Through the Static (10 page)

She was rejecting ever being with anyone.

As the misting water poured down on them, Aurelia clung to Jinx's neck and to the comfort of his mind. Plunging into his memories was still disorienting, so much of the space there cast in shadow and populated by the crumbling remnants of a former life. But there was more there now. Even in the few hours since they'd last come together like this, his mental landscape had become more layered, flourishing without the weight of his partners' repression.

It would have been too easy to linger there forever, basking in the simple affection at the heart of his growth. The way he cared for her… It was so uncomplicated. So pure.

So naïve.

She tightened her arms around him and took care to shield her thoughts. Feeling returned to her boneless limbs as quickly as reason did.

He was like a newborn, for all that he was clearly a man. Affection of any kind was so new, and sex a revelation. Every touch and every word proved it. She just happened to be the first person he'd stumbled across willing to give him both. She almost certainly wouldn't be the last.

He stirred beneath her, stroking warm hands up and down the naked expanse of her back as he breathed against her throat. His pleasure sang through their connection, showing itself in the sweetness of his caress, but there was a hesitation there, too. A carefulness to his thoughts and to his embrace as he lifted her and let himself slip from her body.

Without a word spoken between them, either aloud or in silence, he helped her to stand and placed her in the spray with her back turned toward it. His fingertips slid through her hair, massaging her scalp and untangling the wet strands. Slowly and with a tenderness that made her ache, he washed her.

Her eyes prickled, and she was glad for the way the water cascaded down her face as he first lathered then rinsed her hair. No one had taken care of her like this in so long. Maybe ever.

And she soaked it up. It would be criminal not to release him and give him the chance to find a life of his own, and so she would. But for these few, brief moments before she had to let him go, she'd take what he offered. And she'd enjoy it.

When her skin shone a healthy pink, he finally turned his attention from her to himself, sliding soapy hands over his skin with a crisp efficiency that stood in stark contrast to the way he'd touched her. Within a minute, he was done, and he turned off the tap. A sudden silence rushed in as the sound of flowing water receded, leaving them with just their breathing and the gentle patter of drops falling free from their bodies.

“Towels?”

It was the first word he'd spoken since he'd been inside her, and it sounded heavy in the damp air. She gestured to the cabinet set into the tile. With a nod, he opened the shower door and went to retrieve them. Just like when he'd bathed her, he took care of her first, gently wicking the water from her skin before scrubbing the rough cotton fibers across his own. When he was done, he sat her on the counter again. Undistracted by her nakedness, he dug into the medical kit and came away with gloves and gauze. After touching ointment to the remaining signs of physical trauma, he bandaged her up, securing the ends of the dressing, then pausing. He placed a soft kiss to the skin just above the wound.

“Do you want anything for the pain?”

She moved her shoulder around. While it had been easy to ignore in the heat of their intimacy, there was a soreness in her muscles that would likely worsen as she tried to sleep. She nodded. He offered her a single-dose package of analgesics, and she accepted it without complaint.

“You need to rest.”

“I'm fine.” It wasn't entirely true. She was exhausted. Still, she had things she needed to do. Gesturing at his head, she said, “I should—”

“Not tonight.”

His voice was firm, brooking no argument, and as she gazed into his eyes, she found she didn't really want to give him one anyway. Especially with the way he was looking at her, all longing and resignation. “All right.”

Covered only in the scrap of the towel, she followed him out into the larger space. It had warmed considerably since they'd arrived, but there was still a chill to the air. “I'll find you some clothes,” she offered, but he shook his head.

An image flashed through their link of their bodies, naked and entwined in repose.

His voice was aching as he told her, “I want to feel your skin.”

And she couldn't fight it. Her own selfish desires and the demands of the link were overwhelming. She padded to the storage closet and took out sheets and blankets, but she left the extra clothes sitting on the shelf. He took the bedding from her and crossed over to the bunks. Unsurprisingly, he made up only one.

As he worked, she went to the kitchen and retrieved two bottles of water. After using one to wash down a half-dose of the pain medication, she took the other to him. She watched his throat bob as he drank, and her ribs felt tight.

