fill themselves with my breasts, big and rough-palmed, his thumbs finding my nipples and working them in slow circles until I arch back into him without deciding to.
"Like that." My voice is already gone thready. "Don't stop doing that."
"Wasn't planning to." His teeth graze the cord of my neck. "Ren. She's ready when you are."
Ren settles between my thighs. He looks up at me once—dark eyes, steady, the thread of him in my chest pulling warm and certain—and then he puts his mouth on me. On my clit, exactly, no fumbling, no searching, because Ren reads me from the inside the way only he can. His blood sense catches each response a half second before I give it, so his tongue is already where I need it before my body's finished deciding it needs it there. Two fingers curl up into me and find the place that makes my hips jerk, and he knew, he knew before I did.
"That's not fair," I gasp.
He pulls off just enough to answer. "You said you didn't want me careful." His breath is hot against my wetness. "I can feel exactly what you feel. There's nothing careful about it." Then his mouth is back on me and I lose the thread of whatever I was going to say.
Atlas's thumbs match his rhythm on my nipples, and the storm-charge sings under everything, and his mouth moves to the hinge of my jaw. "Tell him," he says, low, rough. "You always know what you want. Tell him exactly."
So I do. "There. Right there—don't move, don't change it—" My breath catches when Ren hums against me and the vibration of it goes straight up my spine. "Harder.God, Ren, harder."
"Harder," Atlas repeats against my ear, and there's something almost smug in it, in being the one to relay the order, and Ren's eyes flick up at him over the line of my body, and the look they trade isn't rivalry now—it's two people building the same thing, watching it land.
"You heard her," Ren says, and gives it to me harder. Flat of his tongue, two fingers curling, the rhythm tightening to a point.
I watch them. I make myself keep my eyes open for it. Atlas's jaw set against my temple, the muscle there jumping every timeI move against him, the proof of how much it's costing him to go slow written all down the line of his body—and lower, hard against the small of my back, the other proof, the one he isn't hiding and wouldn't bother to. Ren's eyes lifting to my face between every other breath, taking my whole self in.
"She's close," Ren says. He isn't guessing. He can feel it.
"I know." Atlas's hand splays flat and possessive over my sternum, right where the threads live. "I can feel it too. Through this."
"Then quit narrating and hold her." But Ren's almost smiling when he says it.
"Both of you," I manage, half a laugh and half a moan, and that's the last word I get. The pressure builds and crests and breaks, and I come against Ren's mouth with Atlas's charge humming through every nerve he's lifted to the surface, and it's the first time since the drain that the bond flares all the way bright, a pulse of warmth in my chest that isn't mine, then another laid over it a beat later, two heartbeats inside my own ribs, both of them,there,present, alive. I make a sound I don't have a name for.
The threads aren't filament anymore. They're rope.
"There it is," I get out, when I can get out anything. My voice is wrecked. "There it is. That's the thing. That's what he almost took."
Ren presses his forehead to my inner thigh, just breathing. Atlas's arms close around me from behind, and for a second neither of them is anything but careful, both of them feeling the bruise heal through the bond at the same time.
One of them isn't enough. The want changes shape low in my belly, an empty ache that the orgasm only sharpened, and I don't have to put words to it. Ren feels it move before I do, and Atlas catches it through the bond a beat behind him.
"She wants both," Ren says, already low and rough, sitting back on his heels with his mouth still wet from me.
"Yeah." Atlas's voice has dropped somewhere I feel against my own teeth. "I got that."
They don't make me ask. Atlas's hands close on my waist and Ren takes my hip, and between them they turn me over and bring me down onto my hands and knees in the middle of the bed, Ren settling in behind me, Atlas moving around to kneel up in front where I can reach him. I don't dress it up. "Don't go easy," I tell them both. "Either of you. I want to feel it tomorrow."
