Patchwork

by Elle E. Ire

  “Mmm….” It’s practically a purr. Her eyes glide shut.

  “Uh-uh,” I warn, rapping once, lightly, on her skull for emphasis. “Eye contact. Look at me. No drifting away. You’re here. Now. With me. No one else. Nowhere else.”

  She snaps to full alertness, message received. If she drifts, she remembers. If she remembers, I lose her. I hate that I can’t let her relax too much, but if this works, she’ll forgive me.

  Vick clears her throat. “I’m with you,” she says, hoarseness betraying the weight of her emotions.

  “Good.” Fingers still buried in her hair, pressed to her scalp, I reach for the orange of bitterness and anger. These threads are harder, knotted and twisted into her psyche, but I work them apart with my mind, one by one. When I’ve pulled away more than half, I let one hand drop down between us, running over her shoulder, her collarbone, until my palm presses her right breast through her uniform shirt. I find the hardness of her nipple, straining the fabric of her bra and the button-down both, and scrape my nails lightly across it, back and forth until she groans with the pleasure. The rest of the orange knot falls away, fading to nothingness.

  Pausing in her emotional purge, I unfasten the buttons on her shirt one at a time, checking after each that she’s with me and in agreement with my actions. Her breathing picks up pace. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips. She nods her consent.

  My fingers tremble with the need to move faster, but if I startle her now, I’ll have destroyed the tentative trust I’ve built. Moving with slow deliberation, I work her shirt free from her belted trousers. It takes a bit of tugging, and the abrupt jerk of the motion startles her enough that her hands grip the armrests.

  “Breathe, Vick. Breathe.”

  She takes a slow, unsteady breath. Not so good.

  “You’re okay,” I soothe. “I’m here. I’m here for you.” A pause until I’m certain she’s listening and not lost. “I love you.” My palms slip beneath her shirt, resting upon hot, taut abdominal muscles, letting her feel every bit of the love I have through our connection.

  Her expression goes completely focused and serious. A moment of self-doubt trickles through me at the intensity, then, “I love you too. I would have… before… no matter how many others came and went until we met. After you, there would have been no one else.”

  Chapter 17: Vick—Almost Home

  I AM… so near and yet so far.

  Yeah, that was mushy. Especially for me. I’m not one for pretty words. If I string more than one sentence together at a time, that’s a lot, and if it has to do with romance or feelings, well, it’s a good thing Kelly can read me, because otherwise she’d never know how I feel.

  I’ve gotten both better and worse about it the longer I’ve known her. On the one hand, it’s easier to express myself when hiding is pointless. For the most part, unless the implants have me completely shut down, she knows what I’m feeling. On the other hand, sometimes I take it for granted and say nothing.

  I forget that she needs to hear the words. That she needs for me to accept and confirm what I feel out loud rather than just sensing my emotions through our bond.

  I’m glad I remember that here and now.

  Her eyes light up at what I’m saying. I can’t believe the words are leaving my lips, but they are true, every one of them, and she feels the truth of each syllable.

  “Oh, Vick,” Kelly breathes. A single tear trickles down her cheek.

  I resist the urge to brush it away. She needs this release too.

  With my shirt open and untucked, she has full access to my bra-covered breasts. Her hands trail up my sides, over my rib cage, raising goose bumps in their wake until she reaches the front closure on the undergarment, and damn am I glad I selected that particular one today. I’d been going for ease on my injured arm, rather than quick clothing removal, but it works for both purposes. The pop of the plastic fastener is barely audible over the hum of the yacht’s engines. I can’t hold back a sigh of relief as Kelly leans me forward, then slips the shirt and bra over my shoulders and tosses both to the deckplates to join my hair tie somewhere. Cool, recirculated air blows from the overhead vents and hardens my nipples further, to an almost painful stiffness.

  I’m not large-breasted. I’m probably a little smaller than average. But Kelly’s gaze zeros in on them. She again checks my face for consent; then, at my nod, she lowers her lips to my left breast and sucks the nipple between them while her left hand cups my other one, her thumb teasing, palm massaging.

