Page 44 of Star Bright
Maybe that was a problem?
But he was already lost in the sensations of her, needing to crash into her again and again, in a broken ship or on a spinning sled or drifting as a snowflake. Any way, all ways, he needed her.
Darcy. He didn’t say her name, not with his mouth, but with his whole self, as if projecting his admiration like light. But she was still too far away. Even with her grinding on his hips, he wanted her closer, connected. He trailed his lips across her jaw,down the column of her arched throat, kisses threatening to become a bite, just hard enough…
“Not in the hallway,” she gasped. “My room.”
She was still wrapped around him like the very air he breathed, his spirit buoyed upon her even though he was the one carrying her. They stumbled to her doorway, his feet moving with more urgency than sureness while his mouth was preoccupied with charting a course across every fascinating point on her face. He wanted to memorize each facet of her.
As they tumbled onto her bed, hopelessly entwined, he reached down between their sprawled bodies.
Only to stop when she wrapped her fingers around his wrist. Oh, how he wanted her fingers wrapped elsewhere.
“Wait,” she whispered.
He waited, reluctantly indebted to his fledglings for teaching him patience.
“What are we doing?”
He gazed down at her. “According to the handbook—”
She growled at him, which made his beast squirm with happiness. “You have a universal translator, so I know you know what I mean.”
Balancing with his elbows on either side of her shoulders, he smoothed her tousled hair to the pillow, coming to rest with his palms cupping her jaw. The pulse in her throat raced erratically against his inner wrists, blood to blood, feeling to feeling despite the fragile barrier of skin between them.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. When she drew a sharp breath, he amended, “I know what you mean, but I don’t know what we’re doing. Beyond the obvious.”
Her hands traced restless circled on his shoulder blades. “Then maybe…we shouldn’t do it? Because what if…”
She didn’t finish, but he heard the thunderous echoes of his own uncertainty in that silence.
“Maybe I could blame the crash, my beast, a loneliness as vast as the emptiness of space, for my not knowing.” He brushed his thumb across her lower lip. “What I do know, is that these days—and last night—with you reminded me what joy looks like, what itfeelslike.” Carefully, he lifted himself away from her. “If our time is over, I will forever remember it with that joy.”
Her eyes shimmered with reflected snowlight and tears. “Vash… I don’t want to hurt you. And I don’t want tobehurt.”
“No one does. And no one can promise that. We pray for wings that we might flee from pain and loss, but maybe we fly into the heart of the storm anyway. The only other choice is to stay on the ground, safe but never knowing the skies.”
She closed her eyes. “I’m an Earther. My feet in the dirt is all I’ve known.”
“But you’ve flown with me.” He couldn’t keep the wistful note from his voice. “Was that not joyful?”
“You know it was.” In the space he’d made between them, she wriggled up the bed, drawing her legs to her chest. “But I did that before, trusting someone else to carry me. And when he left me behind… This is just too soon, too fast.”
Vash tilted his head against the outside of her knee. “I understand.” Not because of her body language or the universal translator, because he felt it too.
Keeping his head down, he backed off the bed and straightened.
She gazed at him, her eyes shadowed with regret. “This hurts too, doesn’t it?”
He ached to return to her again, to soothe away her unhappiness. But he feared it would look too much like trying to tempt her, and while the beast would never add to her hurt, he also knew he wouldn’t want to stop touching her.
So he only bowed his head again, giving her that sideways quirk of lips that Earthers used when they wanted toacknowledge the universe’s unfairness without saying a word. “I would fly with you whenever you like, Darcy.”
For once, he wished someone would call him back at the door, but she only wrapped her arms around her knees, as if holding that last contact between them, and watched him go.
He closed the door softly behind him and kept his feet moving. Of course they owed each other nothing, but he only wished he could have given her more.
At least now he knew he still had it to give. In that blank time after Shanya’s death, it hadn’t seemed possible. Discovering that pleasure and laughter still existed in the universe was a gift, not just to him but to his fledglings too.
