Page 16 of Adrift! (Cosmic Connections Cruise #2)

Across the lightyears, Ikaryo had found beauty and devastation, oddities and wonders. He’d memorialized some of those moments on what was left of his skin, but always, he’d kept himself just enough apart that the only scars were ones he chose himself.

Holding Remy McCoy, he grasped a universe in miniature between his hands. She was a compelling paradox with more facets than the capacitorus, a fusion of dark doubts and brilliant boldness, her cool, cynical facade cracked only rarely by the soaring inspiration of the songs she kept swallowed.

But he’d had a glimpse within, and now he wanted to never let it go. Every synapse and circuit was aligned in that aspiration.

Ikaryo reveled in the feel of her, all his senses tuned to frequences he suspected only she could arouse, overloading with her textures and tastes.

Every gasp and moan resounded through him, magnifying his own pleasure until it bordered on agony—the awakening of a yearning he’d left behind on his closed world and on all the ships thereafter that he’d never seen again.

The wonder in her voice when she’d called him beautiful echoed in some hollow space inside him, as forsaken as the Zarnax Zone.

He’d nearly come undone, right then. In service behind a bar, he’d blended into the scenery, just a sentient beverage dispenser, but she’d seen him, sought him out. She’d chosen him.

Being in her bed was his prize.

As he kissed his way back up her body, rising over the curve of her belly to dip into her navel, past the heave of her ribs, the myriad scents of the shower washes teased him, like she was a whole garden of impossible flowers blooming for his delight.

But it was the perfume of her—the faintest sheen of sweat on her bare skin—that truly intoxicated him.

Tiny sparks rose with each contact of his lips, the ambient charge between their bodies turbulent enough to dance for a heartbeat before dissipating.

When he paused with his chest wedged into her tender core, she reached out—he thought to capture the wayward particles, her green eyes shining with delight.

But then her hands clasped tight around him instead, the green darkened with desire. “Ikaryo…”

Augments pulsing in rhythm with their matched heartbeats, he hauled himself above her, drinking in the sight of her flushed skin and tousled hair, the way her chest rose and fell with quickening breath, her tight nipples as red as her hair.

He had to kiss those too, devoting tongue and teeth to worship the pebbled flesh until she writhed against him, and he exulted in the hint of salt and the musky tang of her arousal like he’d just fashioned the most precious potion, an incomparable infusion—and it was all for him.

For him, no universe existed outside this bed, only the ecstatic eternity he might find with her.

“Fuck me,” she growled. “Now.”

The Earther obscenity shocked him almost as much as her impatient command delighted him. “Remy—”

“Together,” she repeated, pulling him down for a desperate, deep kiss.

Finally poised at the crux of her body—so ready for him, as he needed her—he paused one last time, the wanton sprawl of her tattooed in his imagination forever. Then he obeyed.

Echoing her tongue in his mouth, he joined her as demanded, feeling her inner muscles shift and soften to accept him, her flesh yielding to embrace his alien presence, choosing him again.

Not just compatible, not just perfect. Sublime.

A memory swept through him of the moment when the relocation transport ship had cleared the broken towers, piercing the muddy, poisoned skies of his homeworld.

The scarred curvature had vanished behind him, and he’d seen the stars for the first time in his life: pure light in the flawless dark.

As everything had fallen away, he’d felt only awe.

To feel it again now with her, after so many years of wandering alone… How could he begin to share that with her?

Sinking against her, he began to move, flexing into her secret spaces even as he reached down between their bodies to find the subtle knot of nerves he’d memorized earlier with his tongue.

When he touched the little nub, she surged up into him with a strangled cry of his name, so violent he fantasized for a moment she’d shorted his circuitry.

Never had he been so glad of the power in his augmented arm to hold himself up while his unaltered fingertips learned every nuance of loving her.

As he played with the swelling bud, she gasped against his mouth, her legs tightening around the backs of his thighs as she found the rhythm with him. “Oh—yes. Just like that…” Her fingers dug into his shoulders, nails scoring his skin.

He turned up the sensation in his enhancements as far as it would go, until he swore the individual ridges of her fingerprints, the microfluctuations in her skin conductivity, the bioelectric hum of her cells would burn an unforgettable memory into not just his body and every synapse, but into the eternal energy of him that would one day return to the universe.

So amplified, the boosted cybernetics cast patterns of light across her skin, painting her in silver and blue and then ultraviolet, as if she was made of starlight.

In that moment, she was every distant light he’d ever chased, every home he’d never found. Two displaced souls calling across an impossible distance. Finally a chance…

As they moved together, matching breaths, each point of contact between them blazed, as his enhancements reacted to the cascading stimuli.

