She kissed me without hesitation. Her mouth opened under mine, her tongue finding mine and staying there as if the decision had already been made and there was no further reason to negotiate it.
I shifted carefully. The knot allowed only a few inches of movement, but a few inches were enough.
The first shift carried through both of us. Her hand tightened at my back, and the bond caught the change before her breath did. When I moved again, the friction did not build so much as hold, constant and inescapable, pressing through the place where we were joined and returning to me through the bond with nowhere else to go.
She made a sound against my throat that was not quite a word.
I adjusted my grip at her hip and changed the angle. The next movement reached deeper, and her back arched beneath me, her mouth opening with no attempt to contain the sound this time.
I repeated the motion.
She came on the third shift. Her body tightened around the base of me where the knot fixed us together, and the release had nowhere to break. It moved through her, into me, and the bond caught it before it could fade.
Then sent it back amplified.
She came again on the fourth. “Mine,” she said, quieter and more certain than before.
I tightened my hold at her back and brought my forehead to hers. “Again.”
She gave me no resistance.
The next build was slower. Less body, more bond.
Her hand found mine where it braced beside her head, and when her fingers threaded through mine, the contact changed the rhythm more than the movement did. Her pulse reached for mine.
Mine answered. For one breath, then two, we were perfectly aligned. When the next wave came for her, it found me too, pulling me under in the same second.
The release did not break cleanly. It held, impossibly sustained by the bond, until her pleasure and mine became the same bright, unbearable thing.
The knot remained and the connection held. The moment extended past what I would have considered its natural end.
I came once more as the knot released, the last of the tension leaving in a controlled descent rather than a break. Her body continued to respond in smaller aftershocks, her thigh still hooked over my hip, her face turned against my throat.
Then, gradually, it eased.
* * *
She was asleep on my chest when the aide knocked on the door.
I had been awake for some time, but I had not moved.
The lines between us were warm and quiet in a way I had never felt before.
There were two lines now.
Hers sat beneath my skin where her teeth had closed over my shoulder: small, hot, impossibly steady. A returned claim. Private. Unwitnessed. No council record. No formal declaration.
Real anyway.
Catalina slept with her cheek against my chest, her hair across my arm, one hand over my ribs as if checking whether I intended to disappear.
I did not.
I had no intention of moving until she chose to wake.
The knock came again, softer this time.
The aide had walked this corridor every morning for weeks. She knew which door was Catalina’s. She knew the door had been locked from the inside since last night. She knew what that meant.
