Chapter 2: The Wound
He did not slow. If anything the rhythm grew harsher, his hips hammering her against the steel until the table rang like a struck bell beneath her spine. The red emergency lights pulsed overhead, one beat for every slap of his pelvis into hers, and Soraya's muted world narrowed to sound alone: the wet slap of flesh, his breathing torn into ragged strips, the groan of the table's bolts.
"Goddamn it." His voice came out shredded. "Nothing. Still nothing."
He pulled out of her so abruptly she cried out at the loss, her cunt clenching on air, aching and empty. He staggered back a step in the crimson light, shirtless except for the sealed head mask with its fogged visor, his gaunt chest heaving. She saw it then, what the dim glow had hidden. A surgical wound across his ribs, reopened. Raw tissue, four inches long, weeping pink fluid down the ridges of his scarred torso.
"Elias. You're bleeding."
"I know." He said it flat, like a readout. Then he crossed the two steps to her, caught her wrist, and dragged her hand to the wound. "I felt something. When I tore it open against the table. The only thing I've felt in eleven hours."
She tried to pull back. His grip was iron.
"Elias, that's an open incision, you'll get septic, let me get the kit, let me suture it."
"Suture it after. Right now I need you to press."
"You want me to hurt you."
"I need you to hurt me." His grey eyes stared through the fogged visor, hollow. "Pain is the only signal that gets through. Everything else is dead air. Static." He pressed her palm flat against the wound himself, hard, and held it there. The heat of it shocked her, wet and visceral, the torn flesh yielding under her hand like overripe fruit. "Feel how I don't flinch. That's the problem, Soraya. A man should flinch."
"God." Her fingers curled despite herself, into the split of him.
"Press. Harder. Dig in. Please."
She looked at his face, or what she could see of it, and understood that this was not a request she could refuse without killing something in him. So she pressed. She planted her feet and bore down with the heel of her hand, grinding her palm into the raw surgical line, and she watched him, watched for the flinch.
He shuddered. His whole gaunt frame convulsed, a spasm that started in his ribs and shook through his shoulders, his jaw, his fisted hands. A sound came out of him, low and cracked, the first honest sound she'd heard from his mouth since the leak.
"There." His voice broke apart on it. "There, fuck, there. Don't stop."
"You're shaking."
"I can feel your hand. I can feel your hand, Soraya, I can actually feel it."
She kept the pressure, slow and cruel, dragging her thumb along the gaping edge of the incision where the stitches had ripped free. The wound was hot, slick, the tissue swollen and angry. Beneath her palm his heartbeat slammed, too fast, arrhythmic, the pulse of a man being resuscitated. Her own body answered it without permission. Her sex throbbed, empty and swollen from his use of her, and she was ashamed of how the shame only made it worse.
"Harder," he gasped. "Nails. Use your nails."
"You'll scar."
"I'm covered in scars. None of them ever felt like anything." He braced one hand on the table beside her hip, caging her in. "Dig in. Make me a new one."
She did it. She dragged her nails through the inflamed flesh, four slow furrows beside the incision, pressing until she felt the tremor of muscle trying to recoil under skin that could no longer send the alarm. He bellowed. Not a word, just sound, raw and animal, and his body lurched into hers, pinning her to the steel, and she felt him hardening again against her thigh, thick and insistent, the blood rushing back into him the way blood rushes into a numb limb when it wakes.
"Christ," she whispered, staring up at him. "It's making you harder."
"Pain is blood. Blood is feeling. Feeling is you." The sentences came out in fragments, his mind plainly fracturing at the edges. He caught her hand again and pressed it back to the wound, holding it there with his own scarred fingers laced over hers. "Keep talking. Tell me what you feel under your hand. I need to hear it described. I can't trust my own body to tell me."
"It's hot. Wet. The tissue is torn and swollen and it's bleeding under my fingers, Elias, there's blood welling up between my knuckles."
"Say it filthier. Say it like you said my name when I was inside you."
"I'm squeezing your open wound and you're getting hard."
