Chapter 63: A Promise, Not a Lie
Chapter 63: A Promise, Not a Lie
We stopped before the last step for the least romantic question in two universes: neither of us knew whether human and Night-Tail biology could produce a child, and neither of us wanted to discover the answer by accident. A sealed packet from the print shop’s abandoned washroom had survived dry and intact. I checked the wrapper twice. Liora checked it a third time, called me paranoid, and waited until I used it anyway.
It was slow when it finally happened, and it was awkward, and there was a genuinely undignified minute in the middle of it where neither of us could stop laughing. She was above me with her hands braced on my chest and I was gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks, and she stopped and breathed and said, "Wait — no, wait, that’s my knee," and we had to sort ourselves out like two people moving a wardrobe.
Then the angle settled, and the laughter left us by degrees.
Liora went still above me. Her eyes searched my face, all the smugness gone from them.
"Alright?"
I nodded too quickly.
Her fingers tightened against my chest. "Use words."
"Yes. Just—give me a second."
She did. For all her confidence, she waited without moving until my breathing eased and my grip on her hips stopped being quite so desperate. The closeness was almost overwhelming: her warmth around me, her weight over me, the small tremors she couldn’t hide where our bodies met. Her ears stayed angled toward me as if she were listening for the smallest change.
When I pulled her down and kissed her, she understood that as permission to move.
She led at first, slowly enough that I could follow. Every shift of her hips was deliberate. She watched me through half-lowered eyes, learning what made my breath catch, what made my hands tighten, when the intensity became too much and she needed to ease back. I had spent the entire evening being catalogued. This was merely the least dignified part of the process.
Except she was losing some of her own composure now. Her breathing turned uneven. Her tail looped hard around my thigh. The smooth rhythm broke whenever my hands moved over her back or pulled her closer, and each time it did, the pleased little curve of her mouth became harder to maintain.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped waiting to be guided.
I don’t know exactly when. I know my hands stopped being tentative. I know I shifted beneath her and found a rhythm of my own, and her eyes opened fully in surprise. For half a second she looked almost offended that I’d learned anything.
Then something warmer replaced it.
"There you are," she whispered.
After that, she wasn’t the only one deciding what happened next.
She kissed me through most of it. That’s what I remember most clearly, oddly enough. Not the mechanics. Her mouth, and her forehead against mine, and the way she said my name when I held her tightly enough that neither of us could pretend there was any distance left between us.
The first time, she said it like an instruction.
The second time, it broke in the middle.
Her rhythm lost its shape. Her ears flattened into her hair, her tail pulled tight around my leg, and her claws pressed into my shoulders as every muscle in her body drew taut. She buried her face against my neck, but that didn’t hide the sound she made or the helpless shudder that ran through her.
Feeling her lose control took the last of mine with it. I held her hips, pulled her against me, and followed a few breaths later with her name caught somewhere between my teeth and her shoulder. There was nothing graceful about it. My whole body locked, my vision went white at the edges, and for several seconds I forgot that breathing was a requirement.
Liora stayed folded over me while the tension left us in small aftershocks. Neither of us spoke. We just held on until our breathing began to sound human again.
Afterwards we lay in a heap on a bed too narrow for two people, sweating, breathing like we’d run somewhere, with her half on top of me because there was no other configuration available.
Her ears were flat against her hair. Her tail lay across my legs, completely limp for the first time since she’d arrived.
"Right," she said eventually, into my chest.
"Right."
"That was—" She stopped. Cleared her throat. "For a first attempt, that was acceptable."
"You’re not going to be smug."
"I am going to be smug, I’m simply too tired to start." Her hand moved slowly across my ribs. "Give me ten minutes."
I lay there with a woman from another universe breathing against my sternum and the lamp guttering low and the timer sitting silently in the corner of my vision, and neither of us said the obvious thing.
That whatever this had been, neither of us was going to be able to call it flirting in the morning.
We didn’t move for a long time, and then we moved for entirely unromantic reasons.
The basin got refilled. There was a cloth, and cold water, and a lot of complaining from a woman who had been shot at, thrown into a freezer door, and dropped through a dimensional tear without once complaining about any of it.
"It’s freezing."
"It’s the same water you washed in three hours ago."
"That was different, I was dirty and unhappy." She took the cloth off me anyway and did the rest herself, sitting on the edge of the bed with her tail hanging. "Drink something. You look like a ghost."
I drank something. Then she drank something, because I pointed at the cup and waited, which is a trick I learned from her.
There was a mark coming up on her hip where my hand had been and four small scabbed crescents on my left shoulder where hers had. We looked at each other’s damage with the same clinical attention we’d have given a monster bite, and then she prodded the crescents and said "mine," in a tone of deep satisfaction, and I decided not to engage.
We ended up back on the bed with her tucked under my arm and her head on my chest, which was a configuration neither of us discussed.
The awkwardness didn’t fully go. I want to be honest about that — there was a solid ten minutes where I couldn’t work out where to put my free hand and she pretended not to notice, and then she took it and put it on her waist and said "there, God," and after that it was easier.
"Adrian."
"Mm."
"Do you think you could ever bring me here permanently?"
She said it into my chest, so I couldn’t see her face, which I suspect was deliberate.
I looked at the ceiling and thought about it properly, because she deserved that more than she deserved an answer.
Permanent contract: Not established. It’s been in every window since the first night. Which means the System has a category for it — you don’t write "not established" about something that can’t exist. And there’s a class archive five days north-east of here.
But there’s a difference between a category and a road, and I have made exactly one promise in my life that I couldn’t keep and I have never forgotten how that felt.
"I don’t know," I said. "The interface talks about permanent contracts like they’re a thing that exists, and something in my class is built to eventually do more than this, and there’s a settlement north-east of here with a class archive in it, and that’s where I’m going." I felt her go still. "But I don’t know if it’s possible. I don’t know if it needs something I’ll never have. Nobody’s told me anything and there’s nobody to ask."
"So no."
"So I can’t promise I’ll find a way. But I promise I’ll look."
She was quiet.
Then her hand closed on the fabric over my ribs and stayed there.
"Good," she said. "If you’d said yes, I’d have known you were managing me."
Right after those words were said, a barrage of system notifications started coming, and they weren’t stopping for a while.
[Resonance: 25% → 55%]
[Resonance Milestone Reached: 50%]
[Preserved Signature Stabilized: Liora Venn.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 50% after an eligible D-grade roll.]...