Guilt and Desire in the Wasteland
I catalogued the xenogenetic soil markers with mechanical precision, letting the cold blue glow of my datapad anchor me to something that wasn’t him. The terraforming sector stretched out around us, a wasteland of half-grown synthetic moss, a desolate scar across our struggling colony. Dravec stood two meters away, adjusting the telemetry stabilizers on the atmospheric rig. We hadn’t spoken of anything beyond pressure gradients since the seal failure in the east dome—since I’d told him to hold the evacuation order one more cycle to finish recalibrating the scrubbers, and the scrubbers had held, and the seal hadn’t, and nine people I’d promised would be fine had decompressed in their sleep. He had carried the bodies out. He had not looked at me once while he did it. The silence between us was an engineered vacuum, meticulously maintained to keep that ruin at bay.
“The spore density is stabilizing,” I reported, my voice a flat, detached drone. I kept my eyes locked on the digital readout. “We can pack up the perimeter array.”
“Acknowledged,” he replied, his tone equally barren. He knelt beside the primary sample crate, the heavy canvas of his hazard coat scraping against the dry earth.
I crouched across from him to secure the environmental seals on the canisters. It was a routine motion, something we had executed a thousand times without incident. The wind off the dead flats had teeth in it tonight, the temperature already sliding toward the killing cold that came after the weak sun dropped below the rig towers. We had maybe an hour before exposure became a real thing, a thing that took fingers. I reached for the central locking mechanism at the exact moment he did. My bare knuckles grazed the exposed skin of his wrist.
The contact was barely a friction of cells, but it shattered the vacuum in an instant. A visceral, agonizing shockwave ripped through my chest. I gasped, the datapad slipping from my fingers. Dravec went rigid, his breathing fracturing into jagged, desperate pulls of air. The suffocating weight of the past six months—the isolation, the cold closing in, the nine names I had never once spoken to him and never would—crushed the oxygen out of me. I looked up. His eyes were wide, stripped clean of every layer of his professional armor, and there was the thing I could not stand to see in them: not blame. Forgiveness. He was looking at me like he wanted to forgive me, and I would rather have died on this rock than be forgiven, because forgiveness meant being seen, and being seen meant the whole of it would have to be felt.
He reached for me anyway. I went, but I went with my eyes already half-closing, already turning my face from his.
We did not speak. There was no air left for the luxury of a slow realization. The dam obliterated. I lunged forward, scrambling across the synthetic moss, driven by a catastrophic need to fuse my fractured pieces back into his—but when he tried to find my mouth I caught his jaw and pressed my face into his neck instead, hiding there, taking him by the throat and the shoulder and anywhere that was not his eyes. He let me. That was the worst of it, the way he let me, his hands seizing my shoulders with frantic force while he angled his head down toward mine and I kept ducking it, again and again, a small brutal refusal threaded through all that hunger. He fisted the collar of my hazard suit, his knuckles white against the reinforced seam, dragging me into him as though he meant to crawl directly inside my ribcage.
The bulk of the suits fought us at every shift. We toppled sideways onto the uneven moss, my hip striking a raised stabilizer plate hard enough to bloom an ache down to the bone. I welcomed it. I pressed back into the edge of it, let it bruise, because the pain was a clean thing, an honest thing, easier to hold than what he wanted to give me. His weight came down over me, and the rigid hazard panels caught and snarled between us, the layered material too thick to let our bodies find any honest contact. My elbow was pinned beneath the bunched canvas of my own sleeve, and his coat hung heavy off one shoulder, a dead weight that hemmed us in rather than opening us up. We strained against each other through all of it, hips grinding into nothing but stiff fabric, the friction useless, the angle impossible, the cold worming in through every gap the gear left open. A sob of pure frustration tore out of me into the hollow of his throat.
“Off,” I rasped, my voice fracturing. “Get it off.”
