Page 46 of Ward

Every time he drew back she felt how badly he wanted to drive into her and how hard he was holding it, felt the restraint from the inside like a hand clamped on the lid of a pot at a full boil, and that was what undid her.

Not the size of him.

The holding.

“Stop being careful,” she said into his neck. “I’m not the good plate. Use me like the cast iron.”

A rough sound tore out of him, and through the loop she felt the lid come off. He hooked a hand under her knee, opened her wider, and drove into her hard enough to push her up the bunk.

She cried out — yes, like that, yes — and felt her yes slam into him and come back as his, and the rhythm went ragged and deep and perfect.

The loop climbed. It didn’t reset; it reduced, richer each round, her pleasure feeding his feeding hers, gold light pulsing off his markings in time with every thrust.

She came apart again with her fingers knotted in his white hair and heard-felt him groan as it crashed through him too, and he fucked her through it and past it with the methodical devotion of a man who had found, at last, a formation worth holding.

“Say it,” she gasped, right at the edge of a third. “Say my name again.”

“Tisha.” Rough, reverent, wrecked. “Tisha. Tisha —”

That sent her over.

She clenched around him, and he felt it, and it took him with her.

He came with his face buried in her neck and his whole body locked, a long helpless shudder that poured through the loop into her like heat from a thrown-open oven door.

The markings flared bright enough to throw the shadows of her spice jars up the wall — eleven houses, four continents, one station — and the warm room went gold.

After, she lay collapsed on his chest listening to his heart slow, watching the markings bank down to embers.

Her grandmother of a cast-iron pan on its shelf bearing witness. The loop hummed on low, banked, neither of them reaching to raise the cuff. His contentment sat in her chest alongside her own, two pots on one stove.

“So,” she said, into his skin. “For the record. The compatibility summary flagged us for pace. Re-lee says we’re a slow riser. Like bread.”

A pause.

“She writes the conversation topics herself,” Aldric said, gravely, and Tisha laughed so hard she felt it hit him and rebound and set him off too — the first time she’d ever heard him laugh, deep and rusty, a door on old hinges finally moving — and the sound of it, doubled through the loop, was the single best thing she had ever made in any kitchen anywhere.

“Stay,” she said, when she could talk. “I make breakfast.”

“I know,” he said, into her hair, fever-warm, unhurried, home. “I’ve had thirty-one days of intelligence briefings on the subject.”

Chapter 15

Aldric

He made the comm from her quarters, which Falkin was going to notice in the first half-second, because Falkin noticed everything and had spent twenty years being insufferable about it.

Aldric found he did not care.

While the line crossed the void, he examined the feeling from the floor, his back against her bunk because her one chair was structurally sincere but optimistic.

The wall of photographs stood at his shoulder, and the plant observed him with what he had come to accept was custody. He concluded the not-caring was load-bearing now and let it stand.

Tisha was at the eighth-bell close, finishing service.

She was everywhere in the room: spice jars ranked like a well-run armory, the black iron pan on its shelf, eleven houses’ worth of kitchens looking down from four continents.

When he’d docked, the sum of his worldly décor had been a blade kit and an armor stand. He had, as of this week, a drawer here. She had cleared it without ceremony and announced it like a portion — “That one’s yours, don’t argue” — and he had stood before an empty drawer in a warm room, unable to speak for a measure of time he declined to log.