#its messy and incoherent but o well

Losing himself might not be such a bad thing after all, he thinks, his mouth hot on her neck.

Even as a child, it has always been difficult for Jamison to keep his thoughts straight. Everything seems to race, a constant leap from one topic to the next, prompted by swatches of conversation and pretty things that catch his eye and loud cracks of sudden noise that fissure through his chest like the thrum of thunder. His attention is a soft putty pooled in someone else’s hand; thumb and fingers mold it into a different shape every few minutes, forever driving his focus to something else, something else, something else, to insignificant things that hold no true bearing, and yet regardless of where it catches, it always boomerangs back to lovely sets of charges and bundled sticks of dynamite and bottles of chemical compounds he knows by sight and smell alone, no labels required.

He can never be certain where his thoughts will take him, but there is one thing he is certain of: everything is better when she’s near.

He doesn’t even remember when it started. It must have been a few months ago at the very least. Over the course of the past half year, her presence has gradually become a more comfortable and familiar phenomenon, one that seems to have somehow crept up while his back was turned so that it could envelop him without his cognizance. Whether it was tinkering in the workshop or slapdash dinners in the mess hall or those rare moments stolen out by the beach, she would ensnare him with quiet snickers and subtle humor and the plots of very cheesy Indian films, and then there came the times where he’d be aboard the ORCA with her in the adjacent seat and all of him seemed to suddenly settle, as if simply having her near granted him this new, superseding focus that could somehow ascend the distracting clamor of everything else.

It is perhaps one of the more remarkable things he’s experienced. Not because being consumed so utterly by something that isn’t gunpowder and grenades makes him feel all fluttery inside, but because shipping out is a delight for reasons beyond exercising his thumb upon a detonator’s switch and because returning to the watchpoint means more time spent entangling with her. Formal events are bearable, his downtime is an envious balance of production and dalliance, and assignments are barely assignments at all.

But he still loses himself, just as he always does. He loses himself in her like he loses himself in coils of wire and chemical amalgams during late nights upon the workshop floor because he must finish this set of explosives, he absolutely must—because doesn’t know when his thoughts will still long enough again for him to focus, for him to properly work, for him to put all the little pieces together without thinking about the twenty other things he should have done the other night or last week or a bloody fortnight ago.

Satya isn’t lovely sets of charges or bundled sticks of dynamite or bottles of chemical compounds, but she might as well be. The rest of the world could erupt into nuclear holocaust, and he’d never even notice.

“Please,” she says against the wall, and it is decidedly disheveled and shed of all the pleasantries such an entreaty would entail; “if you don’t stop teasing, I don’t know what I will do with you.”

“I’ve got some suggestions if you’ve got an ear.” Aching and hard, Jamison mouths yet another kiss along the column of her neck. He is flush against her back, his left hand plunged beneath the pleats of her sweeping sapphire saree petticoats. “Thought you wanted to wait ‘til we got back? You’re the star of the show, after all. Guest of honor. Probably be a bit conspicuous if she went missing. What about the monkey and the others?”

“I’m not worried. Patience is one of their virtues. They will survive not seeing me for twenty minutes.” Satya glances over her shoulder, gold-hazel eyes mirthful and alight. Loose locks of jet hair ruin her perfect bun. “What about you?”

Sparks snap in his belly. “Patience was never one of mine.”

“Then hurry.”

Jamison hates wearing suits, anyway.

His heart is his own cannonade as he thrusts in. Her saree is cumbersome and the folds flow far past his legs, but she feels exquisite and the crystal in her left palm etches the circled faces of moons into his bare back and her thick thighs around his hips lock him in. He kisses an exposed shoulder and shudders at how hot and wet she’s become, thoughts mussed, nerves exulting. Stifled noises catch in her throat with each swift movement of his hips, and he leans her back against the wall with his hands clamped on her generous rear, breathing heavy curses into her hair and against her mouth.

It’s hard to handle how inexplicably good she feels. She is at the center of everything with her gorgeous eyes and radiant skin and lilting accent, and the posh, raucous gala he’d never wanted to attend seems so impossibly far from this darkened corridor, an entire universe away, inconsequential and boring and completely pointless. He’d rather let his focus drip away, let his hands wander, let her come around his cock; he’d much rather lose himself here with her than work himself back into that stuffy suit jacket and sit around tables of their merry ragtag band of teammates and clusters of too-important VIPs, all demanding to see the bombshell sighing his name.

Satya is all consuming, even as she crumbles apart. With a helping hand between her legs, she kisses him to suppress the noise, and all he can seem to think is mine,mine,mine, a punctuation at the hilt of every thrust. Her muffled moans splinter through him like a thunderstorm and the tight heat around him feels sublime and nothing else in the world matters more than how perfect everything is in this moment, however brief—her prosthetic arm hooked around his neck, her legs squeezed around his hips, Jamison on her talented tongue.

When he comes, it’s hard and pulsing and messy and good, but she ushers him on until he’s entirely breathless and spent, a deep exertion corded in his thighs. He leans his metal arm against the wall to allow himself a moment to recover, and as he draws in long, jagged breaths, the world slowly starts to bleed back in, blot by blot: her hiked saree, his discarded gear, the slickness of their sweat, the twilit corridor, the opulent gala below, the evening’s warm air.

She presses her forehead to his, nose to nose, eyes half open. Her hair may be out of place and her petticoats may be rumpled and her saree may have come unpinned, but she is just as magnificent now as she was at the night’s inception.

Jamison kisses her, overcome, his thoughts as still as a looking glass.