Once the bed was made, he stood beside it and let the towel fall from his waist before reaching out to her. With a light tug, he eased the fabric from her skin. The instant she was bare, he pulled her to him, holding her tightly. But when she tried to see what he was thinking, she found his mind securely closed.

After a long moment, he drew away, ducking to place a soft kiss on her lips before lifting her and laying her down in the bed. She watched him as he walked across the room, naked and unashamed, to turn off the lights.

Moments later, he climbed into the bed with her, positioning his body between hers and the edge. He was always trying to keep her safe. With her back against his chest, his arms curled around her and their legs intertwined, the connection between them hummed. Her insides seemed to glow.

“Rest,” he murmured, lips whisper-soft against her ear.

And she did.

Chapter Eleven

It was a simple dream. Jinx stood in a room full of shadows, but the darkness did not scare him. Around him lay the crumbled ruins of a place that used to bring him comfort. There was no crackling, no static and no noise. There were no fingers or wires playing havoc with his brain. There was only him.

And across from him was the woman.

He hardly recognized her as he stared. Instead of sad, her eyes were sparkling, and nothing about her was disapproving. In a world without sound, she spoke his name. His real name. She reached out her hand, and the buried heart in the center of his chest bloomed with a long-forgotten ache.

For the first time, the woman in the static came into focus, as real as anyone or anything. He took one step toward her, but suddenly the ashes of his former life grew solid, hands clutching at his ankles from the floorboards. He tripped, and his outstretched hand went through her.

Because she wasn't real. She was still a ghost. And he was still alone.

Except he wasn't.

With a shuddering start, Jinx lurched forward, cresting out of a dream and into wakefulness with a suddenness that left him reeling. Instead of a bare mattress in a barracks, inundated by the barked-out orders of his Three, he was in a bed with sheets that smelled like female skin, and his pillow was scattered with strands of copper-colored hair.

Aurelia.

He wasn't alone because he had Aurelia.

With his arms and with his mind, he reached out for her. The bed was cold, his hands closing around nothing but sweet-scented sheets, but in his thoughts, he latched onto the solidity of her immediately. She was there. Somewhere. He just needed to find her. To touch her, and to assure himself that she was real.

He sat up and scanned the space, but he didn't have to look far. The lone flush of color in a white-and-gray room, she was a vision, all rosy cheeks and lips and soft falls of shimmering hair. She sat on a stool near a lab bench on the opposite wall, gaze trained on a tablet computer display, her fingers wrapped around a stylus. And even in baggy scrubs, she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

The instant the word
beautiful
passed through his mind, her focus snapped to him, her gaze darting up to meet his. A rush of emotions passed across her face, a flurry of images coloring her thoughts too fast for him to catch onto any one of them before the canvas went blank. All he was able to grasp was a sense of restraint, and somewhere just below that…regret?

Her mouth settled into a line, everything about her casually guarded as she pressed a series of buttons on her tablet, then set it and the stylus aside. Leaning forward, bracing her elbows on the edge of the table, she gave him a weak smile. “Good morning.”

Was it? There were no windows, no way to tell where the sun sat in the sky, and the lights over on her side of the room gave him no better clue. He palmed the back of his neck and stretched. “How long have you been up?”

“Not too long. Maybe an hour.”

Jinx frowned and lowered his gaze to the bed they had shared. She'd been bone-tired when they'd lain down together. Then again, he had been, too. He'd barely gotten any rest at all that last night in his barracks, propped up against the door of his room and watching over her, ready to snap into action at a moment's notice if Curse and Charm decided to move against them. Still, he never slept long or late. Or well.

He'd slept like the dead the night before. It had been so
quiet
, both in his head and in the room. With her form held tight inside his arms, he'd felt a kind of peace that was entirely new. Not once had his Three's thoughts intruded on his repose. Nothing had.

Except his dreams.

His breath caught, and his eyes reflexively closed against the memory of hazy images moving through his consciousness. He'd never dreamed before, never experienced that sense of the world around him being real and yet…not.

