She lifted one sensor from the remaining tray and turned back to him, meeting eyes that were dark and desperate. His agitation made her own hands shake.
“Calm down.” She rested her palm on his forearm, her whole body softening with the peace sent swirling through them both.
God, if she’d known how physical this link would be…
He exhaled deeply at her touch and stilled his leg, looking up at her with trust she didn’t deserve. She attached the sensor to his temple, following it with another on the opposite side of his head and a third behind his ear, right over the pentacle tattooed on his skin and next to the LED that reminded her of what and who he was. As if she could forget. She was about to lift her hand from his arm when his fingers wrapped around hers.
She saw how the sensation of skin on skin soothed his nerves, and she closed her eyes for a second.
“Please,” he asked. “Let me touch you.”
She sucked in a wavering breath and opened her eyes. It was so hard to deny him. To deny them both. “Okay. For now.”
Manipulating the diagnostic equipment with only one hand wasn’t easy, but she managed all the same. Right up until she twisted and the ache in her shoulder flared. It was mostly healed now, but—
“Here.” He let her hand go and snuck his own up under the waistband of her scrubs to rest against the bare skin of her lower back. Turned her around so there wasn’t any strain on the wound. Against the curve of her spine, his fingers flexed.
His palm was so warm, his touch arousing in a way she didn’t know how to process. She stuttered in her movements as she drew her arm back and braced herself with the heel of her palm on the edge of the lab table. Only once the rush of heat radiating from where his skin pressed to hers faded did she manage to refocus herself fully on the data streaming in.
And then his touch didn’t distract her anymore.
Aurelia had spent her life studying the connections between man and machine, the interfaces between cerebral cortexes and the wiring humanity had begun to lay there to expand the brain. To make it more. She had seen the damage done over the course of long-term control and repression. But never, ever, had she seen anything like this.
There were the scorch marks and burnt tissue that always resulted from wiping an initiate’s former life, but that was only the beginning of it. The degradation from the failing link was impossibly, unimaginably vast. Whole systems were threadbare, the cells atrophied to the point of near destruction around the networks of implanted circuitry. And yet, for every cluster of neurons the connection had destroyed, there were other parts of him that had flourished. All across his brain, there were pieces of himself that had grown back, rerouting past the broken patches and creating whole new conduits. New connections to lost memories. To emotions. To touch.
She staggered backward, pulling herself from his embrace to settle on a stool beside his. He reached out for her, but she shook her head, eyes riveted to the screen.
The effect of losing contact was immediate. The current of information moving through his system bottlenecked, unable to reroute itself through the portions of his brain that had detoured through his tactile senses. Everything still functioned, but when she’d linked them, she’d created a new pathway, one that allowed him to use the secondary systems his brain had built to try to compensate for the parts of his grid that had been failing.
She only watched for a few more silent seconds before rising. With shaking hands, she pulled the electrodes from his skin and attached them to her own.
She’d never been bent to fit to the will of a Three—had never been subjected to the long-term deterioration that kind of connection engendered. Hell, she’d only been tethered to him for a day.
But there were new pathways wending their way through her system. New nerves blending thought and touch.
She stood there, staring blankly, hearing the way he was calling her name, both aloud and in her mind, but not listening. He laid his fingers on her arm and the display lit up in direct correspondence to the easing in her mind, the exponential growth in the clarity of her thoughts. She pulled the sensors from her temples and neck and set them down, then dragged the other stool over so she could sit without losing contact with his skin.
“It’s changed you,” he said, voice even. It wasn’t a question.
“It’s changed both of us.”
“But mostly you. I was already…” Damaged. The word lit across his mind and hers in synchronicity.
She shook her head. “The human brain was never meant to withstand the kind of connection you were subjected to. Especially not for years. That you survived at all… The way your brain adapted. It’s nothing short of a miracle.” Craning her head to the side, she gazed into those dark, beautiful eyes. “You’re a miracle.”
And he was.
He reached out and ran the back of his knuckle down her cheek. “What do you need to do?”
Stalling for a moment, she looked away. At her hands, at the floor. At anything.
“Sever you.”
The only sound in the room was their breathing, then there was his hand on her face, pulling her back toward him, all black eyes and a mouth set in the most bitter of disappointments, thoughts of loss and a failure to understand. “Aurelia—”
She shook her head. “Even if for no other reason—” And there were so many reasons. “They can take you. Until I do a full sever, they can still take you back.” She finally looked at him. Really looked at him, not hiding anything. Especially not her terror for him. “Is that what you want? To go back to them? To that life? To lose everything you’ve gained?”
“Never.” His gaze was fierce, his jaw set. “I’ll never go back. Not while I still have breath.”
“You may have breath but no choice. As long as the connections are still there, you’re vulnerable.”
He studied her hard, and she could feel the probing in her mind, could see the changing in his thoughts. A low ripple of hurt became a wave, threatening to surge.
“Is that really all?” he asked.
How could she explain to him the swirling pit of reasons in her mind? In the end, all she could say was, “It’s the right thing to do.”
