Chapter 549 | Not a Request

Chapter 549: 549 | Not a Request

I activated Euphoric Feedback at level five. Not high enough to overwhelm, just enough to sharpen every nerve ending between her hips into something unbearable. Her reaction was immediate and violent. She shoved herself down onto my hand and ground, her abs rippling with each motion, her chest heaving, milk still leaking from both nipples in thin white trails that ran down her stomach and pooled in the creases of her abs.

That visual. That specific visual of Misato Ayame, Squad Captain, lime green ponytail half undone, abs glistening with her own milk, riding my hand on her own couch with her underwear pulled to the side because she couldn’t wait long enough to take it off properly. I burned it into long-term memory and filed it under things that justified every single terrible decision I’d made since orientation.

"Jace." She used my first name. The lime ring in my skull went supernova. "I’m close."

I turned my wrist and curled my fingers upward and found the spot that made her stop breathing. Then I leaned forward and took her right nipple back into my mouth and sucked hard while my thumb ground against her clit in a tight circle.

Misato came with a scream that tested the concrete.

Her back bowed so hard her ponytail swept across my knees. Her thighs clamped around my arm with B-rank strength and her internal muscles seized in rhythmic contractions that tried to crush my fingers. Milk erupted from both breasts in twin arcs that hit my chest and chin and soaked the couch cushion behind me. The taste of buttermilk flooded my tongue so thick and rich that the System notifications stacked on top of each other in a blur.

I held her through it. Every pulse, every wave, every sound she made that she probably hadn’t made in twenty years or maybe ever.

When she finally unclenched and sagged against me, her breath came in ragged bursts that fogged the skin of my shoulder. Her ponytail had fully come undone. Lime green hair fell across both our bodies in long, sweat-damp curtains that smelled like salt water and lavender soap and Misato.

"That was," she started.

"Your first one."

She pulled back far enough to look at me. Her pupils were blown so wide I could barely see the dark brown beneath them. Her lips were swollen from biting them and kissing me and her cheeks were flushed red from her jawline down past her collarbones and across the tops of her breasts.

"First one tonight," she corrected.

"First one with somebody."

She didn’t confirm or deny. She didn’t need to. I’d felt it in the way she grabbed me, in the way her whole body had gone rigid with surprise before the pleasure took over, in the split second before the orgasm hit when something crossed her face that looked like the expression people wear when they step into warm water after a very long cold.

I pulled my hand free and Misato watched me bring my fingers to my mouth. The taste of her was different here, salt and something clean and mineral, underneath the buttermilk that lingered on my tongue from the extraction. Her eyes tracked the motion of my tongue across my own fingers and her breath caught audibly.

"Bedroom," she said.

Not a request.

I stood up with her still wrapped around me. Misato weighed nothing compared to my C-rank baseline. She pointed down a short hallway without speaking and I carried her past a bathroom door and into a room that looked exactly like her. Military corners on the bed. One nightstand with a lamp and a phone charger. Training manual stacked under a water glass. A single photograph in a silver frame of a younger Misato and a woman who could only be her mother, both of them grinning at a camera.

The bed was a twin. Of course it was a twin. Misato Ayame, captain of the most dangerous first-year squad in the academy, second in command of a strike element that just cleared Monterey at the fourth-fastest time in school history, slept on a twin mattress in a concrete room while Blair Davenport occupied a penthouse the size of my entire floor.

I dropped her on the mattress and she bounced once, her green hair fanning across the white sheets. She reached for the waistband of my remaining clothing and I let her pull it down.

Her eyes went wide.

"Oi," she said, reverting to the particular Japanese exclamation she only used when something genuinely surprised her. The lime ring flared so bright I tasted ozone.

"That’s the standard reaction," I said.

"Shut up."

She grabbed my hips and pulled me down on top of her and the twin mattress protested with a creak that would have made furniture designers weep. The bed was not built for two people who weighed a combined four hundred pounds of muscle, bone, and divine parasitism. I didn’t care and neither did she.

Misato’s legs opened and I settled between them. The contact of skin against skin, chest to chest, hip to hip, with nothing between us, made the graft sing. Every inch where her body pressed against mine felt like a direct line to whatever kept me alive, and the lime ring burned with a steady, furious warmth that said more than I had the vocabulary to understand.

She reached down between us and wrapped her hand around me and guided me forward until I was pressing against her entrance. Wet heat and muscle and the absolute certainty in her grip.

"This is a direct order," Misato said, looking up at me with eyes that held nine years of wanting and three days of grief and one cliff-side kiss that she’d spent every hour since pretending to regret. "Do not hold back."

"Copy that, Captain."

I pushed inside her, and Misato’s head fell back against her flat military pillow, and her hand slapped the wall beside the bed with a crack that definitely tested the concrete.

She was tight. Fighter-tight, the kind of thing that comes from years of core conditioning and the involuntary clenching of someone experiencing something they’ve imagined so many times that reality overwhelms the simulation. I went slow at first despite her order, giving her time to adjust, and she grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked.

"I said," she breathed, "don’t hold back."