Chapter 565 | Out of Respect for the Craft

Chapter 565: 565 | Out of Respect for the Craft

The vault counter sat at twelve of twelve in the corner of my vision, glowing gold and smug about it. Naomi stayed in my lap after she finished, her forehead pressed to mine and her breath coming out in shaky little puffs that tasted of green tea.

Her thighs still trembled against my hips. Her wet skirt had ridden up so high that it had stopped being a skirt and started being a belt with ambitions.

"You’re still hard," Naomi whispered against my mouth, and she rolled her hips once to prove her point.

"I’m aware of my own anatomy, thank you, Love."

"Belle said lunch ends at twelve forty." Her pink eyes dropped to the clock on my nightstand and came back up to my face, dark at the centers. "That gives us eighteen minutes, and I’m a fast learner."

She didn’t wait for a reply. Her hand slid down between us and worked the button on my soaked uniform pants, and the zipper went down with a sound that should have been illegal before noon. Her calloused fingers wrapped around me, and I forgot the name of the academy for a full second.

Naomi lifted onto her knees and pushed her ruined underwear to the side. She held my eyes the entire time she sank down, slow and stubborn, until she sat flush against me. A shaky moan left her throat, and her nails dug into my shoulders over three separate sets of scratches from three separate women.

"Okay," she breathed. "Give me one second to remember how legs work."

"Take two seconds, because I’m generous like that."

She laughed, and the laugh squeezed around me so hard that my vision went white at the edges. Then she started to move. Naomi rode me slow at first, her hands braced on my chest and her braid swinging over one shoulder, and every time she came down the shell necklace bounced against her collarbone with a tiny click.

The noon light came through the blinds in stripes, and it painted gold bars across her brown skin. Milk still beaded at her nipples even though the vault had nowhere left to put it. I caught a drop on my tongue anyway, out of respect for the craft.

Nine weeks ago I sat in an amphitheater in a folding chair and wrote this girl’s name into a mental ledger. I filed her under Silver tier at thirty-four percent attraction, right between Belle’s bust measurements and a note to buy protein bars.

If anyone ever builds a time machine, I’m going to find that guy in his folding chair and punch him square in his doughy face. Then I’m going to punch him again for the shirt he was wearing, because that thing strained across his stomach like a crime scene.

"You’re thinking," Naomi accused, and she came down harder to punish me for it.

"I’m thinking about time travel and violence against my past self."

"That’s the least romantic thing anyone has ever said to me during sex." Her hips stuttered on the next stroke, and her voice went thin and high. "Stop thinking about him. He’s gone, and I like this one better."

That landed somewhere under my sternum, right where the graft lived. The silver-pink ring flared so bright behind my eyes that I had to blink it back.

I grabbed her hips and took over. Naomi gasped and fell forward onto my chest, her braid sliding across my throat, and I drove up into her in long strokes that rocked the cheap bedframe against the wall. The headboard knocked out a beat that Belle could definitely hear from the living room. I chose not to care about that.

Euphoric Feedback came on at level four without me asking it to. My body had learned her by now, and it knew she liked the heat to build slow and pool low before it broke. Naomi’s whole back arched under my palm.

"Jace," she gasped into my neck. "Jace, please, I’m close again."

"Then let go, and I promise I’ve got you."

She came apart on top of me with a sound she buried in my shoulder, her teeth sinking into the muscle hard enough to leave another mark for the collection. Her inner walls clenched around me in long pulses, and that dragged me over the edge right behind her. I held her down against me and emptied into her while her shell necklace pressed a cold little circle into my chest.

For a while neither of us moved. Her heartbeat thudded against my ribs, slow and lazy, and she smelled like rain and my soap and the faint vanilla that lived in everything she touched.

"Your buff’s still running," I mumbled into her hair. "That one didn’t count for anything on paper."

"I didn’t do it for paper, you idiot." She kissed the bite mark she’d made, soft as an apology she didn’t mean. "I did it because Blair Davenport looked at you like she wanted to eat you, and I wanted to win."

"You definitely won, and the doorframe agrees."

Naomi lifted her head and peered past my shoulder at the bubbled paint. The wood still showed five finger-shaped dents where Blair had gripped it, black at the edges.

"I’m going to feel bad about that later," Naomi decided. "Right now I feel great about it."

Three sharp knocks hit the bedroom door. They weren’t polite knocks. They were the knocks of someone who had a laptop open and a timestamp ready.

"I’m coming in, and I’m not looking," Belle announced from the hallway. "I’ve already seen everything this squad has to offer, so nobody get modest on my clock."

The door opened. Belle stood in the doorway in a dry academy tracksuit two sizes too big, which meant it was mine, with her blue braid wrung out over one shoulder and her laptop balanced on her forearm. She held a folded grey t-shirt in her free hand.

Her amber eyes went to Naomi’s bare back, then to the pile of soaked clothes on my floor, and finally to the headboard. A long, slow, satisfied breath left her nose.

"Twelve of twelve," Belle read off her screen. "That makes the vault full before lunch, so I’m promoting you, Love. You’re officially my favorite employee."

"I don’t work for you," Naomi said into my neck.

"Everyone works for me, and some of you just haven’t signed the paperwork." Belle tossed the shirt so it landed on Naomi’s head. "Put that on before you catch a cold and Misato blames me for the paperwork."

Naomi pulled the shirt down over her shoulders and climbed off me on legs that wobbled like a newborn deer. The hem fell to her mid-thigh. She looked so good in my clothes that past Jace would have cried, and present Jace was only barely holding it together.

"Where’s Davenport?" I asked, reaching for the sheet.