  Her free hand slips up my arm, careful around the bandages protecting my healing wounds, and back into my hair, reinitiating the bond between us.

  I can’t see emotions the way she does, though occasionally, when we’re really in synch, I detect a faint haze of color around her, which she thinks is a transference of her own sight to me through the connection. However, I know when she’s pulling my feelings apart. Confusion becomes clarity. I understand my actions and reactions and can put names to the causes—pain, fear, anxiety, frustration—whereas the rest of the time I’m flying half-blind, guessing at what ails me.

  She sucks hard on my nipple and I gasp at the pleasure… until my memory flashes on images of the Sunfire soldiers in the Alpha Dog, overlaid with silhouettes of Dr. Peg Alkins’s shapely yet intimidating figure.

  What the actual fuck?

  Why would I be combining these two images? They have nothing in common. Nothing except me.

  No. I need an emotional connection. What emotion connects these two pieces of my patchwork life?

  The rolling of Kelly’s thumb and forefinger over my nipple, along with the insistent pressure of her tongue on the other one, suddenly switch from pleasurable to pain. I flash on early sexual encounters with Alkins, when she became a little overzealous with her nails and teeth, “accidentally” leaving scratches and bite marks in her enthusiasm, then apologizing profusely until I forgave her. So many clues as to her real desires. So many missed signals.

  There’s a tearing sound as a third image invades my brain—Rodwell ripping at my uniform, grasping at my breasts through the ragged openings while I hang helpless by my tied wrists. He’s rough and demanding, squeezing until my body jerks and twists in desperation to get away. I hate him. I hate myself. I hate—

  Guilt.

  It’s guilt.

  Intellectually, I know what Rodwell did to me isn’t my fault, my failing, but I’ve never been able to convince my conscious mind of that. I also haven’t told Kelly the real reason Alkins and I split up. She needs to know. She can’t help me if she doesn’t know whatever I can remember to tell her. And then there’s the fact that the Sunfires weren’t just brawling with the Storm in that pub. They were specifically after me. My whole team needs that information. I haven’t told them and I should have, but I was so distracted by everything else….

  My chest constricts. I can’t get a deep breath. My nails dig into the pilot chair’s armrests.

  “Vick! Vick, open your eyes. Look at me. Right now. Look at me!”

  Pilot chair. Armrests. Space yacht.

  Kelly.

  My eyelids snap upward, and I jerk my head back, away from the face much, much too close to mine. My head bangs against the headrest. For a few seconds, the cockpit is a blur of fuzzy images and intense pain, my concussion reasserting itself through the haze of drugs. Slowly, slowly, bits and pieces come into focus.

  “Sorry,” I grind out, hoarse and strained. I swallow once, twice. “I’m sorry.” I blink away the stars flickering in my vision.

  Kelly bites her lower lip, her expression full of concern. “No, I’m sorry. I lost you. I broke eye contact when I….” A fierce blush creeps into her cheeks as she gestures vaguely at my exposed chest. “But there was so much guilt, and I was distracted by that and what I was doing to you.” The blush deepens. Fucking adorable.

  I take a slow breath and let it out. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s not like I want you to stop doing things like that to me. It
was good.” I take another breath. My smile is sheepish and I suspect she’s not the only one blushing. “Really good. I just need to remember to keep my eyes open. Shouldn’t be too much of a hardship. Watching what you’re doing will probably act as a turn-on.”

  “Yes,” she agrees with a wicked smile. “Probably.” She lowers her head again, then hesitates. “What are you feeling so guilty about? Alkins? If you want to keep that private, I won’t like it, but I can deal with it. You don’t need to feel guilty. I knew you’d had other relationships before me. I hadn’t expected to come quite so face-to-face with one, but I knew.”

  I sigh. I should tell her… something. I’m not quite ready to reveal all three of my sources of shame, but she’s expecting an answer to her question whether she says I can keep it to myself or not. Which one?

