“
Acting on impulse, Akos turned and kissed her. She stuck her fingers in one of his belt loops and pulled him tight against her, the way they had been earlier, when they were interrupted. But the door was closed, now, and Teka was fast asleep in some other part of the ship.
They were alone. Finally.
The chemical-floral smell of the ship was replaced with the smell of her, of the herbal shampoo she’d last used in the ship’s shower, and sweat and sendes leaf. He ran potion-stained fingertips down the side of her throat and across the faint curve of her collarbone.
She pushed him over, so she was straddling him, and pinned his hips down for a tick, just to tug his shirt out from under his waistband. Her hands were so warm against him he could hardly breathe. They found the soft give of flesh around his middle, the taut muscle wrapped around his ribs. She undid buttons all the way up to his throat.
He’d thought of this when he helped her take her clothes off before that bath in the renegade safehouse, how it might be to take off their clothes when they weren’t injured and fighting for their lives. He’d imagined something frantic, but she was taking her time, running her fingers over the bumps of his ribs, the tendons on the inside of his wrists as she freed the buttons on his cuffs, the bones that stuck out of his shoulders.
When he tried to touch her back, she pressed him away. That wasn’t how she wanted it just then, it seemed like, and he was happy to give her what she wanted. She was the girl who couldn’t touch people, after all. It sparked something inside him to know that he was the only one she’d done this with--not excitement, but something softer. Tender.
She was his only--and fate said she would be his last.
”
”