Page 69 of White Lights
“Let’s get out of here,” he says, “before we both get hurt.”
He points at a server next to them. It rises fifty feet above their heads.
“Can you climb?” he says.
“You’re joking,” Dez says, looking around for other options. The only other servers near them lead down. Far down. A direction she’s not interested in going ever again. She inches away from the edge, swept by a sudden wave of vertigo. “Can’t you call someone, explain what happened? We didn’t do this on purpose—”
“You got yourself into this, Rae. Get yourself out.”
“I can’t climb that thing—”
“Then you’d better hold on,” Rafe says, and flexes.
“Give me a fucking break.”
“I did Everest in less than a day. This is cake.”
“When are you going to stop bragging—”
“When you put your thighs where your mouth is.”
“I don’t think you understand how to use ‘where your mouth is.’ Like, at all.”
“Hop on.” He slaps the back of his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
He turns his back to Dez and bends his knees. She can’t believe she’s going to do this, but she really doesn’t like this place. She sighs and flings her arms around his neck.
“Wrap your legs around me.”
When Dez follows his instructions, she’s amazed by how fluently their bodies fit together.
She breathes him in, feels the warmth of his neck against her cheek. His strong hand under her thighs.
He reaches above them, grabs a metal edge, and begins making his way up. For several, quiet minutes, Dez observes him moving slowly, sturdily upward, taking hold of gaps and toggles, and drawing his body upward, never breaking or disturbing the equipment. His traps flex and ripple, and he breathes steadily, audibly, in a way Dez can’t help finding erotic. Is this what he would sound like in bed? She holds fast to him, but finds her panicked grip relaxing, her body somehow trusting that he’ll get them out of here.
She stops worrying if Rafe can feel the heat from her essence radiating into his lower back. She decides she wants him to feel it, to know her desire. Slowly, she lets her hands descend across his torso, feeling his muscles, wanting to feel more.
After climbing for what feels like an hour, a surface overhead glows blue and gray.
“Is that—”
“The underside of your Lens,” Rafe says when her chest is level to it. “Hoist yourself up like you’re climbing out of a pool.”
Dez pulls herself onto the platform, highly aware of her ass. Onceshe is safely up, she collapses on the flat, familiar surface, her breath coming in gasps. She can see now that what she just climbed through is a large crack in the starry black border of her Lens’s platform. From above, it’s barely discernable to the naked eye, but wide enough for her to have fallen through.
Rafe drops onto the platform next to her and rolls onto his side. “You okay?”
“I’m not sure,” she admits. “That was very fucked up.”
He cracks a smile. “Wanna do it again?”
Dez gets to her feet. She touches the screen, now dim gray and missing her brother. She tries to replay her mistake, tries to understand how it happened.
“Why didn’t you warn me that could happen?” she asks.
“I didn’t know I’d need to. You have a rare gift for unprecedented catastrophe. I’ll have Zeke take a look at it, fix the crack.”
“How did you catch me? I was falling so fast.”