He realized she must feel the wild current arc where their bodies joined.

Before he could pull back to diminish the exchange, she bowed up into him, seeking even more of that stimulation, and a primal satisfaction rushed through him, that he and only he could give it to her.

Releasing her so he could brace both hands on the mattress, he drove harder into her body, her whimper of need urging him on.

“Ikaryo—” Her voice hitched higher, her body tensing beneath him. “I…”

“Yes,” he groaned, angling deeper within her to find that hidden spot. “Now.” Positioning a fingertip above her softest flesh, he released a tiny jolt…

She came apart in his arms with a cry that was half scream, half song.

Her body clenched around him with a power that triggered his own release.

Sympathetic pulses throbbed through him, an exquisite feedback loop where each of her spasms heightened his own pleasure until he couldn’t find the distinction between her climax and his.

The imploding supernova of sensation brought him crashing down, blanking all his awareness except of her.

He would’ve collapsed on her, except one last erg of energy in his slackening arm let him angle to one side.

She tilted with him, their sprawled bodies still joined as the aftershocks rippled through them both in gravitational waves of bliss.

As their synchronized breathing slowed, each beat of their hearts etched a little deeper in him until the rhythms merged, like the eternal background hum of their own private cosmos. For once, floating adrift in the vast unknowable felt…like where he was supposed to be.

She traced a lazy finger over his chest, not following the interfacing circuitry of his augments or any of the tattooed imagery, but improvising a new path. “That was”—she sighed, the deflation separating them by a few nanometers—“not in the brochure.”

“I certainly hope not.” He tightened his arm around her shoulders to close the distance. “That was a Remy-only special.”

When she laughed softly, the sound resonated through him like the final chord of a perfect song.

The room lights shifted to a subtle red-gold, flattering and calming, but as he stroked her back, he felt the tension gathering in her, one fingertip drumming on his breastbone in broken counterpoint to his pulse. Erratic, not erotic.

“Ikaryo?” Her voice was small, vulnerable in a way he’d never heard before, the timbre just on the verge of cracking. “Do we know this is…us?”

He paused his caress. “Who else is here?”

“The resonark.”

“Remy—”

“It responds to emotion. Evens believes it’s a connecting force. What if it’s making us feel things that aren’t real?”

For a long moment, he considered. “Even if the anomaly is an amplifier, even if it’s turning up the volume or clearing the static, something must be there first. You’re a musician; you know you can’t create harmonic resonance from nothing.

To match, a frequency must exist already—or at least the potential, ready to resound. ”

When her fist clenched on his chest, as if trying to catch hold of the steady beat, he put his hand over hers, interlacing their fingers to press her open palm over his heart.

“This is me, Remy. All of me, the early pieces that survived my world and the extras added later that make me who I am now.” He peered down at her. “What do you think?”

“I… I’m not sure.” Her troubled green gaze glistened, the amber flecks gilted in the delicate light. “From the first time I played a note, I knew who I wanted to be. But obviously I was wrong. What if I’m wrong about…this?”

“What if you aren’t? What if you never were.”

“You don’t know—”

“True. None of us do. Certainly not Evens with his lying and obsession. But what I feel matters too. If the resonark entangled us somehow… I’ve seen your knitting, which proves entanglement doesn’t guarantee a harmony that holds.”

“Hey.” She thumped their joined hands on his chest, but the hint of tears was gone from her eyes.

“It’s what we do with the threads we’re given,” he told her. “Mariah would say every knit and purl can change what we’re making. That’s what I believe. And maybe that’s what scares me too. We’re the ones holding the tangles.”

She let out another shaky breath that was half a laugh. “Whatever happens next, this cruise has been…” After a long beat of silence where his heart hung suspended under their hands, she just shook her head, ducking under his chin.

He buried his lips in the locks of her hair, mussed into a beautiful knot that might never let him go. “For me too.”

As they drifted toward sleep, still wrapped in each other and the lingering warmth of their connection, Ikaryo realized a fundamental element of his own universe had shifted.

For the first time since leaving his devastated homeworld, he wasn’t thinking of his next destination. He’d been seeking a place, and instead he’d found a person in the space between the stars—and a reason to stay.

She saw his broken pieces and called him beautiful. With her, his unfeeling machinery became music.

Tomorrow, they would sing to the anomaly in the hopes of saving the ship. But tonight, they had found a harmony all their own.

Could he also find the words to tell her what that meant to him?

The Love Boat I might still be perilously adrift, but he was exactly where he wanted to be.