His whole body jolted. The shudder ran through him into her, through his caged arm, through the steel table rattling against the deck bolts. His cock pressed fully erect against her hip now, leaking against her skin, and she could feel the tremor running through it too, an honest, uncontrollable tremor, the body finally speaking.
"Again," he rasped. "I'm going to fuck you again, and this time you're going to keep your hand in the wound the whole time, so I have something to feel. Something real."
"If I keep pressure on it you'll feel it less. Pain fades when you hold still. It has to move to keep signaling." She heard herself say it in her clinical voice, the xenopsychologist calculating stimuli, and hated how much she wanted to give it to him.
"Then move your hand. Grind it. Tear it if you have to."
"You've lost your mind, Commander."
"I've lost everything else." He hauled her thighs apart with both hands, fingers bruising into the soft flesh, and dragged her to the edge of the table. "What's left is you and this. Help me."
She reached down between them and took hold of him, his cock hard as a pipe in her fist, and guided him to her entrance. With her other hand she flattened her palm over the ruined incision and began to move it in slow, vicious circles, rolling the raw tissue under her hand, keeping the signal alive.
"Elias," she said, husky and low, right against the visor. "I'm going to make you bleed, and you're going to fuck me through it."
He slammed into her.
The first stroke drove the breath out of her in a single shocked syllable. He bottomed out against her cervix and stayed there, grinding, his pelvis flush to hers, and his head dropped forward until the fogged visor rested against her forehead.
"Tight," he groaned. "Christ, you're tight. I can feel that. I can feel you squeezing me."
"I can feel all of you." Her voice cracked on it. After the numbness of the last hours, after the hollow grey nothing, the stretch of him was a floodlight. Every ridge of his cock, every vein, dragged against her inner walls like braille she was reading with her whole body. "You're huge and you're everywhere and don't you dare stop."
He didn't stop. He pulled back slow, almost all the way out, her labia clinging to his shaft, glistening, and then drove in again with a long, measured stroke that made the table groan. The deliberateness of it was worse than the brutality had been. Before he had been hammering, searching, a man throwing himself at a locked door. Now the door was open and he was learning her, one inch at a time, his numbed skin reading her through the single live channel where their bodies joined.
"Tell me," he panted. "Tell me what it's like from your side."
"Full. You're so deep I can feel you in my belly." Her free hand clawed at his shoulder. The other kept its slow, vicious circuit over his wound, rolling the hot torn tissue, keeping the signal alive. "When you pull out I feel empty. Like you're taking something with you. When you push in I feel the head of you spreading me open, rubbing that spot just inside, right there, right there."
He hit it again, deliberately, angling his hips, and her back arched off the steel. She heard herself moan, loud and ugly in the sterile room, and didn't care. The red light pulsed with the rhythm of him, faster now but still controlled, each stroke long and deep and tight, his buttocks flexing under her heels where she'd hooked them against his thighs.
"Harder," she begged. "Elias, harder."
"No." The word came out raw but certain. "Like this. I want to feel every part of you. I've got eleven hours of nothing in my skin and you're the only thing on this station that isn't dead air. I want it to last."
He changed the angle again, dragging the head of his cock slow along her front wall, and her cunt answered him with a gush of wetness he could feel, he said he could feel, the heat of her flooding around him. His scarred hands gripped her hips, thumbs pressing into the crease of her thighs, holding her open, holding her still so he could use her exactly the way he wanted. Each thrust came a fraction deeper. Each withdrawal pulled a whimper out of her that she'd have been ashamed of an hour ago.
Soraya ground her palm harder into his incision. Blood welled between her fingers, warm and shocking, and under her hand his heartbeat was a war drum.
"Your pulse is through the roof."
"It's been flat since the leak." He laughed, a broken sound. "Listen to it now. You did that. Your hand in my ribs and your cunt around my cock. I'm alive, Soraya. Eleven hours dead and you're bringing me back."
"Then fuck me like it." She clenched around him, deliberate, squeezing her inner muscles tight, and his whole frame shuddered. "I'm gripping you. Can you feel that?"
