Page 111 of She Who Devours the Stars
“I warned you this might happen,” she said, but her voice was the kind that wanted to be caught in the echo.
“Yeah, well, you also said you had ‘full control’ of your convergence. I’m starting to suspect a pattern of exaggeration.”
Dyris made a noise that wasn’t a laugh, but wasn’t not. She tried to pull away, but the force vector snapped her right back against me, our hips aligned and the rest of our bodies locked in the world’s slowest, softest wrestling hold.
On the far side of the suite, a lamp tore free of its socket, spun twice, and gently adhered to the wall. A deck of holo cards drifted past, each card peeling off in sequence and plastering itself to the nearest available surface—our calves, the bedding, the ceiling. One of them, Queen of Swords, landed square between my shoulder blades and stuck there, vibrating.
Dyris plucked it off, rolled it between her fingers, then flicked it so it sailed in a perfect parabola and embedded itself in the mythglass at the foot of the bed.
“You should have seen yourself,” she said, voice gone low and velvet. “You radiated. I could feel your field before I even walked through the door.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “If you keep talking like that, we’re never getting down.”
She reached up, cupped my chin, and angled my face to hers. The kiss was gentle, nothing like the ones from earlier, when we’d been trying to see who could outpace the other in reckless hunger. This one was slow, indulgent. It tasted like the end of a long war.
Her fingers threaded through my hair, and she drew me in closer, as if she needed the evidence of my body to believe her own.
I let her.
After a while, she drew back, eyes soft but calculating. “The city will be watching,” she said.
“Let them,” I replied. “We’ve set the precedent.”
She made that same not-laugh, then ran her palm down my sternum, thumb tracing the edge of one breast before coming to rest over my heart. “You’re still glowing,” she whispered. “It’s not supposed to last this long.”
I looked down. She was right: the afterimage of my last event was still pulsing under my skin, blue-white and impossible. “It’s probably just side effects,” I said. “Or you’re leaking.”
Dyris shifted, angling her hips so the contact between us was less theoretical. “If I was leaking, the room would be on fire.”
“I like your optimism,” I told her.
“You’re terrible,” she said, but she didn’t sound mad.
The bedding field, finally bored of zero-G, began a slow descent back toward the floor. As we settled, our bodies creaked apart—not all at once, but in stages, each limb reluctant to say goodbye to its opposite number. When we hit, it was soft, anticlimactic, but the sense of touch that returned was electric.
I tried to roll over, but Dyris snared my wrist. “You’re not done,” she said.
“I’m hungry,” I protested, but she smiled, teeth bright and predatory.
“You always are,” she said, and pulled me back on top of her.
This time, there was no urgency. We moved slow, letting the heat simmer instead of boil over. I could feel every inch of her, how the skin on her chest was cooler than mine, how the pulse at her throat raced ahead whenever my lips got close, how her hands always sought my sides, as if she wanted to make sure I wouldn’t drift away when she blinked.
It was perfect, and I hated how much I needed it.
At the edge of the bed, my old commlink buzzed. Dyris ignored it, but I twisted just enough to see the message blinking on the cracked screen:
[Perc: ALL CLEAR. TOWER STILL HERE. NO SIGN OF INBOUND ANNIHILATION. DRINKS?]
I snorted. “Perc wants to know if we want coffee.”
Dyris closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the pillow. “If he brings it up here, I’ll make him wish he was never born.”
“He wasn’t,” I reminded her. “He was assembled.”
She smiled, the real one, the one I only ever got to see when she forgot to keep the walls up.
We lay like that for a long time, the only sound our breathing and the slow, patient ticking of mythic residue as it worked its way through the room’s systems. Outside, the city was still glowing with the aftermath. Inside, we were just two girls in a bed, holding each other like the world couldn’t reach us here.
