The kiss turned wild.Deep and desperate and nothing like the careful beginning.His mouth crushed mine.Explored.Took what he wanted without apology.
His hands were in my hair.Tilting my face up.His mouth was hungry and certain and completely honest.I felt it all.His need.His fear that I might leave him.The enormous, all-consuming reality of wanting someone, needing someone, and not being able to control that need.
I didn't want him to control it.I wanted to be his.No doubts.No second guessing.
My palms made contact with the nodes on the back of his neck.Energy moved through both of us in long warm waves — nothing like last night's violent surge.Different the way a river was different from a flood.Sustained.Steady.
I pulled him closer.
He came.
My eyes filled with tears.I didn't let them spill.But my vision blurred.He studied the gathering moisture with a look of awe.“What is this?”
“Tears.They’re…” What the hell were tears really?Emotional overflow?That answer felt right.“When a human feels too much, sometimes the feelings leak out of our eyes.”
"What do you feel too much?"He kissed my closed eyelid.My temple.His hands stilled.Present and warm and waiting, always waiting.
"You," I said honestly.
He wrapped his arms around me.Pulled me tighter against him.
He held me like I was something worth holding.
And I let him.I had no idea just how much I needed that.
That was the thing.The revolutionary thing.I let it happen.Let myself press my face against his chest and feel his heart beating under my cheek.Let myself be enclosed by his warmth and his certainty and the steady reality that this was my life now.He was mine.I didn’t have to try to survive on my own.Be alone.Lonely.Always searching for answers.For something new.Different.Something to fill the huge black pit in my heart that had been there as long as I could remember.Since my parents died.Since I joined the Nova Frontier Initiative when I was a young orphan.Started training.Gave myself to their system and let them turn me into a machine.
The tears that had built since the ledge — since the catch, since his arm slammed closed around me and the absolute animal relief of not falling moved through me like a second discharge — I let them happen quietly against his shirt in the cave dark.
Ineverlet myself cry.
That was the truth I registered as the tears came.Not with shame.Not with the familiar reflexive impulse to stop them.To reconstruct the professional distance and be fine, be useful, be the one who held it together.Just the simple, bone-deep recognition of something that had always been true.
I did not cry.Ever.There had been no point.No one to share the pain.No one who cared if I hurt.
Not at the crash.Not through the storm.Not on the cliff face.Not once on an alien planet.Lost.Afraid.Facing death.Responsible for ten people in escape pods, somewhere out in the jungle who needed me to be functional.
I was crying now.
Against the chest of the man who had caught me every time I fell.In a small glowing cave on a cliff face on a planet that was changing my biology, claiming me as its own.As part of its beating heart.I was not stopping these tears.For the first time in forever, I was not apologizing for them.Not managing my emotions, packing them away or changing them into something smaller or more appropriate.
He held me through every second of it.
Said nothing.Made no attempt to stop it or redirect it or resolve it into something more comfortable.No careful words.No reassurance.No quiet suggestion that it was all right, that I could stop now, that he'd seen enough.Just held me — his arms around me, his chin at the crown of my head, his heartbeat running its slow certain rhythm under my cheek — and let me be exactly what I was in this moment.
Without asking me to be anything else.
Nobody had ever done that.Nobody in my life had ever simply held me through something without trying to manage it.Without an angle.Without the subtle well-meaning pressure to pull myself together, to be functional, to return to the version of me that was useful to them.
Everyone had always needed me to be fine.
He didn't need me to be anything.
He just held me.
I pressed my face harder against his chest and breathed him in — the warm-metal scent of him that had been working on my nervous system since the jungle path yesterday.His arms were warm and certain across my back.The marks on my collarbones pulsed their steady rhythm against his chest and his nodes answered through the fabric between us.Outside, the storm moved through the valley in sustained blue-white pulses and none of it required anything of me.
I just breathed.Clung to him like he was the only thing that made sense on an alien world, because he was.