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I close my eyes.
The bond gives me what sight can’t. His need, bright and raw. His breathing against my skin. Crisp apple and salt in the air. The cool shift where his shoulder fades beneath my mouth. I kiss the place anyway.
Ezra gasps. My lips meet resistance, then pass through a fraction, leaving cold sensation across my tongue before his body firms again.
The intimacy feels different like this. I stroke him by memory when his hips blur beneath my hand.
Ezra guides me with his voice. “Slower.”
I obey by dragging my thumb over the head of his cock as it flickers between full heat and cool pressure. His partly faded hand moves over me, alternating between firm strokes and spectral trails that make pleasure spark strangely through my body.
I purr against his throat. The sound travels through the bond. Ezra arches into me, becoming clearer where my chest presses to his.
“There,” he says. “Keep doing that.”
I kiss him again and let the purr deepen. His body steadies in patches. My hand works him faster. His grip tightens around me. We move together against the desk, mouths meeting between breaths, every flicker answered with sound, pressure, scent, and the bond we formed before either of us understood what fear might seal inside it.
Ezra comes first. His body turns almost painfully solid as he spills over my hand, forehead dropping to my shoulder. The sensation of him shaking against me pulls my own release close.
His hand slides down my cock again. “Come for me,” he whispers.
Pleasure tears through me, sharp enough that my knees bend. Ezra keeps one arm solid around my neck while his other hand continues moving over my cock, fading enough that the pressure shifts between warm grip and spectral cool. When it passes, I stay against him.
Neither of us speaks for several breaths.
Then Ezra kisses beneath my ear. “You’re disappearing too.”
I straighten enough to see his face. “I’m right here.”
“You cook. Guard. Carry. Check doors. Keep me breathing. Now you have an omega upstairs, and you will turn yourself into a full-time emergency response team if we let you.”
“You need me.”
“We want you.”
I look down at our open clothes, at the evidence on my hand, at Ezra’s body flickering but relaxed. “Keeping you alive matters more than what I want.”
“Survival can’t be the only thing our bond is allowed to do.”
The words settle between us. I have no answer that isn’t rooted in fear.
A floorboard creaks above.
Pepper’s voice drifts down the stairs. “Theo?”
I clean my hand quickly with a cloth from the desk drawer, then help Ezra fix his clothes. He catches my face and kisses me once, softer now.
We find Pepper halfway down the attic stairs, wrapped in her blue blanket with her curls piled messily on one side.
I reach her in two steps. “You should have called.”
“I did.”
“You should have waited.”
“I made it down four stairs.”
Her gaze moves past me to Ezra. His hair is disordered, mouth swollen, body faint at one shoulder but calm.