“What did you dream about?” Aurelia's voice had that edge of curiosity to it again, the scientist's zeal.

He shuttered his mind as he looked up at her. As intimate as their connection had become, there was something intensely private about the shifting shadows and the ruined room. And the face. “Did you not see them? While I was sleeping?”

One corner of her mouth tilted down. “Maybe some little glimpses, but they were fuzzy. And I wasn't really paying attention.”

Sensing no lie to her words, he accepted her statement. He glanced away from her before admitting, “They were memories. I think.”

“More are coming back to you, aren't they?” Her voice was soft, her tone drawing him to look at her again. Resolve danced in her eyes, and he swallowed and nodded. “Even more will. Once you're free.”

So they were back to that again. Something in his chest hurt. To keep the twisted mess of anger and loss contained, he rose to stand beside the bunk, and was about to stride across the room when a burst of self-conscious heat flowed toward him across the link. He glanced down at himself. He was naked and half hard.

She cleared her throat. “I left some clothes next to the bed.”

It felt like another layer of distance between them, compounding the loneliness of waking up without her and her talk of severing their link. Nakedness had never been important in their barracks—not until Curse and Charm had started sleeping together. Even then,
his
nakedness had never been important. For all that desire had coiled, useless and unfocused, in his gut, he'd been asexual there. Here he was anything but. And she wanted him to be clothed.

The scrubs were the same drab green as hers, cut for a man, but they were a size too small. He drew them on anyway, keeping his eyes on the ground the whole time. When he was covered enough for her, he retreated to the kitchen.

“I left you—” she started.

“I found it.”

She'd left him food just like she'd left him clothes. That similarity alone was enough to make the gesture chafe.

He ate and drank in silence, then went to the bathroom where he relieved himself and splashed cold water on his face. The stark white of the place seemed to mock him with its sterility. Last night, it had been alive and full of heat, kindled with the motion of bodies and kept warm with the way she'd let him care for her. Nothing had ever felt like that. Nothing.

Bracing himself against the counter, he met his reflection and stared into his own dark eyes. There were so many things he'd lost in his life. Things he didn't even know. But he knew Aurelia—knew what it was like to touch her and to push inside her, to be grounded in the gentle embrace of her mind. He didn't want to lose any more.

He couldn't lose
her.
He wouldn't.

With a new sense of determination, he wrenched open the door and stalked back out into the main space. She looked up at his entrance, her eyes and thoughts still guarded, her mouth open as if to say something, but he didn't give her the chance. Within seconds, he stood before her, hands buzzing with a longing for contact he wouldn't deny. He curled one around the back of her neck, pushing past the distance she was projecting. The instant skin touched skin, the ache in his chest eased. He pulled the stylus from her hand and set it on the table before entwining their fingers, breathing her scent and her relief. She'd been needing this, too.

He held her gaze just long enough to be sure of her, then closed his eyes before capturing her mouth, a rush of lips and tongue and need. He kissed her until neither of them could breathe, and then he kissed her again. When he finally pulled away, it was to press his forehead to hers, eyes closed, sucking in air and her and everything he'd found these past two days.

And then he begged. “Don't do this. Don't do this, please. I don't want it.” He shook his head and fought for air. Dropped every veil until he was more naked than he had been without his clothes, showed what it had been like through all these years. His voice was strained. “I don't want to be alone.”

It took everything in her not to buckle at the heartache in his voice. Of course he didn't want to be alone.

She stopped herself. He didn't want to be alone because he never
had
been. Didn't he deserve the chance to be his own? To make his own choices?

Even if he doesn't choose you.

Aurelia brought a hand up to card it through his hair, massaging his scalp and swallowing hard. “At least let me look,” she said. “Everything was moving so fast when I made that link. I need to see…”

He lifted his face from hers, drifting his hand up to touch her cheek. “You won't change anything? Not without telling me?”

“Not without telling you.” She could promise him that much.

She still felt obligated to set him free, but the first step no matter where they went from here was a full set of diagnostics. Even if she gave in and made their link permanent—

She stopped herself. It wasn't worth thinking about. Or wishing for.

