Chapter 39| Wanted It Rather Than Needed It

Chapter 39: Chapter 39| Wanted It Rather Than Needed It

Damian looked at her.

She held his gaze with the specific steadiness of someone who had thought about what they were saying before they said it and had no interest in walking it back.

Then she turned toward the bathroom and looked at him over her shoulder.

And reached out her hand.

He looked at her hand for a moment. Then he stood up from the table and crossed the room and took it and she pulled him toward the bathroom with the ease of someone who had already decided how this went and was simply arriving at it.

The bathroom was small and honest about it. The same quality as the rest of the unit, functional and clean and without pretension.

Sable turned the taps and steam began to rise. She turned to face him in the small space between the bath and the wall and looked at him with the warm direct expression that had replaced the clinical distance so gradually that he hadn’t been able to identify the exact moment it happened.

He looked at his Flux reading.

[Flux: 58%]

Still had some. He looked at her.

"I still have some Flux," he said. "We can wait until.."

"Don’t worry about it," she said. She stepped closer. Put her hand flat against his chest the way she’d put it at the back of his head. Present and deliberate. "You did well today. You did well this whole week." She looked up at him. "Let me fill you up properly. Then we’re both starting fresh."

He looked at her.

She looked back at him and the steam from the bath moved around them and the unit was quiet and Kira was somewhere in the building doing a perimeter sweep that was going to take forty minutes and the world outside the window continued without knowing what it was doing.

She reached behind herself, then changed her mind about the order of things. Her hands found the hem of her top instead and she pulled it over her head in one smooth motion and tossed it out through the bathroom door into the room beyond. It landed somewhere on the floor and neither of them looked at where.

She stood in front of him in just her bra in the small steaming space and the warmth of the room and the warmth of her were the same temperature and her chest rose and fell with the particular breathing of someone who had stopped pretending the moment was anything other than what it was.

The bra was doing considerable work.

He noticed that with the specific attention of someone whose eyes had been making a disciplined habit of not noticing and had just stopped being disciplined about it.

She reached behind herself properly this time and the clasp came free and she let her big boobs fall freely and stood in front of him completely unhurried. The steam moved around them and she threw her bra at the same location her top landed. Her hands came to rest at her sides and she looked at him with the warm direct expression that had replaced the clinical distance so gradually he hadn’t been able to mark the moment it happened.

[Grade Scan: Sable Wren — Grade A. Flux restoration available: 65%]

Damian leaned forward and his hands found her waist and she exhaled at the contact. Slow, deliberate, her eyes staying on his while his mouth found her left nipple and closed around her with the pressure that drew the best response from her every time.

She gasped."uhmmm"

Her hand came to the back of his head immediately, fingers pressing into his hair, and the milk came warm and immediate and rich and he drew slowly and felt her lean into it. Her back arching slightly, her free hand finding his shoulder and gripping it, her breathing abandoning any attempt at management above him.

He moved to the right nipple.

"Damian..." His name in her mouth with that quality it had acquired somewhere between the motel and the farmhouse kitchen. Not professional, not clinical. Just his name said by someone for whom it had stopped being just a name.

He stayed with it. Slow and deliberate, his tongue working against her, one hand moving from her waist to the curve of her lower back drawing her closer and she came without resistance, her forehead dropping forward until it rested against the top of his head, her breathing ragged and unmanaged and completely genuine above him.

The milk came and the Flux climbed and the steam from the bath filled the small space around them and somewhere in the building Kira Claire was doing a perimeter sweep that was going to take exactly as long as it needed to take.

He stayed until the system confirmed.

[Flux: 58% + 65% = 100%]

Ding!

[Milk Memory: Refreshed. A-grade bonus reapplied. Duration: 24 hours.]

[Bonus compounding: ×1.7]

He sat back drawing his mouth from her nipples, milk remnants dripping on his lips.

She stayed where she was for a moment. Breathing, her hand still resting at the back of his head, her eyes closed. The expression on her face was the one she’d had in Eren’s spare room. The one that appeared when precision abandoned its post entirely and left something warmer and less managed in its place.

Then she opened her eyes and looked at him.

And something shifted in the quality of the moment. A door opening that had been edging open since the motel room and that was now simply open, no ambiguity about it, no navigation required.

He realized, sitting in the steam of a safe house bathroom with Sable looking at him like that, that this was the first time since he was sixteen years old that he had felt something that wasn’t strategy or survival or the cold mechanical necessity of staying alive one more day.

Six years in the facility. Sucking breast milk had been a refuel cycle. A transaction. The body getting what it needed to keep functioning, nothing more complicated than eating or sleeping.

This was not that.

He didn’t know exactly when it had stopped being that. Somewhere between the motel room and here the transaction had accumulated weight and the weight had become something he didn’t have a clean word for and standing in the steam of a bathroom in a safe house in a city that didn’t know he existed. He understood that for the first time in six years something in him had wanted something rather than simply needed it.

She was still looking at him.

He looked back.

The bath was still running behind her, steam rising, the water level climbing, and neither of them said anything and neither of them needed to and the unit held its quiet around them.

He stood up.

She took his hand again, the same way she’d taken it in the doorway, certain and unhurried and reached past him to turn the taps off.

"We’re partners," she said quietly.

"Partners," Damian confirmed.

The bath waited. The steam settled. The unit held its quiet.

And for the first time since he was sixteen years old Damian let something happen that had nothing to do with survival and everything to do with wanting it to.