Unbroken

“Yes,” I agreed softly, and licked my lips to savor his taste again. “I like many things about you.”

He groaned and stepped in closer, and my knees parted until he was pressed against me in a hot, solid line from chest to crotch. Beneath the thin cotton gown, I was bare, and he knew it; I could feel the tension gathering inside him, coiling down deep, and his erection was an obvious pressure against me. “Shit,” he whispered, and brushed my lips with his. “I wasn’t exactly planning on this. There’s no privacy here, you know. And you’re not healed enough to—”

“I decide whether I’m healed enough,” I said. The minor aches and pains had fallen away, driven back by the adrenaline and sweet, anxious need that was forming inside me. “As for privacy, the door does lock. And we take our pleasures now, or risk never having them again. What would you want?”

He groaned and kissed me again, and I distinctly heard the metallic sound of the lock engaging on the door. Then the steel-framed chair that Orwell had used slid across the floor and slammed at an angle under the handle. “Just in case,” he murmured, and I felt his fingers pulling at the ties on my hospital gown. “Mmmm, easy open. Very nice.”

For answer, I used a tiny burst of Earth power to part the zipper of his jeans as I slid the leather of his belt out of the buckle. I paused then, suddenly struck by a new, odd thing: my left hand.

It was working.

I opened and closed my fist, watching the fingers bend, the hand itself curl; apart from the metallic shine to it, it felt and looked just as my right hand did. There was no sign of the damage that I’d suffered on the road from the Djinn attack.

“Did you…?” I asked.

Luis shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “I’m not that good. Orwell fixed you up. Said he needed you fully functional.”

“Well,” I said, and smiled as I eased his pants down, taking my time with the job. “I assure you, I am fully functional. And that’s of benefit to you.”

He gasped aloud as that metallic hand touched, stroked, played, and then he buried his head in the hollow of my neck to kiss, nibble, bite gently at areas that made me shiver and arch against him. “Hope the brakes are good on this bed,” he said, and made me laugh. I hadn’t thought I’d ever laugh again, but the vision of the two of us madly entwined on this bed as it rolled through the hallway, Wardens stopping to gawk… “Stop laughing,” he scolded me, but I heard the tremble of it in his voice, too. “You’re screwing up my concentration.”

I made him gasp aloud, again, from what I was doing with both hands now. “Am I? Because it seems your concentration is quite… firm.”

“Oh, now you’re teasing?” His voice had turned ragged, dark around the edges, and I let him lift me up and back onto the bed. My gown drifted to the floor, and somehow the sheet joined it as he kicked off his jeans, stripped away his sleeveless shirt, and knelt in the open space between my legs. “I can tease, too. Payback.”

He could, it seemed. The teasing involved hands, mouths, sweetly torturous control that made me bite my lips and beg him for release. When he finally gave in, when he was inside me, instinct and a desperate need took hold of me, and no matter how he tried to slow it down, I wasn’t in the mood for leisurely lovemaking. Not this time. There was too much darkness to dispel, too much desperation, too little time left. He surrendered to me as much as I did to him, both of us lost in the fury and fire and urgency of it, and when he came he shuddered deep, holding me upright and close, and seeing the ecstasy take him triggered something wild in me as well, something that burst up from our joined bodies and spun us both crazily out of control, up into the highest reaches I’d ever climbed on the aetheric, and then drifted us down again like falling leaves to settle once again in our human, mortal, beautiful forms.

Luis collapsed against me, only just managing to hold his weight off at the last minute by resting it on his elbows. We were both covered in sweat, tasting it on each other’s lips, and the glow between us lingered. Neither of us wanted to move, and it wasn’t until the door rattled that he finally stopped kissing me in drowsy, gentle presses of lips, and sighed. The frustrated groan that followed came from the very depths of him, and I felt it resonating in my own body.

“Welcome back,” he said, and laughed a little despairingly. “Now it’s time to go. God, Cass. If I’d lost you…”

I touched my lips to his in wordless reassurance. “You didn’t,” I said. “And you won’t.”

There was another impatient rattle at the door, and then a knock—tentative at first, then growing louder.

“We should probably—”

“Yes,” I agreed, and kissed him again. “We should.” Neither of us was in a hurry to answer the summons— and then, unexpectedly, the lock snapped back.

“Crap,” Luis said.

There was an Earth Warden on the other side of that door; Luis’s forethought in adding the bracing chair had paid off, because that stopped them from barging in—for a moment.

“Hand me my gown,” I said.

He kissed me again, fast, and slid off to grab my gown, drape it over me, and then step into his underwear and jeans in a fast, expert motion. He was just zipping up when the chair clattered away from its locking position at the door, and it banged open.

Luis didn’t pause. He picked up the sheet from the floor and put it back over me, winked, and turned to face the person standing in the doorway.

It was Isabel. Next to her, Esmeralda’s human torso swayed on top of her snaky, muscular body. She crossed her arms over the tight, pink shirt she wore (embellished with the glittering words BITCH QUEEN) and looked down at Isabel, who had frozen, looking taken aback.

“See?” Esmeralda said. “Told you there was nothing wrong. They were just totally doing it.”

Luis got his shirt from where it dangled at the end of the bed and pulled it over his head. “Girls,” he said in a bland voice. “What’s the emergency?”“Um…” Isabel’s cheeks were beet red, and she couldn’t seem to look directly at either of us. “Nothing. It can wait. I just—I just wanted to see how she was doing. When the door was locked, I thought—”

“I told you,” Esmeralda said in a bored voice, and checked the finish on her fingernails. “Doing it.”

“Shut up!” Isabel whispered fiercely. “God!”

“Thank you for coming to see me,” I said, and was very careful about where and how the sheet draped over me. “I’m sorry the timing was… awkward. I’m much better.”

Esmeralda coughed and muttered something under her breath; that earned a solid backhanded smack from Iz, whose blush worsened, if that was possible. “Uh—okay then, I—” Esmeralda was grinning at her now. “I just— shut up!—I’ll come back later.” She turned and left, head high, struggling to hold to her damaged dignity, and Esmeralda broke into outright guffaws of laughter.

“Oh my God, did you see her face? The two of you are so busted,” she said. “Get a room. Somewhere else.”

“Es,” Luis said. “Beat it. I mean it. And lay off the kid. She’s six-going-on-fifteen.”

Esmeralda stuck her tongue out at him—and showed fangs at the same time—but she slithered off down the hallway, petulantly knocking over a cart along the way. Luis shook his head.

“I think we just scarred that kid for life,” he said. “She’ll never look at us the same again.”

“She knew we were lovers.”

“There’s a big difference between knowing and walking in on it,” he said.

“So you regret it?”

He turned toward me, and his slow, intimate smile warmed me from within. “Not for a damn second,” he said. “I wish we had a thousand hours just like it.”

But we didn’t, and hearing it aloud brought it home to both of us. The smiles and warmth faded. Luis cleared his throat, took a step toward the door, and said, “I’m going to go find out where he’s sending us. You okay on your own to get cleaned up?”

“Yes,” I said. As he shut the door, I threw back the sheet and gown and got out of bed. With the recession of all the complicated hormonal cocktails that had given me such a burst of… enthusiasm, I was left feeling weak, shaky, and even more bruised, though still oddly elated. The elation faded as I stood in the shower and scrubbed myself with the crisp-scented soap, and I was left feeling thoughtful instead. Lewis Orwell had seemed almost…