Through the Static (11 page)

“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 you 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 going 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.

Her whole body arched as she snapped her eyes open, moaning long and low at the intimacy of the kiss, of his breath against her sex. His mind was awash in reverence, lost in the subtle taste and texture of her wetness on his tongue. Hers was just as consumed by the unexpected rush of sensation, the gentle probing and the pressure on her clit, fingers pressing her open and sliding inside. There was no fear of what he thought of her, their connection a thread of perfect understanding, and so she melted to his touch. With her body and voice and mind, she told him what felt best, and he pursued her pleasure with an enthusiasm that made her free to reach for it, too.

In the moments before her body yielded, she reached a hand down to slip through his hair, to palm the back of his neck. He groaned against her, and then she was shattering, brilliant waves, soft and echoing. Through it all, he licked and sucked and filled her with his fingers, following the twisting of her body away from him and into him, magnifying every pulse until she was left, raw and limp against the mattress, palm still resting on his skin. Only then did he slide up her frame, but even that he did slowly, mouth trailing over every curve.

With his mouth at her ear, his hard cock pressed between them at her hip, he whispered, simply, “You're so beautiful.”

She sighed and wrapped her arms around his back, tracing her hands along the lines of muscle to his ass. He palmed her breast, kissed her neck and then her mouth. Over and over, he slid himself along her skin but never took the offer she presented with her parted thighs, the soft openness of her still-singing body.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The images and sensations swirling through his mind were too myriad, and his shaky exhale mirrored that. He pressed his forehead to her shoulder and shook his head. “Can't decide. Want to touch all of you. Take all of you. Every way.”

Once more
. That was what he'd said to her before she'd given in.

She'd been the one insisting they needed to finish the sever. But the idea of losing this, of never having this again…

She pushed the thought away. It was too much. For now, she'd just give him everything she had—she'd take everything she could.

Finding strength in muscles that had gone slack with the force of her climax, she pushed him off her, rolled them and settled herself on top of him. With no more hesitation, without waiting for him to decide, she lifted his cock and straddled his hips. And with one sure stroke, she drove him home.

“
Aurelia
.”
He choked her name and threw his head back, hands coming up to grab her hips as she moved over him. His pleasure flooded her as she soaked him, everything a jumble of wetness and heat, fullness and pressure. He groaned in an unending stream of sound, a symphony against the rush of joined sensation, arms coming around her and hips thrusting up to meet her.

She let him pull her down until their chests were flush, her mouth at his throat. The link between them gaped, the infinite depth of connection yawning at her, and the truth came tumbling out.

“It doesn't have to end.” The words were a single breath as she sped over him, taking him deeper and faster and feeling the pleasure climbing. “Even after. It won't end.”

“Won't…” he panted, gasping hard for every word, hands digging hard into her shoulder and her hip to force her down, “…be…the same.”

“But I'll still want you.”

His eyes rolled back in his head, a low groan of “Always” and then he was lost, flooding her insides with his release, pushing her until they fell into the same oblivion of thought and sound. A perfect understanding and a union of personhood too profound to bear.

But she bore it. She bore it to the very end. And even then, collapsing over him and breathing him in, she didn't let go.

She didn't let go.

“You're sure about this?”

He only asked her once. She stared into his eyes, wanting so badly to touch his face. To let him touch her at all. But she was already scrubbed in, and the movement of impulses through his new neurons and circuits would only make the work she had to do more daunting. She nodded, keeping all her doubts to herself.

Even though he was supposed to keep his hands clasped in his lap, he reached out, stroking his fingertips along her elbow and looking up at her with pleading in his gaze. “Did you mean it?”

“What?”

“That, after…”

“That I'd still want you?”

He didn't answer, but the movement of his throat told her everything she needed to know.

Her heart felt like it was swelling in her chest. She closed her eyes and pressed her lips once to his, echoing him as she pulled away. “Always.”

For a second, the room seemed to tilt, the floor dropping out from under her the same way her emotions were. God, what was she doing? A man like this wanted to bond to her, wanted to cement this insatiable need for each other into their tissues and their bones. He was ready to sign everything over to her after only a day. And she was saying no.