The kiss lasted longer than either of us had planned for.
When it finally broke she stepped back half a step, not away exactly, just enough to look at me, her chest rising and falling and her usual composure completely absent. Her grey eyes were wide and her lips were slightly parted and she looked, for the first time since I had known her, like someone who did not know what came next.
It was a remarkable thing to see on her face.
"I should tell you something," she said.
"Tell me."
She looked at the floor for a moment then back up. "I have not done this before. Any of it. I am aware of how that sounds at my age and I do not particularly want to discuss the reasons. I just thought you should know."
She delivered it with the same flat directness she brought to everything, chin up, not asking for anything, just giving me accurate information and letting me decide what to do with it.
I looked at her for a moment.
"All right," I said.
"That is all?"
"What else would you like me to say."
She considered that. Then something in her expression shifted, the braced quality going out of it.
"Nothing," she said. "That is actually the correct answer."
I reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and she went very still at the contact, her eyes on mine, tracking everything.
"I am going to go slowly," I said. "Tell me if you want me to stop."
"I will," she said. And then, quieter: "I do not think I will want you to."
***
I kissed her again, softer this time, no urgency in it, just warmth and contact and the slow establishing of something she could settle into. She kissed back carefully at first, learning the rhythm, and then with more confidence as she found her footing.
My hands moved to her waist and she inhaled slightly at that, a small involuntary sound that she appeared surprised to have made. I kept my hands still until she relaxed against them, which did not take long.
I walked her back toward the bed slowly. She went without hesitation, which told me something, and when the back of her knees met the edge of it she sat down and looked up at me with wide serious eyes that were paying very close attention to everything.
"Still all right," I said.
"Yes," she said.
I sat beside her and turned her face toward mine and kissed her again, and while I did I brought one hand to her collar and undid the first button of her dress. She stiffened slightly, one reflexive tension, and then deliberately let it go.
"Keep going," she said against my mouth.
I kept going.
Button by button, unhurried, giving her time to adjust to each stage before moving to the next. She sat very still through it with her hands in her lap and her breathing becoming less steady with each passing minute, a flush working its way up from her collarbone that she could not have controlled if she had tried.
When the dress came loose I pushed it from her shoulders and she let me, her eyes on my face the entire time, watching my expression with the focused intensity of someone taking notes.
"You are studying me," I said.
"I study everything," she said. "You do not mind?"
"I do not mind."
I pressed my lips to her collarbone and she made a sound that she immediately tried to suppress. I moved lower and she stopped trying to suppress it.
***
I laid her back gently and she went, her hair spreading out around her, her grey eyes following me as I moved over her. She was lean and pale and precise looking even like this, nothing soft about her except the flush on her skin and the way her hands had found the sheets on either side of her and were holding loosely.
I took my time.
I learned her the way I had learned Mira, slowly and without rushing, but with Sera everything was slightly different because every response was new to her. The places that made her breath catch, she did not know they were there until I found them. The sounds she made were small and surprised, as if her own body was providing information she had not previously had access to.
"There," I said, when I found the spot beneath her ribs that made her spine curve.
"What was—" she started, and then I did it again and the question dissolved.
Her composure came apart in pieces, each piece going slower than the last because she was paying attention to all of it, cataloguing it, trying to hold onto the analytical distance she kept from everything. Eventually that stopped being possible. Eventually there was just the sensation and the warmth and her hands gripping the sheets and her voice making sounds she had never made before.
"Kael."
"I have you."
"I did not know it felt like—" She stopped. Started again. "I did not know."
"I know," I said. "Now you do."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh and then was not a laugh at all as my hands moved lower and found the hem of her underskirt.
I looked up at her. "Yes?"
Her face was flushed and open and entirely unlike its usual self. She nodded once, quick and certain.
I moved the fabric aside and touched her and she made the sharpest sound yet, her hips lifting off the bed involuntarily, her hand flying to cover her mouth.
"Do not," I said.
She lowered her hand. The next sound came out unmuffled and she squeezed her eyes shut as if that helped.
I worked slowly and carefully, reading every response, building something that had nowhere to go except forward. She was completely present, completely in it, the analytical distance gone entirely. Her hips moved against my hand without her directing them. Her head pressed back into the pillow.
"This is," she started.
"Yes," I said.
"I cannot think."
"You do not need to."
"I always think."
"Not tonight."
She came with her back arched and both hands gripping my arm and a sound that she did not try to muffle, long and broken and entirely her own. I held her through all of it until the last tremor passed and she went still and lay breathing hard with her forearm over her eyes.
A long silence.
"Well," she said finally, from under her arm.
I said nothing. I waited.
She lowered her arm and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then she turned her head and looked at me with the grey eyes, still slightly unfocused, her cheeks still flushed.
"I want to do something," she said.
"Tell me."
"I want to—" She stopped. Tried again with the particular precision of someone choosing words carefully. "I want to do for you what you just did for me. But I do not know how."
I looked at her.
"Then I will show you," I said.
***
She sat up, still flushed, still slightly unsteady, with the focused expression of someone who had decided to learn something and intended to do it correctly.
I guided her hands first. Showing her the grip, the pressure, the pace. She followed with careful attention, adjusting based on my responses the way she adjusted a remedy based on a patient's feedback, precise and methodical and utterly serious about getting it right.
"Like this," I said.
"Like this," she repeated, and adjusted, and I made a sound that told her she had adjusted correctly.
A small satisfied expression crossed her face. The expression of someone whose hypothesis has been confirmed.
Then I guided her lower and she went without hesitation, her grey eyes coming up to find mine as her lips touched me for the first time. She was tentative for exactly one moment, the last reflex of unfamiliarity, and then she was not tentative at all. She applied the same focused intelligence she brought to everything, reading my responses, learning what worked and what worked better, building confidence with every minute that passed.
She was, I was not surprised to find, a remarkably fast learner.
Her eyes stayed on mine. Watching. Recording. Adjusting.
I let her set the pace and the terms and kept one hand loosely in her hair and watched her face and understood that this was Sera Voss doing what Sera Voss did with everything she decided was worth her full attention.
She gave it her full attention.
When I finally stilled her with a hand at her shoulder she sat back and looked up at me with an expression that was something I had never seen on her before. Not the flat professional assessment. Not the careful nothing.
Something warm and direct and quietly pleased with itself.
"Well," she said again.
"Well," I agreed.
She almost smiled. The almost was closer than it had ever been.
I pulled her up to me and kissed her and she came without hesitation and kissed me back and the candle burned low on the table by the window and neither of us was going anywhere.
Second Bond: forming.