“But it’s not what I want.” His tone was quiet but strained, the pleading lying just beneath the surface. “Don’t I get a choice?”
She wanted to laugh and she wanted to cry. Didn’t he see that his chance to choose was what she was trying so hard to preserve?
All at once, her emotions boiled over, the dams she’d placed around all her conflict bursting as she stood, tearing herself from him and from his touch. With her fists curling tight, she rounded on him. “That’s exactly the point! Of course you should.” The treacherous harbingers of tears stung the edges of her eyes. “You should get to choose whatever you want. You should get to know what you’re choosing from. Don’t you see?” Throwing her arms wide, gesturing at the room as if it encompassed the world as a whole, she felt her throat pinch as her voice spiraled higher. “You should get to make your choice after you’ve seen all your options. After you’ve walked the world as your own man. Met other people. Other women. Other—”
Her words failing her, she brought one hand up to her mouth, the knuckle pressed tight to her lip. She turned a quarter-step away from him, unable to look at him with the way she was shaking inside.
When he spoke, it was simple. Devastating. Decisive. “I want you.”
She forced in a shuddering inhale and closed her eyes. “And shouldn’t I get to choose, too?”
A single, staccato note of pain rang out across their link before his mind went purposefully blank. She looked back at the room with an unseeing, blurred gaze. But not at him.
“You don’t want to be bound to me.”
She shook her head but still kept her gaze trained away. “I don’t want you to realize in three years that y
ou don’t want to be bound to me.”
The image rose up, unbidden and unwanted, of a male figure in silhouette against the door that he would exit through. The day Peter had revealed his betrayal, he’d looked at her like she was nothing and no one. He hadn’t wanted to be bound to her either, and yet he’d suffered through it until he’d gotten what he wanted. And then he hadn’t had to suffer through it anymore.
The silence hung in the air around them, lingering until Aurelia felt like she had to say something. Only she didn’t know what it would be. She’d told Jinx everything she needed to. He’d told her his truth, too. She just wished she could believe it.
Finally, the scrape of his chair on the tile rang out through the space as he pushed back, clothes rustling as he stood.
“All right.”
She whipped her head around, disbelieving, but the expression on his face was all earnestness. The corners of his eyes were sad.
“All right?” she asked.
“All right.” His shoulders squared, and he drew his chin up. His posture was still open, though, his palms turned out as if, in spite of his acquiescence, he was just waiting for her to take hold of them once more. He nodded and trained his gaze on hers. “If that’s what I need to do to prove it to you. Then do what you need to do.”
Chapter Twelve
For the third time, Jinx turned his gun over in his hands.
Aurelia had spent the rest of the morning bent over various lab tables, her nose glued to one computer screen or another. Even though she’d seemed ready to operate on him earlier, when it had come down to it, she’d begged off for a few more hours, saying the diagnostics had revealed new complications for which she needed to prepare.
That had been fine with Jinx. He’d withdrawn, heart heavy, certain he’d need the time to prepare himself for what she was determined to do, but the resignation of it all had set in quickly. The instant he’d recognized what was really going on—that to win her, he had to let her go—he’d given in to it.
And so he’d been left at loose ends.
There were no directives from Spellcaster to see to, none of the chores that made up his daily life with his Three. The inactivity combined with his increasing impatience to have the sever done with had him pacing the narrow space, feeling caged in and uneasy. Too confused now to reach out and touch her, he could only spend so much time watching her before the longing for her skin became too much. He’d needed something to do. Not that there was much he was good for in a place like this.
Eventually, he’d settled into his milieu, a dark, silent laugh choking his chest as he cleaned his weapons and inventoried hers. Death. That was his natural domain. Not intimacy. Not the pounding in his pulse when he looked at her or remembered what she felt like in his arms.
Catching himself staring at her again, he refocused his gaze on the steel in his hands. The gun was plenty clean, the mechanism smooth and the chambers full. His instinct was to holster it, but that was just another thing that wasn’t right. He was still dressed in the scrubs she had given him as he waited for his own clothes to come out of the wash. The flimsy fabric was comfortable enough, but he was itching for sturdier stuff, for belt loops and hidden pockets to lodge weapons into.
If nothing else, he was wearing his boots again. It was good to have that solidity beneath his feet, that feel of a blade against the inside of his calf. It made him feel a little bit more like himself.
In a practiced motion, he clicked the gun’s safety into place. With nowhere to put it, he set it down beside him, but it left an itchy feeling under his skin. He should have a weapon on him, always. Especially now. He had Aurelia to think about. To protect. Even if he might not have her for much longer.
In a moment of weakness, he gave in and let his gaze flit to the other side of the room. The swell of longing rose in his chest. Groaning, he ran his hand through his hair. Aurelia still showed no signs of being ready. And if she didn’t get into his head soon, he was going to go out of it.