He answered by losing a little of his control. The rhythm sharpened, the long strokes shortening, his hips snapping harder, the wet sound of their bodies loud under the hum of the emergency systems. The table skidded a centimeter on the deck with every impact, bolts screaming. Her clitoris ground against the root of him on every downstroke, and the pressure was building in her low and sweet, a coil tightening behind her pubic bone.
"I'm close," she gasped. "Don't change anything. Don't you dare change anything."
"Come on my cock." His voice was gravel. "I want to feel it. I want to feel you come, I've got nothing else, Soraya, give me that."
She reached down between their bodies with slick, bloodied fingers and rubbed herself in tight fast circles, and he watched her hand, or she thought he did, the visor fogged and red-lit. The coil snapped. Her orgasm tore through her from the inside out, her cunt clamping down on him in hard rhythmic waves, her thighs locking against his ribs, her cry bouncing off the steel walls and coming back distorted. Through her palm in his wound she felt him feel it, felt the convulsion that ran through his whole body as her muscles milked him.
"There," he roared. "That, that, I feel it, I feel every spasm."
She rode it out, pulsing around him, and he held on through it, buried to the hilt, shaking, refusing to finish, his jaw clenched so hard she could see the muscle jumping under the mask's edge.
"Inside me," she panted. "Come inside me. I want to feel it fill me."
"Not yet." He pulled out, slow, torturous, and she moaned at the loss, her fluids running down her thighs. He turned her over with those bruising hands, bent her forward over the table, her cheek against the cold steel, and drove back into her from behind in one long stroke. "One more. I want one more out of you. Keep your hand on my ribs."
She reached back, found the wound blind by touch, and pressed. He fucked her deep and tight, the new angle grinding her g-spot raw, her own slick and his precome making each stroke obscene in its wetness, and the red light pulsed and the station hummed and for the first time since the leak neither of them was alone in a numb body. His hand closed over hers against his torn flesh, pressing her palm down harder, using her own hand as the switch that kept him alive.
"Say my name," he growled into her ear.
"Elias."
"Louder. When I come. I want to feel you say it around my cock."
She turned her head, cheek against the steel, and pushed back into him to meet his next stroke.
He drove into her again, and the world detonated.
Soraya froze under him, every muscle locking. Because there, in the dead grey void where scent had lived, something bloomed. Copper. Salt. The warm animal reek of sweat and blood and sex, thick and unmistakable, flooding her empty skull like water into a cracked hull.
"Stop." Her voice came out strangled. "Elias, stop. Something's wrong. I can smell. I can smell you, I can smell the blood, it's wrong, stop, stop."
He didn't stop. He gripped her hips and thrust harder, deeper, slamming the air from her lungs. "No. No, Soraya, that's it coming back. That's the chemical clearing. That's you waking up."
"It's wrong, we're wrong, the leak, the masks, we don't know what it's doing to us." She tried to twist away from him, palms slipping on the steel. "Stop, please, we have to stop."
He folded himself over her back, visor cold against her nape, and drove in again with a stroke that ground her clit against the table's edge. The sensation tore her protest apart at the seams. Her body answered him before her mind could object, hips tilting, cunt swallowing him greedily, wet and clenching.
"You were going to say stop." His voice was ragged but steady. "Your hips just begged me not to."
"Shut up." She hated how breathless it came out.
"Smell yourself. Smell us. Tell me what it's like."
She couldn't help it. She breathed in, deep, and it was overwhelming, the musk of their fucking thickening the recycled air, his blood sharp and metallic, her own arousal sour-sweet. After eleven hours of nothing it was like being born. A sob broke out of her, half grief, half something else.
"Like a slaughterhouse," she whispered. "Like a locker room. Like you. God, Elias, it smells like you."
"Then lose yourself in it." He pulled out slow and slid back in, and she felt him shiver at the sight or the sound or the squeeze of her. "Come back with me."
She stopped fighting. The last thread of resistance snapped and she pushed back into him, meeting every stroke, her returning senses layering sensation on sensation. She could smell her own arousal now, sharp and animal. She could taste the salt of her own lip where she'd bitten it. The world came flooding back through the same hole he was fucking into her, and she let it.
"Harder," she snarled. "Finish inside me. I want to smell it after. I want it running down my leg so I can smell myself on you all shift."
