He pulled back.

Six inches.

Then pushed forward.

Her throat took him again and she made that sound again, muffled and furious and edged now with something else — the involuntary catch of a body finding a rhythm it was not asked about and beginning to answer it anyway.

Gck. Gck. Gck.

The sounds filled the mechanism room. One hundred screens documented them. The copper threads of the runic energy vessels hummed their single sustained note against the obscene wet percussion of her throat working around him, her hands pressing against his thighs with pressure that was no longer quite pushing — it was something closer to holding on.

Her saliva ran down her chin. Her eyes streamed — not crying, but the involuntary tears of a body responding to an airway being managed — running down her flushed cheeks and falling from her jaw.

He reached down with his free hand and pulled at her dress.

The fabric moved. She grabbed for it — one hand releasing his thigh, gripping the neckline — and he felt her jaw tighten, felt her teeth engage against him again with the same fury that had started this, the same teeth that had become the thing that was now undoing him.

The sensation ran up his spine.

The repeated, maddening friction of her teeth — not designed, not intentional, the pure reflex of a woman refusing to yield even with his cock in her throat — dragged against him every time he pulled back, and every time they dragged he felt the fire at the base of his spine move a degree closer to its conclusion.

A first.

In a life that had moved past firsts very quickly, in a body that had been given every conceivable sensation and had moved past novelty into a kind of terminal satiation that was the problem he’d been carrying for weeks — this was, specifically and undeniably, a first.

Her teeth.

He came.

It was not a controlled release. It arrived the way the first things arrive — with the involuntary force of something that had not asked permission, his grip in her hair tightening, his hips pressing forward one final time and holding there, his cock buried in her throat as the release began.

The first pulse was audible. A sound from his chest — low and guttural, surprised at itself.

The second registered in his legs.

The rest filled her throat.

He felt her swallow — involuntary, rapid, the reflex of a body managing what it had been given — and the swallowing sensation ran along the whole length of him as he continued to empty, the hot, dense volume of it flooding her throat, her mouth, the space between them.

He pulled back slowly.

Her throat released him inch by inch, the sound of the withdrawal wet and continuous and obscene, her gag reflex answering the departure with the same reflexive spasms it had answered his presence with.

He pulled out completely.

She coughed.

One sharp, total cough — her body reclaiming its own airway — and then another, and the force of it shook her shoulders, her hand going to her throat, her whole frame doubled forward in the chair. His seed leaked from her parted lips. Ran down her chin. Fell onto the displaced fabric of her dress in a thick, continuous stream that caught the amber light and held it.

She gasped.

The sound of someone breathing after not breathing. The ragged, total quality of oxygen returning to a body that had been somewhere else.

Her eyes were streaming. Her lips were swollen and wet. Her chin was covered in the mixed evidence of the last several minutes — his seed, her saliva, and the involuntary tears of a body that had been through a thing it was not prepared for.

She coughed again.

Pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. Turned her face away from him, her shoulders shaking, her chest working in rapid, unsteady increments.

He looked at her.

At the face that had no armor on it right now. At the sharp features and the iron-colored eyes, both currently focused entirely on breathing, on the immediate and pressing business of being a body that had been used and was now accounting for itself.

"You look beautiful," he said.

She made a sound.

It started as a response — something with edges, something aimed — and arrived as nothing, her throat not yet available for language, the words she had assembled dispersing before they reached air.

He reached forward.

His hands — both of them, settling at her waist, her ribs, the warmth of them registering through what was left of her dress — lifted her.

Out of the chair.

Not violently. Not with the urgent, improvised quality of improvised force. With the smooth, total certainty of a man to whom her weight was simply not a factor. She came up from the chair like something being lifted with engineering rather than effort, her lower body trailing, the prosthetic leg hanging, her upper body against his chest.

"Put me—" Her voice was raw, barely above a croak. "Don’t—"

He turned.

The control panel was behind him. Three meters of formation crystal arrays and copper threading and runic energy display, its surface cleared by the sweep of her hands where she’d gripped it earlier — the broad, flat surface of it exactly level with his hips.

He placed her on it.

The cold of the panel met her thighs and she gasped — a sharp intake at the temperature contrast — her hands going back to brace herself, her palms flat on the runic surface, the crystal panels beneath her lighting up briefly at the warmth of contact.

He stood between her legs.

Or what would have been her legs, what had once been her legs — what were now the hinges of the prosthetic on one side and the shortened, scarred end of her left thigh on the other, both of them spreading as his hands pressed them apart with the unhurried certainty of a man making room.

She pushed back against his hands.