It wasn’t just the tight quarters or the dark or the suffocating boredom. It wasn’t even his grim sense of resignation about what she was about to do. It was this limbo. This torture of being close but not quite close enough. He’d spent so much of his life connected to and surrounded by people but unable to say what he wanted to. Never alone but lonely. He was tired of it.
At least with Curse and Charm, he’d known where he stood. He’d known what would happen the next day and the next, and hopeless as it had been, it had been simple. Nothing was simple now.
Nothing except how he felt about Aurelia. Nothing but the way she made him feel about himself.
But she didn’t want that.
He looked up at her again. She had her lip between her teeth as she performed some sort of calculation in her head, gaze trained on a little black screen. Loose fabric hid her curves from him, but he knew them now, knew how they felt against his skin. Would he remember that? After?
They’d both been playing their hands close to their chests since the minute he’d given her permission to do this thing. Cut off from her thoughts, his were riddled with doubt. For all her insistence that she needed to set him free, there was a part of her that wasn’t so sure. Would she miss this? Would she miss him? Those soft moments when just a touch of a hand on skin made everything clear? The harder ones when he was deep inside her and the world gave way, leaving nothing but him and her, minds and bodies melting, one into another?
The deep pang of memory lit a fire inside of him, rekindling the blaze from the low spark that never really went away. He was so keyed in to her, so intensely aware of her body and her heat, even when he tried with all his willpower not to be. It hurt to think that he wouldn’t be. Not for much longer.
Before he fully knew was he was doing, he was on his feet. There’d been no conscious decision to show his mind to her, but in the same instant, she looked up from her work, her face flushed and eyes dilated. All around the guarded edges of her thoughts, there was the same low crackle of need as she set her tablet aside and rose.
“Are you ready?” he asked. He was talking about the procedure, of course. But the deep grit in his voice betrayed that he was talking about so much more.
She nodded, her throat bobbing with the force of her swallow. “We should do it now.”
“Right.”
He crossed the room in a half-dozen strides, and then his hands were on her skin, sneaking their way beneath the hem of her top and circling her waist. All the tension in his mind faded away, replaced just as quickly with a coiling in his abdomen. A rush of blood to his cock.
“I’ll just need—” She stumbled back but didn’t remove herself from his grasp. Not completely. Gesturing absently at the trays of scalpels and wires and solder, she opened her mouth and closed it again.
He wasn’t hearing anything.
“I need.” His lungs burned, his grip tightening and his head floating. There were so many things he needed, but there was one he thought he could have. If only he could ask. He squeezed his eyes shut before opening them again. Before opening his mind to show her all the desires simmering just beneath the surface of his skin.
There was a swirl of want and reluctance swimming under hers as well, and she shook her head even as she leaned into him, her hand on his chest, fingers clutching at his wrist. “Jinx—”
“Once more.”
He darted his gaze to the bed he’d held her in the night before, and his resolve strengthened in the same breath that her body went soft and pliant against his.
He didn’t know much about sex or about this twisted mess of feeling scorching his insides to ash. But he knew you were supposed to do things a certain way. You weren’t supposed to take your lover in a frantic pile of limbs and ache on the forest floor or up against a wall. It was supposed to be in a bed. Naked.
And if he only got to do this one more time, he was g
oing to do it right.
It took Aurelia all of three seconds to catch up to Jinx. Any thoughts of surgical severing or of putting distance between them evaporated in the wake of the sheer sexual energy he was putting out, her head spinning at the sudden change in the temperature of the air and of her thoughts. She gave in and gave herself over, clinging to him with as much need as he did her.
And it didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense, this pull to join with him. After years devoid of contact or passion, coupling twice in one day should have left her sore and sated, but it had only awoken the hunger. She felt no pain, no lingering satisfaction beyond those blessed moments of release. All she felt was the low throb, brought back to a sharp keening inside her with just a thought.
Maybe that was why she shifted gears so easily. Because the sex had never really stopped. It had only simmered down, and with the lightest of stoking it rose right back to a boil.
In one smooth motion, he lifted her off her feet and into his arms, his mouth crashing down onto hers once more. Tasting his lips and tongue, she wrapped her legs around his waist and held on tight. Each time they’d come together like this, it had been with an urgency that overwhelmed her senses and narrowed the world down to only his skin and touch. But there was more now. In both of them and in their intertwining minds, there was a finality.
A clutching and a cleaving together in preparation for letting go.
Sinking deep into his kiss and into his mind, she was dimly aware of movement and of her back hitting the surface of their mattress, of warm, large hands pushing cotton from her hips. She moved with him, slipping from the barrier of her clothes until she was naked beneath him and then doing the same to him. With every breath and every inch of flesh revealed, she felt like she was freed. Like she was whole. She took one glance down the bare length of his body then opened her legs and closed her eyes, desperate for the peace and pleasure she would find with him inside.
The moment hung, crystalline and vibrating, his heat searing into her through the air between them, the only contact that of his palm against her knee. But then, instead of her flesh parting around the hardness of his body, there was only softness. Lips. Tongue.
Through the Static Page 10