  “The Sunfires are after me,” I blurt out. I grimace. It’s not what she’s looking for. But she can’t see my expression with her head down, and she knows I’m telling the truth through our bond.

  To my surprise, she doesn’t glance up, but rather returns her attention to other things, fingers working at my belt, then the fasteners on my uniform trousers. “Keep talking,” she says.

  “The attack in the Alpha Dog,” I say, pausing to gasp when she breathes warm and heavily over the exposed portion of my underwear. “It was targeted. At me. The Storm soldiers who died in there. That’s my fault.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Her voice is strained, maybe with concern, maybe with concentration. I can’t be sure. “You didn’t kill them. Why do they want you?”

  Even without contact with my head, she’s reinitiated the connection between us. The guilt falls away in incremental strands. Or perhaps it’s just the natural result of letting this information go.

  “Not me so much,” I answer. She presses lower. My dampness soaks into the fabric of my panties, making them cling in uncomfortable yet tantalizing ways. My breath hitches on my next intake of air. “They want… the technology.”

  Kelly wriggles backward on my lap, to my knees, until she’s balanced precariously on the edges of them, then leans over and braces herself with one hand on my shoulder. She slips her whole other hand down the front of my pants, cupping my sex, applying insistent, intermittent pressure. My thoughts blank as the pleasure takes over.

  “The Storm already told them it’s no longer for sale,” she says. “We warned them. The… side effects are too severe.”

  Side effects. Yeah. Understatement of the century. “They don’t care. Or they don’t believe us. Regardless, they want me to give up my secrets, like that’s even an option, or to experiment on me at their leisure.” I can’t tell them what they want to know. I literally can’t. The safeguards built into VC1 prevent me from revealing anything about the implants, even under the most excruciating torture. I can only talk about them with people who already know.

  Kelly shifts her hand, using two fingers to press the undergarment fabric inside me, just a little, then rub it in and out, creating a delicious friction. Of their own volition, my hips squirm on the pilot’s seat. “Mmm,” she murmurs. Then in the same soft tone, “None of that is your fault. The Storm did what they did to you without your knowledge.”

  Well, yes, I was legally dead at the time.

  “The technology is valuable and dangerous. If it weren’t inside you, if it were a separate thing and the Sunfires tried to steal it, don’t you think the Storm would send personnel to get it back?” She continues to work her fingers, covered in rough, wet cotton, in and out of me, in and out.

  My hips buck a bit harder. “I suppose,” I manage, letting my hands leave the armrests and wrap around her rib cage, drawing her in closer. I need skin contact, both with my hands and with my body. It doesn’t take much effort to slip her satiny pink top from the hem of her short white skirt. My palms glide over her ribs, settling just above her hipbones.

  “Eyes open, Vick,” she reminds me.

  I snap my lids up, not even realizing they’d started to close. “Right.”

  “And don’t you think it’s possible,” Kelly continues, thrusting a little harder and a little deeper with her fingers until I’m writhing, “that some soldiers might get hurt, even killed, in the process of retrieving or protecting that technology?”

  “I don’t—”

  She uses the next lift of my hips to pause, slipping from me and climbing off my lap. Using both hands, she eases my pants and underwear down to my boots. I groan at the delay, my arousal higher than it’s been in months, but forgive her when she strips off her own skirt, top, and bra, leaving the white-lace-covered triangle between her legs and revealing the damp patch darkening the fabric there.

  “No ‘don’ts,’” she scolds. “They would, and you know it.”

  My eyes track her every move as she kneels before me, unfastens my boots, and tosses them to land with a pair of thuds on the deckplates. My pants and underwear quickly follow.

  “How is any of that your fault?” she finishes, parting my thighs wide and placing her body between them. Her hot breath falls on me, making me tremble. “Come here.”

  I work my way to the edge of the seat. My pulse races.

  “Say it, Vick. It isn’t your fault.”

  “I—”

  Kelly rocks back on her heels and stares up at me, waiting.

