Page 35 of Adrift!
She came apart in his arms with a cry that was half scream, half song. Her body clenched around him with a power that triggered his own release. Sympathetic pulses throbbed through him, an exquisite feedback loop where each of her spasms heightened his own pleasure until he couldn’t find the distinction between her climax and his.
The imploding supernova of sensation brought him crashing down, blanking all his awareness except of her.
He would’ve collapsed on her, except one last erg of energy in his slackening arm let him angle to one side.
She tilted with him, their sprawled bodies still joined as the aftershocks rippled through them both in gravitational waves of bliss.
As their synchronized breathing slowed, each beat of their hearts etched a little deeper in him until the rhythms merged, like the eternal background hum of their own private cosmos. For once, floating adrift in the vast unknowable felt…like where he was supposed to be.
She traced a lazy finger over his chest, not following the interfacing circuitry of his augments or any of the tattooed imagery, but improvising a new path. “That was”—she sighed, the deflation separating them by a few nanometers—“not in the brochure.”
“I certainly hope not.” He tightened his arm around her shoulders to close the distance. “That was a Remy-only special.”
When she laughed softly, the sound resonated through him like the final chord of a perfect song. The room lights shifted to a subtle red-gold, flattering and calming, but as he stroked her back, he felt the tension gathering in her, one fingertip drumming on his breastbone in broken counterpoint to his pulse. Erratic, not erotic.
“Ikaryo?” Her voice was small, vulnerable in a way he’d never heard before, the timbre just on the verge of cracking. “Do we know this is…us?”
He paused his caress. “Who else is here?”
“The resonark.”
“Remy—”
“It responds to emotion. Evens believes it’s a connecting force. What if it’s making us feel things that aren’t real?”
For a long moment, he considered. “Even if the anomaly is an amplifier, even if it’s turning up the volume or clearing the static, something must be there first. You’re a musician; you know you can’t create harmonic resonance from nothing. To match, a frequency must exist already—or at least the potential, ready to resound.”
When her fist clenched on his chest, as if trying to catch hold of the steady beat, he put his hand over hers, interlacing their fingers to press her open palm over his heart.
“This is me, Remy. All of me, the early pieces that survived my world and the extras added later that make me who I am now.” He peered down at her. “What do you think?”
“I… I’m not sure.” Her troubled green gaze glistened, the amber flecks gilted in the delicate light. “From the first time I played a note, I knew who Iwantedto be. But obviously I was wrong. What if I’m wrong about…this?”
“What if you aren’t? What if you never were.”
“You don’t know—”
“True. None of us do. Certainly not Evens with his lying and obsession. But what I feel matters too. If the resonark entangled us somehow… I’ve seen your knitting, which proves entanglement doesn’t guarantee a harmony that holds.”
“Hey.” She thumped their joined hands on his chest, but the hint of tears was gone from her eyes.
“It’s what wedowith the threads we’re given,” he told her. “Mariah would say every knit and purl can change what we’re making. That’s what I believe. And maybe that’s what scares me too. We’re the ones holding the tangles.”
She let out another shaky breath that was half a laugh. “Whatever happens next, this cruise has been…” After a long beat of silence where his heart hung suspended under their hands, she just shook her head, ducking under his chin.
He buried his lips in the locks of her hair, mussed into a beautiful knot that might never let him go. “For me too.”
As they drifted toward sleep, still wrapped in each other and the lingering warmth of their connection, Ikaryo realized a fundamental element of his own universe had shifted.
For the first time since leaving his devastated homeworld, he wasn’t thinking of his next destination. He’d been seeking a place, and instead he’d found a person in the space between the stars—and a reason to stay.
She saw his broken pieces and called him beautiful. With her, his unfeeling machinery became music.
Tomorrow, they would sing to the anomaly in the hopes of saving the ship. But tonight, they had found a harmony all their own.
Could he also find the words to tell her what that meant to him?
The Love Boat I might still be perilously adrift, but he was exactly where he wanted to be.
