She arrived late that evening, a little breathless from the stairs, hair pinned back too neatly for the hour, and a pair of sleek, black leather gloves on her hands that made something low in my chest shift without permission. She didn't remove them as she walked through the door, didn't apologize for the delay, didn't offer any excuse at all—instead, she held up her hands with a faint, wry smile that hovered just on the edge of amusement and said, "I've been getting shocks. From some of the bodies. I know it sounds insane, but it feels like a static pulse, like something jumps out of them and into me. The gloves help."
She flexed her fingers as if to demonstrate, the leather catching the overhead light in small, sharp glints. And I should have laughed, or shrugged, or nodded like it meant nothing, but my eyes were already locked on her hands—those hands that handled the dead with such care, such reverence, as though every incision was a question and every organ a prayer. I had watched her touch what no one else could bear to look at, seen the way her fingers moved when they thought no one noticed. I had memorized those movements. I had imagined them. And now, gloved and glinting, they felt too far from skin.
I stepped forward slowly, not as a man seeking closeness nor as a predator drawn to warmth, but as something older, responding to a summons he did not fully understand. There had been something buried in her voice when she spoke of the shocks—something shy and unsaid beneath the explanation, the way people talk about ghosts when they're not ready to admit they've seen them. A tremor not in pitch, but in what she didn't say. Vulnerability braided into defiance. A thread knotted tight around her need to be believed.
And though she stood there with her chin lifted, gloves smoothed and spine straight, she didn't flinch when I moved toward her. Not outwardly. But I saw the difference. I heard it in the rhythm of her breathing—how it grew slow and shallow, like prey catching the scent of something too quiet to be trusted. I saw it in the muscles of her throat, the ones that betrayed her heart, fluttering quick beneath the skin like a trapped moth against glass. It was not fear. It was instinct. It was the soft, evolutionary knowledge of being watched by something that didn't blink often enough to be human.
I reached for her hand without permission.
Not to startle. Not to stake a claim.
But because the ache to feel her—truly feel her—had grown sharp enough to cut through everything else.
My fingers closed around her wrist with deliberate slowness, a gentle clasp meant for examination rather than command, and I felt it the moment her body responded. A single, telling jolt—not enough to recoil, but enough to answer. Her pupils widened slightly. Her shoulders shifted an inch back, not in retreat, but to brace for something she couldn't name. She didn't speak. She didn't protest. She only watched me the way one watches a storm gather over still water, the kind you know will drown something no matter how still you stand.
The leather creaked faintly as I began to peel the glove away, one finger at a time, revealing pale knuckles and fine, nearly translucent veins that mapped her like rivers under snow. Her hand was smaller than I expected, but warm where it met my palm, the warmth of someone who ran too hot from being too alive in a world that fed on the cold. Her skin—bare now—looked impossibly soft, not just untouched but unweathered, a thing that shouldn't have been allowed to survive in a profession so intimate with death.
When I stripped the last of the glove from her, it fell from my fingers without sound, forgotten. I didn't offer words to explain myself. I didn't smile to soften the moment. I only turned my palm upward, and pressed it flush to hers.
Skin to skin. Pulse to pulse.
And she shivered.
Not the kind of shiver meant to signal discomfort.
Not the polite twitch of someone startled by cold or by touch they hadn't seen coming.
No—this was something older.
A reaction dragged from the marrow.
A full-body answering that didn't begin in her nerves, but somewhere deeper—buried where language hadn't reached in years.
It rolled through her in silence, an echo beneath her skin, a single breath caught like a blade between her ribs.
She didn't gasp. She didn't recoil. But her chest tightened, rose just slightly beneath her shirt, as if her lungs had forgotten how to move and were only now remembering under pressure.
I felt it in the tension of her fingers—subtle, but seismic. The way her body stilled, not in resistance, but in attention.
And I watched her.
Because I couldn't not.
A flicker crossed her face then. Something that might have been recognition. Or awe. Or the first inkling of surrender.
It was gone almost as fast as it had come, like heat off a flame when you're too close but not ready to burn.
But I saw it.
