Page 25 of Fought and Found

The contact is a detonation.

My forehead against the nape of his neck, and the fuzz there is dense and impossibly soft, and his warmth hits me through the shirt, through every thin layer between his skin and mine, and my body goes liquid with it. Ten years of sleeping cold. Ten years of solo bunks and empty co-pilot chairs and nights where the only warmth was the mug in my hands. And now there is this—the furnace-wall of his back, the ridged muscle beneath the velvet, the way his heat sinks into me like water into cracked ground. I press closer without deciding to. My breasts flatten against the hard plane of his spine and the contact sendsa jolt from my nipples to the base of my belly, sharp and bright, and I go still with the force of it.

He goes rigid. Every muscle in his back locks against me. I can feel the tension through every contact point—my forehead, my chest, my hips, my thighs pressed to the backs of his.

“Breathe,” I tell him, mouth against his neck, and the word vibrates into him, and he exhales—shaking, controlled the way you control a weapon that wants to fire.

His tail uncurls. Slow, deliberate. It finds my hip, traces from hipbone to waist, and then the full weight of it drapes over me—heavy and warm, settling into the curve between hip and ribs like it was built to fit there.

Then his hand. Reaching back—blind, finding my thigh first, fingers spreading across the muscle through the thin fabric. Not practiced. The motion of a man who has not touched anyone in longer than I want to guess at, and is rebuilding from raw materials. His palm slides from my thigh to my hip and his fingers curl over the bone, claws fully retracted, smooth pads against fabric. A grip. The kind you use on something you’re afraid of losing in the dark.

My breath catches. The specificity of his hand on my hip—the size of it, the heat, the way his fingers span the distance from bone to the soft dip of my waist—registers in places that have nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with the fact that his hand is enormous and warm and holding me like I’m the fixed point, and he’s the thing in danger of drifting.

The purr starts.

Low. So low I feel it before I hear it—a vibration in his chest traveling through his spine into mine. Below sound. More texture thannoise. It moves through the mattress, through my bones, through the ribs where all the formless things I can’t name have been living.

My hand finds his. I lace my fingers through—mine small and callused, his broad and warm—and hold on. The contact sends something electric up my wrist, settling in the crook of my elbow where the skin is thin.

The purr deepens. Thickens. A resonance that fills the bunk and the spaces between my vertebrae, and the warmth is total now, every surface of me against some surface of him. I press my nose into the fuzz at his nape and breathe him in—warm skin, the dark spice scent that Sprout identified as compatible-mate pheromone, and god, there it is. The scent hits the back of my throat and slides lower, warm and narcotic, and my body responds with a specificity that is not confusion, not curiosity. Want. My nipples tighten against his back. My hips shift into him—involuntary, instinctive, the base of my spine lighting up as I press against the hard curve of him—and the purr surges, a full-body vibration that runs through his back into my chest into my belly and settles between my thighs like a hand.

I’m in trouble.

I haven’t been held in years. I’ve slept alone on this ship for a decade. No one has put their arm around me and pulled me close and vibrated with a frequency that sayssafein a language older than words.

I fall asleep with his purr in my bones and his tail wrapped around my hip and my breath warm against the nape of his neck.

The space beside me is not empty.

I surface in the half-place between sleep and waking, and the first thing I register is that I’m grinding against him.

Not a decision. A slow, rhythmic press of my hips into the cradle of his body, my backside fitted against the hard ridge of his pelvis, and the vibration—the purr—is moving through me at a frequency that has bypassed my brain entirely and gone straight to the base of my spine. His arm has tightened across my ribs. The tail has migrated—my thigh now, curling hip to waist in a possessive spiral his waking mind would never authorize, the muscular weight of it pinning me against him. The back of my head is tucked beneath his jaw, the fuzz of his throat warm against my hair, his pulse slow and heavy above me.

I shift. Not away. Deeper. My hips press back and the purr surges—a whole-body tremor through his chest into mine—and his arm flexes, drawing me flush against him, and the sound he makes is not a word. A low, rough vibration at the back of his throat that I feel in my teeth, in my nipples, in the ache between my legs that has apparently been building while I slept.

This is the least safe thing I’ve done in twelve years. I have a Tier 1 SRS operative wrapped around me, his organization has eight vessels hunting us, and I am pressing closer. Morrison’s voice, very quietly: threat assessment before sentiment, Knight. I know. I know. I’m not moving.

Awake now. Fully, electrically awake. I do not move.

His body is wrapped around mine. Tail: thigh, hip, waist—the full spiral, gripping with a strength he’s not conscious enough to moderate. Arm: across my ribs, hand flat against my sternum—my sternum, the place where everything I can’t name lives—his palm precisely there, as though his sleeping body knew the address. And lower: the hard press of him against my backside, unmistakable, and my body’s response is equallyunmistakable, a slick heat that has nothing to do with his thermal output and everything to do with the fact that I am being held by a man whose unconscious body wants mine as badly as my conscious body wants his.

Every point of contact registers twice—once in my head, once between my hips. The ridge of muscle along his forearm where it crosses my ribs. The velvet texture against my lips. His thigh pressed hard against the back of mine. I want to turn in his arms. Put my mouth on the pulse point beneath his jaw and feel the purr vibrate against my tongue. I want his hand to slide from my chest down over my belly, and the specificity of that image pools liquid and heavy in my core.

I want him. Not abstractly. Not eventually. Now, in this bunk, with his body wrapped around mine and that vibration running through every part of me and five hours until someone tries to kill us.

“Projected sleep quality,” Sprout murmurs from the corridor, orb dimmed to soft amber. Considerate. Sprout is never considerate. “On track for best in 347 logged nights. I have updated the Xarthian’s file from ‘Hostile’ to ‘Complicated.’”

Wrapped in him, I smile.

His breathing changes. The slow rhythm hitches—the stutter of someone surfacing. His arm tenses. The tail tightens, reflexive. I feel the exact moment consciousness arrives: the full-body freeze, every muscle locking, his hand rigid against my sternum.

He knows where he is. He knows where I am. He can feel what his body is doing—the tail, the arm, the purr that hasn’t stopped, the hardevidence pressed against me that neither of us is acknowledging—and his entire frame vibrates with the effort of not moving.

I tighten my grip on his hand. One squeeze. My thumb across his knuckle—the same deliberate touch I gave his fuzz, his forearm, the soft place behind his ear.I’m here. This is all right. Don’t pull away.

The breath he lets out travels through my hair, down my neck, and every fine hair on my body lifts in response. His mouth is against the top of my head, his exhale warm and ragged, and I can feel the war in him—the rigid discipline fighting the body that has wrapped itself around me like a vine.

His tail does not unwrap. The arm stays. Palm flat against my chest, and beneath it my pulse runs hard and honest, and I don’t hide it. Let him feel the evidence.