  Fuck.

  “It’s not my fault,” I grind out.

  She tilts her head to one side, looking at me and through me. “Now mean it.”

  “Oh for the love of— Fine.” I pause a moment, sorting through everything that happened in the Alpha Dog and weighing my guilt against her words. I never asked for this, any of this. And she’s right. The Storm would sacrifice as many as it took to protect technology as valuable as what’s in my head.

  The last knots of that particular guilt release, falling away like melted ice thrown on a heated stove.

  Which pretty much sums up how the rest of me feels right now.

  “It’s not my fault,” I repeat, and this time, it’s true.

  Kelly’s smile lights up the cockpit. “Good. Now, let’s see if we can’t deal with the last of your emotional buildup.”

  I groan, wondering what other delay she’s going to put me through, but she leans in, reaching forward to separate my folds.

  “Time to release that sexual frustration,” she whispers and lowers her mouth between my legs.

  Chapter 18: Kelly—Aftershocks

  VICK IS… better than she was.

  It’s been a long time, but I remember what Vick likes, and I flick my tongue from side to side over her clitoris, holding her as still as I’m able with my palms against her knees. It’s quite the challenge with her hips shifting in rhythmless, involuntary movements, but for the moment, I have her under my control, my empathic talent wide open and ready to detect any change in her emotional state from pleasure to something less positive. After a particularly strong gasp from her, I cast a quick glance upward to make certain she’s still got her eyes open.

  They are, and they’re watching my every move. It’s quite a turn-on, and I stifle a gasp of my own at the sheer amount of need in her gaze.

  Although I sense she’s holding out on me with regard to the whole guilt thing, the intensity of the negative emotion has decreased enough that I’m willing to let it sit for now. Her heated skin and the wetness I find when I dip my tongue inside her tell me I’ve teased her into a state of near frenzy, not to mention the lust I’m reading through our bond, which has me almost as hot as she is.

  “I think… I think I need you to stay outside from here,” she pants, offering an apologetic look.

  Rodwell did horrible things to Vick. She told me some, but not all of it. I understand what’s behind her request. My nod moves my tongue up and down, making her gasp, then moan. I take that as the encouragement it’s meant to be and repeat the motion, speeding up my efforts until her thigh muscles clench beneath my hands and her fingers dig into my shoulders.


  “Kel—”

  Whatever she intended to say is lost to a cascade of pleasure so intense it takes me right along with it. My hips thrust against her while she goes rigid, trembling with the release. Before she can come down completely, I crawl to kneel by her side, slipping my hand between her legs to stroke her fast and hard. She leans over and her mouth finds mine, muffling her near scream, while her eyes go wide.

  Her back arches. She reaches her peak a second time, then flops bonelessly back into the chair, breaking lip contact so that she can attempt to catch her breath. I rest my head against her hip, heart racing, pulse pounding, not certain if the relief I feel is mine or hers or both.

  When she calms, I look up, startled to see tears streaking both her cheeks. Stretching out with my gift, I recognize them as a product of being emotionally overwhelmed, but it doesn’t make them any less startling.

  “You okay?” I whisper, not wanting to break the quiet moment.

  “I think so,” she says. Her hand shakes when she reaches to brush strands of hair from my face. “Thank you.”

  “You are very welcome. I don’t think you’re fully healed,” I caution, sensing something building in her emotional makeup. “But you’re capable of it.” I can’t quite identify the newcomer to her psyche, but it suggests while this was a step toward recovery, we may have a long way to go.

  She nods, solemn, then spends the next hour or so showing me how very grateful she is. When we’re finished, I’m wrung out, muscles weak, body begging for extended rest.

  Vick double-checks that VC1 has firm control over the luxury shuttle. Then she leads the way aft through the small lounge area and into the smaller galley where she makes quick work of heating up a couple of mugs of soup—cream of mushroom for me, beef and barley for herself. Cupping our hands around the warm mugs, we carry them into the far aft sleeping area.