“And now me.” Because I sure as hell hadn’t made his life any easier.

“You are nothing like Christine!” he said, in my face. “She was a responsibility, a mistake I made when young and foolish, and from whom I came to believe I would never be free!”

“Then what am I?” I challenged, staring up into blazing sapphire eyes.

“A joy.”

His mouth crushed mine, parting my lips in a bruising kiss that I returned with equal intensity. My hands caught the sides of his face, digging into that ridiculous hair. All eight pounds of it, soft and shiny as a woman’s, that I’d started out hating and somehow grown to love. Just like I loved—

He jerked back, and the expression in his eyes told me I must have been projecting again. I found I didn’t mind all that much. I found I liked it. Like the mouth pressed into the curve of my throat, my breast, my pelvis, the teeth and tongue altering between laving and nipping, while I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I really had gone mad.

When I let myself think about it, how much had changed, how much was changing, it terrified me. We weren’t what we had been, not any of us. And I didn’t know what we would be by the time the war ended, or even if we’d still be alive. But right now, I wouldn’t trade it. Wouldn’t trade any of it.

I didn’t know that he heard me that time, didn’t know if I was still coherent enough mentally for my thoughts to make sense. All I knew was that he did things I didn’t even know how to put a name to. Until I was writhing and begging and threatening and—

He took my fingers and brought them down to his lips, and then further, to spread me open just that much more, for him. I slid in knuckle-deep, so ready—I had been ready. And then, his eyes never leaving mine, he pulled my fingers to his mouth and licked them clean.

It felt like something broke inside, but I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t even say please anymore. Just curled my fingers in his mouth and reached for him with the hand he was no longer holding. I grabbed and pulled with no real strength, but he came, crawling up my body, letting that glorious hair drag against me, the tacky sweat on my skin amplifying the friction.

Until he settled against me, pulled my thigh over his hip and ground, in little movements that had me sobbing and blinking at the ceiling like I had forgotten what it was, and had him groaning and talking into my neck. I couldn’t understand a word, not a word, because everything around me had become white noise; the ebb and flow of his movements counterpointed with my own so that I honestly couldn’t tell which were mine and which were his.

Until he slid in two inches and stopped.

“W-what are you doing?”

“I will only ever do this the first time physically once,” he told me, apparently serious. “I want to remember everything, every movement, every scent, every sigh.…”

I growled and flipped us, seating him completely, all in one movement, the burn just the way I liked it. “Believe me. You’ll have plenty of reminders.”