The silence after impact was its own kind of heat... breath on breath, heartbeat on heartbeat, the room still ringing with what they'd done.
For a suspended second, Lila didn't think at all. Her mind was a bright, white blank where sensation lived, fluttering in the hollow of her throat and the heavy throb between her legs.
Then feeling returned in ordered waves: the shape of his chest under her palms, the dull sting where his teeth had pressed, the slow unclenching of muscles that had held him like a secret.
Not long ago, this same body had carried the weight of his refusal like stone.
The look on his face when he'd pulled away had lived inside her... sour, stubborn, the kind of memory that sits behind the ribs and drags.
She'd gone gray at the edges after that. Sadness first, then that brittle flatness that pretends it doesn't care.
She'd already lost him, and with him, the last chance to complete her mission.