“Come on then.” She let herself place one more soft kiss against his lips before pulling her hand from his hair and standing.

Palm clasped tightly in his, she guided him to a chair in front of one of the other lab benches. Her equipment was already laid out there, the things she'd set out in those early hours as a distraction when all she'd wanted to do was watch him sleep. It was everything she'd need for a neurological exam. Or for a surgery. She swallowed and swept the tray full of sharps and sutures and soldering needles aside without meeting his gaze. As he sat there, his knee bounced up and down in a constant, nervous shake, his thoughts all of resistance and fear.

She lifted one sensor from the remaining tray and turned back to him, meeting eyes that were dark and desperate. His agitation made her own hands shake.

“Calm down.” She rested her palm on his forearm, her whole body softening with the peace sent swirling through them both.

God, if she'd known how physical this link would be…

He exhaled deeply at her touch and stilled his leg, looking up at her with trust she didn't deserve. She attached the sensor to his temple, following it with another on the opposite side of his head and a third behind his ear, right over the pentacle tattooed on his skin and next to the LED that reminded her of what and who he was. As if she could forget. She was about to lift her hand from his arm when his fingers wrapped around hers.

She saw how the sensation of skin on skin soothed his nerves, and she closed her eyes for a second.

“Please,”
he asked.
“Let me touch you.”

She sucked in a wavering breath and opened her eyes. It was so hard to deny him. To deny them both. “Okay. For now.”

Manipulating the diagnostic equipment with only one hand wasn't easy, but she managed all the same. Right up until she twisted and the ache in her shoulder flared. It was mostly healed now, but—

“Here.” He let her hand go and snuck his own up under the waistband of her scrubs to rest against the bare skin of her lower back. Turned her around so there wasn't any strain on the wound. Against the curve of her spine, his fingers flexed.

His palm was so warm, his touch arousing in a way she didn't know how to process. She stuttered in her movements as she drew her arm back and braced herself with the heel of her palm on the edge of the lab table. Only once the rush of heat radiating from where his skin pressed to hers faded did she manage to refocus herself fully on the data streaming in.

And then his touch didn't distract her anymore.

Aurelia had spent her life studying the connections between man and machine, the interfaces between cerebral cortexes and the wiring humanity had begun to lay there to expand the brain. To make it more. She had seen the damage done over the course of long-term control and repression. But never, ever, had she seen anything like this.

There were the scorch marks and burnt tissue that always resulted from wiping an initiate's former life, but that was only the beginning of it. The degradation from the failing link was impossibly, unimaginably vast. Whole systems were threadbare, the cells atrophied to the point of near destruction around the networks of implanted circuitry. And yet, for every cluster of neurons the connection had destroyed, there were other parts of him that had flourished. All across his brain, there were pieces of himself that had grown back, rerouting past the broken patches and creating whole new conduits. New connections to lost memories. To emotions. To touch.

She staggered backward, pulling herself from his embrace to settle on a stool beside his. He reached out for her, but she shook her head, eyes riveted to the screen.

The effect of losing contact was immediate. The current of information moving through his system bottlenecked, unable to reroute itself through the portions of his brain that had detoured through his tactile senses. Everything still functioned, but when she'd linked them, she'd created a new pathway, one that allowed him to use the secondary systems his brain had built to try to compensate for the parts of his grid that had been failing.

She only watched for a few more silent seconds before rising. With shaking hands, she pulled the electrodes from his skin and attached them to her own.

She'd never been bent to fit to the will of a Three—had never been subjected to the long-term deterioration that kind of connection engendered. Hell, she'd only been tethered to him for a day.

But there were new pathways wending their way through her system. New nerves blending thought and touch.

She stood there, staring blankly, hearing the way he was calling her name, both aloud and in her mind, but not listening. He laid his fingers on her arm and the display lit up in direct correspondence to the easing in her mind, the exponential growth in the clarity of her thoughts. She pulled the sensors from her temples and neck and set them down, then dragged the other stool over so she could sit without losing contact with his skin.