It hummed low and live between our palms, that invisible thread stretched so tight it sang—too quiet for the ear, but impossible to ignore. It wasn't heat, not exactly. Not static. Not chemical. It was something older. Something sentient. A burn without flame, a weight without form.
It lingered right there in the space where her lifeline brushed mine.
A pulse line to pulse line communion.
The energy curled itself inwards, slow and serpentine, gathering like breath in the lungs of a thing that hadn't exhaled in centuries. And all around us, the morgue—so sterile, so familiar—changed. Not in shape. Not in scent. But in pressure. In posture.
The air thickened. Bent in toward us.
Not like weather. Like witness.
As though the room itself had gone silent to see what we would do with the thing between us—this low, electric hunger that neither of us had asked for, but both of us now carried.
Everything else receded.
The fluorescents above. The table behind her. The faint scent of steel and bleach and death.
Gone.
All I could hear was the shift of her breathing as it caught once more, steadied, caught again. And beneath it, her heartbeat—no longer rapid, not calm either, but suspended. Like she'd stopped fighting the reaction and was now simply feeling it. Living inside it.
Her hand remained in mine.
Not passively.
Not like a hand forgotten in a handshake.
But deliberately.
Her fingers had stilled, but they hadn't relaxed. They stayed curled in the barest suggestion of tension, like she wasn't sure if she should pull away or pull closer, and the indecision was its own surrender.
She didn't look up. Not yet.
But I felt her eyes—felt the weight of them where they hovered, fixed on the center of our touch, watching her own skin against mine like it might transform at any moment into something unrecognizable.
And I didn't speak.
Couldn't.
Because I knew—down in the cracked marrow of what made me who I am—that if I gave this moment words, it would come alive in a way neither of us could ever bury again.
Something had shifted.
Not around us. Within us.
A door opened in her. Another in me. And what had stepped through wore no face, spoke no language, answered to no god I would name aloud—but it knew us both. It claimed us.
And I let it.
Because this—this frictionless charge, this unbearable restraint of skin to skin—wasn't want.
It wasn't need. It was knowing.
Recognition, yes. But also return.
Of something I hadn't remembered losing.
Of something she hadn't known she was waiting to find.
And still, she had not pulled away.
She could have pulled away. Could have laughed it off, turned, given me some line about blood sugar or static electricity or anything else to undo what had passed between us. But she didn't.
Her fingers shifted instead, just barely, just enough to let me feel the twitch of her nerves under skin, the way she flexed against my hold not to escape it, but to register it fully. Testing the weight of me. Of us. Testing whether I would hold firm if she pushed. Whether I would pull her closer if she yielded.
And I didn't breathe. I didn't blink. I held my hand against hers like a confession I didn't yet have the words for.
Because I understood, with painful clarity, that something irreversible had just occurred.
Not in the room. Not in the lighting or the silence or the way the shadows leaned too far in.
But in her. In me.
Something ancient. Something rooted not in logic, but in the blood. A recognition that bypassed language and anchored itself in the space between awareness and want. The kind of shift that doesn't ask permission. The kind that rewrites the rules of touch, of presence, of proximity. The kind that leaves no clean exits.
I could feel it unraveling in me already.
And the most dangerous part, the most exquisitely dangerous part, was this: She felt it too.
She had known it the moment our skin met.
And still, she had not pulled away.
Her fingers curled into mine almost reflexively, and for the smallest fraction of a second, her knees dipped as if her body wasn't entirely convinced it could keep holding her up. The look on her face was not shock. Not entirely. It was hunger, cloaked beneath curiosity. It was need, shaped like nerve. And I felt something old rise up in me, something I had buried so deep it no longer had a name, something that wanted not to harm her, but to ruin her for anyone who would ever think to touch her this way again.
My grip tightened around her fingers, not enough to bruise, but enough to claim, and I leaned close enough to see the way her pupils swallowed the light.
Her mouth curved upward, but there was no laughter in it. Only the slow, teasing edge of someone aware they were walking the blade of something dangerous. "Careful, Draeven," she said, her voice no louder than a whisper but no less sure for its softness. "You look like you want to devour me."
God help me, I did.
I said her name, softly but with intention, tasting it like a sacrament meant only for the dark, as though it had always belonged in my mouth, not for casual use or polite introductions, but for something deeper, something meant to be spoken in a room where no one else could hear, where breath touched breath and every word carried the weight of something that couldn't be unsaid.
