Page 30 of Ghost’s Awakening

I could smell him. Sweat, sharp and clean. The soap from that morning under it. The heat of him bleeding through every place we touched, his leg against mine, his side under my arm, the damp mat pressed to my shoulder.

We scrambled. I got on top for a second, my hand planted beside his head, my hips bearing his down into the mat. His face was under mine. Brown eyes looking up. I could see the sweat beaded at his temple, the last of the yellow bruise, the way his lips had parted because he was breathing through his mouth. My hips were flush to his. I could feel both our pulses hammering through the places we pressed together.

He bucked and reversed. In one motion he was over me, one forearm laid across my collarbone, his face directly above mine.

Inches.

His breath landed on my mouth. His weight settled on my hips, his forearm against my collarbone, and every channel in my head, every calculation, every rapid-fire read that kept my brain running every waking second of my life…

It all went quiet.

All of it. Gone. Like a hand had reached into my skull and pulled the plug clean out of the wall.

There was nothing left in me but his face. Six inches over mine. The sweat at his temple. The way his eyes moved, dropping off mine to somewhere lower, to my mouth, and back up again, and I felt his eyes land on my mouth and stay there.

His forearm shifted on my collarbone. The pressure changed. Past a pin now. Something else. The weight on my hips shifted too, the smallest movement, and the awareness that came behind it was so sharp and so sudden my breath caught, and I knew he heard it, because his jaw tightened and his eyes went dark and neither of us moved a muscle.

We were just there. On the mat. Breathing each other in.

The gym had gone silent. The clink of the weights and the buzz of the tubes overhead, all of it gone, and in its place sat the heavy quiet of a room full of people holding their breath at once.

Somebody cleared their throat.

Caleb blinked. The focus shattered. The room crashed back in, the light and the rubber stink and the buzz, and he shoved off me and was on his feet in a single motion, stepping back, hands dropping to his sides.

I sat up. The mat was damp where my back had been. My face was on fire. And my hands were shaking.

"Good round." My voice came out wrecked. I stood, knocked the mat dust off my shorts, and looked at nobody.

"Yeah." Caleb grabbed a towel off the bench and buried his face in it. Held it there a beat too long. "Good round."

I walked to the water station by the wall, grabbed a bottle, drank half of it because my mouth had gone to sand. I could feel the room at my back. The eyes. The conclusions being drawn.

Irish appeared beside me. Reached past for a bottle, his shoulder brushing mine. When I glanced at him the grin was gone, and what had taken its place was quieter. The same look Kai gave me years ago, standing over my bed in the med bay, when I'd cracked a joke about the scar and he'd stared at me with an expression I didn't understand until much later.

"Good round." Irish's voice had dropped to match the look. He popped the cap and drank. He didn't say another thing.

Across the gym, Caleb had the towel looped around his neck and was talking to Tank, his body angled away from me, his voice low and level and completely ordinary, like the last few seconds on that mat had been sparring and nothing else on earth.

Except the hand gripping the towel, his left, was clenched so tight the knuckles had gone white.

I looked away. Sat on a bench. Finished the water. Tried to boot up the dozen channels that had gone dark the instant his face was over mine.

They wouldn't come back. The only thing still running was his eyes looking down at me, the heat of his breath, the double pulse I'd felt where our bodies pressed, and the silence that had filled the gym to the rafters.

My knee was bouncing. I couldn't make it stop.

8

WIRE

CALEB

The mat was under my back and Ghost was over me and neither of us was fighting anymore.

The whole gym was there, exact, every detail my body had filed without permission. The buzz of the fluorescent tubes. Rubber and iron and sweat baked into concrete. The damp print my shoulders had left on the mat. His forearm lay across my collarbone, but the pressure had changed, from a pin into something with a question inside it, and his weight settled onto my hips like it had decided to stay.

Six inches. His face six inches over mine, sweat sliding from his temple down along the edge of his jaw, and those pale blue eyes so close I could see the darker ring around each iris. In the gym he'd looked like what he was, a man who put people on the ground for a living. Now that man drained out of his face and something else filled the space behind his eyes, younger and hungrier and aimed at nothing in the world but me.