Page 57 of Night Shift

The hardest one.

I open my eyes.

“I will trust you to return.”

Something breaks open in her expression.

Then—because she has always been braver than I am—Calliope pulls my face down to hers and kisses me.

There is nothing tentative about it this time. She kisses me with all the anger and relief and fear we have accumulated between us, and when my arms close around her, she comes willingly.

That matters more than I ever understood it could.

The sky is thick with night, but the world inside her apartment is the inverse of darkness: urgent, raw, lit with a star’s worth of hunger. She tears open the buttons of my shirt with vengeful precision, and I respond in kind, cupping her in my arms, flaring at every place our skin blazes together. The table shudders under us, our hands moving faster than intention. She laughs into my neck as I sweep her up and pin her against the cool plaster. My palms cup the dizzy curve of her waist, aligning every axis of us.

We tumble to the floor, still fused, limbs a slipknot of shadow and corporeal heat. I have studied the geography of her, reverently and ruthlessly, but tonight is new: her bitterness is sweet, her rage is silk, and the old rules no longer hold. When I move inside her, it is not possession—it is surrender, total and atomic. The stars outside, invisible to mortals, bank and flare violet and blue. I pull the night into the room, and it noiselessly surrounds us, a second skin, turning us invisible to anyone else but not to each other. Every place she touches me becomes a new kind of dark: warmer, denser, alive.

She gasps—a sound so mortal and so necessary that the darkness shudders at its edges. I press my mouth to the hollow of her throat and feel her pulse hammering there, wild and insistent, the most ancient rhythm I have ever heard. I want to consume her slowly, reverently, the way night takes a city: block by block, light by light, until nothing remains but the soft animal dark of us. She arches into me and I answer, pulling her deeper into the gravity of it, her breath ragged and bright against my ear.

I want to consume every version of her: the soft animal of her breath, the sharp salt of her skin, the way she says my name like a question she already knows the answer to. I pull her closer, deeper, until there is no grammar left for where I end and she begins. She cries out, and the sound is a small, bright detonation—mortal and catastrophic, the kind of thing that makes gods forget their names. I answer her with everything I have withheld across eternity, and the night outside presses in, dense and warm, as if the universe itself is leaning close to watch.

At the edge of the universe, we collapse together, both ruined and remade. The darkness around us rings like a struck bell.

Afterward, we burrow into the nest of her bed, limbs tangled while the seconds gather quietly around us. Calliope curls against my chest, and I hold her without wondering how long I am permitted to keep her there.

As sleep begins to claim her, she asks, “Do you remember the first night?”

“Every moment.”

“The coffee?”

“Violent.”

Her sleepy laugh warms my chest. “The scone?”

“Life-changing.”

“Me?”

I look down at her.

“You changed everything.”

Her eyes drift closed, and the last of her anger seems to leave with the breath she releases against my skin. Within minutes, she is asleep.

I remain beside her.

For a while, I allow myself to imagine staying.

This is everything I wanted: Calliope safe in my arms, the world held beneath my darkness, morning unable to reach through the windows and take this moment from me.

Then I remember my promise.

When I fall asleep?

I will let you sleep.

When morning comes?