I moved toward her, not to kiss her, because that would've fractured the fragile tension still holding everything in place, a tension so fine it felt like a wire drawn between us, vibrating with a charge that was not meant for anything as crude as resolution, but because I needed to be closer to the shift I had just felt bloom in the space between us, that sudden and irreversible tilt in gravity where I was no longer just a man and she was no longer just a woman, but something older, something mythic, something forming itself in the charged hush between touch and restraint.
And as I came near, the scent of her changed, subtly but unmistakably, deepening into something warmer, denser, laced with adrenaline and something chemical beneath it, something primal, like the way skin smells when it's lit by the fire of wanting and not yet having, the way need begins to pulse just under the surface, skin flushing with heat that has nowhere to go.
And my voice, when it finally rose, did not come from any civilized place inside me, not from the part of me that reasons or bargains or weighs consequences, but from the place buried deep and long starved, the place shaped by hunger that never learned the language of patience.
"You have no idea how true that is."
And still, she didn't flinch.
She didn't laugh, didn't smirk, didn't offer a coy little glance to brush away what now stood between us like a line scorched into the floor.
She only looked at me with the kind of steady, still-eyed calm that you see in prey animals just before they surrender, not from fear, but from some deeper instinct, some ancient recognition that tells them when the hunt is over and the only thing left is to face whatever comes next.
There was no denial in her gaze.
No confusion.
Only something achingly aware.
Something curious enough to stay.
She left not long after that, her gloves tucked tight in one hand, her hair still carrying the imprint of the morgue lights, her breath a little uneven, like it hadn't quite settled back into her lungs properly, but she didn't look back when the door closed behind her, and I didn't follow, not with my body, not yet, but some part of me had already gone with her, had already wrapped itself around whatever lived in that stillness between us and refused to let it fade.
But I wasn't done
I couldn't be.
Hours passed. The body was processed. Notes were taken. The reports typed. The steel trays cleaned and reset. Everything that should have pulled me back into the rhythm of routine came and went, unnoticed, like white noise beyond glass.
And when night fell hard and the city softened at its edges, when the last fluorescent light buzzed out and the morgue's silence returned to its usual hum, I found myself outside her building.
Not consciously.
Not by plan.
It was as though something inside me had already mapped the route before I thought to resist it, like the shape of her shadow had already carved a path into the soles of my shoes.
I stood there, just beneath the reach of the streetlamp, where the light could not quite expose me and the city was too tired to care what moved beneath its skin. The window above me was lit in low amber, her silhouette framed in the curtain's pale flicker, and I watched without guilt or shame or anything that might have once warned me against this kind of watching.
Because she had touched me.
Because I had let her.
And nothing after that would be simple again.
I waited.
I waited until her shadow slowed, until the light dimmed and her room softened into the quiet edges of sleep. And through that narrow gap in the curtains, I saw her move, her body folding into the bed with the unguarded weariness of someone finally safe, her spine curling beneath the sheets like something delicate giving in, her hand stretching across the pillow with fingers that curled not into fists, but into the fabric, into the memory of what she'd held hours earlier, my hand, my skin, the place where something ancient had stirred.
She turned once in her sleep, and the blanket slipped low, revealing the bare curve of her shoulder, the one that had pressed against mine, the one I hadn't stopped thinking about since she'd walked away. Her breath was slow, the kind that comes not from peace, but from exhaustion laced with something else, something restless and warm that still hadn't left her system.
And even in sleep, her lips parted just slightly, not in a smile, not in fear, but in something that looked terribly like surrender, as though her body still remembered mine even when her mind had slipped somewhere else.
I stayed until the stars began to die behind the slow bleeding of dawn, until the light softened the hard line of her window and the sky made its first quiet attempt at forgetting the night.
I stayed because I couldn't leave her yet, not without breaking something that had only just begun to form, not without carrying the full weight of what I'd felt when our skin touched and that low hum had passed between us like an unspoken vow.
I stayed because something in me had recognized her.
And I knew, with the kind of certainty that doesn't waver or forgive, that recognition never fades.