He braced a hand against the moss and lifted himself enough to give me room. He worked the front clasps of my suit free, one at a time, and I let him, because his hands moving over the seals were not his hands moving over my face. The wind found every inch he bared. He peeled the suit down from my shoulders slowly, deliberately, his mouth chasing every place he exposed—the curve of my throat, the wing of my collarbone, the soft give of my upper arm—and each time his lips drifted upward, toward my jaw, toward my mouth, I turned my head and gave him my hair, my temple, the side of my neck instead. He kept trying. He never said anything. He just kept lowering his mouth toward mine and letting me steer it away, and the cold bit hard everywhere his lips weren’t, and I started shaking and could not tell him it was not from cold.
By the time the suit was bunched at my waist he paused, his hands spanning my ribs, his thumbs stroking slow circles beneath the swell of my breasts as if relearning the shape of me. That was too soft. That was tenderness, and tenderness was the one thing I had no defense against. I grabbed his wrist and dragged his hand lower, hard, off the gentle place and onto the urgent one, choosing the force over the care. He understood. Something in his face folded shut, and after that he stopped being gentle. He caught one nipple between his teeth, sharp enough to make me hiss, and I arched into the bite with a broken sound of relief.
We got the rest of it off in a graceless tangle—his thermal shirt hauled over his head, the suit stripped from my legs, his hands tracing the inside of my thighs and parting them, his fingers slipping into the slick heat of me until I was rocking shamelessly against his hand, my breath coming in ragged, hitching pulls. Only then did the last of his clothing go, and by the time we were both bare on the cold moss, the wanting had become a kind of grief, vast and clawing, and the night air was a knife laid flat against every part of us, and there was nowhere warm left in the entire dying world except the place where our skin touched.
The slope of the ground would not let us lie face to face, and I was glad of it, glad of any geometry that turned me away from him. I rolled onto my knees, palms sinking into the synthetic growth, my spine to his chest, my face hidden from him at last. Dravec settled behind me. It was clumsy. The ground pitched us both, his first push glancing and wrong, and he had to grip my hip with one shaking hand and try again, and the cold made us stupid and slow, made the whole thing a fumbling, grief-blind struggle for purchase. When he finally sank into me it was too much and not enough all at once, driving straight through the emptiness that had hollowed me out for months. He filled the void with raw force, but the void was not shaped like a body and the body kept failing to fit it. Each thrust drove me forward onto my bruised hip, the ache flaring bright, and I pushed back into him harder to chase it, taking everything he had, taking force and depth and the burn of the angle, because all of that I could survive.
His forehead dropped between my shoulder blades. Then his hand left my hip and slid up my spine, up toward my throat, my jaw—reaching around to cup my face, to turn it back toward him—and I jerked away, ducked it, caught his wrist and pinned it back down against my hip where it belonged. He let me. He always let me. He shifted his grip and worked his fingers over my clit instead, the pressure climbing fast and merciless, and I let the sensation gather because sensation was not the same as being known.
It crested and broke through me in pulsing waves, my cunt clenching around him in spasms that dragged a raw sound from my throat—and for exactly one second the void closed, sealed shut, full to the brim, *him*, finally, completely. Then the pulses guttered out and the emptiness yawned open again behind them, wider than before, hollowed wider by the brief unbearable fullness, and I understood with sick clarity that this had filled nothing, that nothing in him could reach the place the nine names lived. He pulsed hot and deep inside me a moment later with a sound I felt against my back more than heard, and the tremors guttered out through both of us into the freezing dark, and we were exactly as alone as we had been before, only naked now, only colder.
His hand lifted toward my hair in a slow, tentative motion, fingers grazing the strands at my temple. The one tender thing. The one thing he’d been reaching for the whole time and I’d refused him at every turn, and here it was again, soft, patient, asking nothing but to be allowed.
I flinched hard, twisting away before the touch could settle, the rejection sharp and instinctive as I dragged my suit back into place against the cold.