He broke. His rhythm turned brutal, slapping, the table shrieking across the deck bolts, and with a roar that bounced off the steel walls he buried himself to the root and came. She felt it, felt the pulsing spurts of him coating her insides, hot gush after hot gush, and her second orgasm crashed in on the heels of his, milking him, her cry and his tangling in the crimson air.
They stayed like that, welded together, breathing in heaves. His cock stayed hard inside her. She noticed it before he said anything, the pulse of him not softening.
"Again," he said.
"Elias, you just came. That's physiologically..."
"I'm still hard. Do you understand what that means? Blood is moving. My body is waking up." He slid a hand around her throat, not squeezing, just holding, and rolled his hips. "Once more. Then again. As many times as it works."
They moved. Somewhere in the shuffle his elbow caught the wall panel and the med bay's grav plating flickered, the emergency systems stuttering under the leak's damage. Weight bled out of the room like water down a drain. A stray speculum tray drifted off the shelf and hung, rotating slowly, catching red light.
They floated.
Soraya gasped as her body lifted off the table, still impaled on him, his hands the only anchor at her hips. Zero gravity turned every stroke into something new. There was no friction to push against, no table to brace on, only his grip and her grip, the two of them a single tumbling mass in the red glow.
"Oh God," she breathed. "Oh, that's..."
"Look at us." He turned them, slow, a lazy rotation that dragged his cock around inside her in a corkscrew she felt in her teeth. "We're floating. You're floating on my cock, Soraya."
She laughed, wild and cracked, and grabbed a floor rail to spin them faster. The spin slammed her around him and he groaned, loud, head thrown back. She discovered that with no weight she could ride him in slow orbits, pulling herself down his shaft hand over hand along the rail, floating up, sinking back, each descent driving him in at a slightly different angle. His come leaked out of her with each revolution, pearling into the air in red-lit beads that drifted past the visor.
"Look at that," he muttered, watching a bead of their mixed fluids drift by like a tiny planet. "Filthy. Beautiful."
"You have a filthy mouth for a commander."
"You have a filthy grip for a doctor."
He turned her in the weightlessness, folding her, inventive and greedy. He took her with her legs wrapped around his waist, her spine arched, nothing under her but him, his hands cupping her ass as he pistoned up into her, every thrust sending them both drifting toward the ceiling until her shoulder blades kissed the cold steel up there. He took her against the ceiling itself, her back flat to it, her hair floating in a black corona, him between her thighs driving down into her from above while she clawed at a light housing for leverage. He hooked her knees over his shoulders and folded her nearly in half, gravityless, hammering into her so deep she saw white.
"Again," she heard herself demanding, and she barely recognized her own voice, thick and vulgar and hungry. "Again, again."
"Greedy."
"You made me greedy. You made me feel. Give me more."
He gave her more. He came inside her a second time with his cock buried against her cervix in zero-g, and she felt every pulse of it with her hand pressed flat on her own lower belly, feeling the heat bloom beneath her skin. He came a third time with her mounted on him facing away, her riding him in slow float, her nails raking her own breasts as he pinched her clit from behind, both of them watching their reflections blur in the fogged visor and the polished steel.
It went on. The grav plating stayed dark, the red lights pulsed, the station hummed its dying song around them. Soraya's senses were fully awake now, every smell and texture unbearable and glorious, and Elias's body drank each new stimulus like a man dying of thirst. Position after position, orgasm after orgasm, their bodies inventing geometry in the weightlessness, sweat condensing off their skin in glittering beads, his come and her slick floating free and catching the light.
Somewhere in the middle of it, hanging upside down relative to the deck with his cock still thick inside her, he spoke against her floating hair.
"Soraya. The sensors. Your senses came back." His voice had an edge under the haze. "Mine didn't. I still can't feel my own hands."
She stilled, floating, connected to him, and looked at his gaunt torso in the red glow. Then she took his scarred hand and pressed it, hard, over the ruined incision on his ribs, and held his own fingers down into the wound.
"Then we're not stopping," she said. "Not until you feel something that isn't pain."