Thank you to clafount, and the CMDA discussion, for helping me keep Verner from party crashing this scene. You don't want to know. Really.
6. Event Horizon
She makes the call to Hackett one standard galactic week after helping Liara, and her meeting with the Alliance—he refuses to say she's turning herself in—is set up the same way one would make a lunch date. Three hours before Citadel arrival, he goes up to her cabin.
The rigid line of her jaw as she watches the aquarium mocks her relaxed posture, and her gaze darts after the unpredictable turns of Thessian Sunfish. "Garrus," she says. "You didn't bring any wine."
"It'd still be cheap." The indigo flicker of her vitals is an intrusion, and it's so easy to blink them off he wonders he hasn't done it sooner. "Better without."
The sweet-bitter scent of her shampoo beckons to him, a botanical patina over swirling layers of salt, warm musk, and heated human skin. Dark hollows shadow her eyes, her mouth a grim line.
"Did you know I could still taste you the entire time we were in the Collector Base? Even after we jumped back. Remember that return speech—you were still in my mouth."
Her words are a jolt, from chest to groin plates. He allows himself a twin-larynxed hum as he runs his talons through the burnt umber of her hair until they rest at the base of her neck. Through her half-open lips he can glimpse the pink tip of her sleek human tongue.
"Good," he says. Thumb-tip and talon edge trace the contour of her mouth, and she leans her face into his palm, bites it, licks it, her tongue wet and hot. He presses his forehead to hers, and says, "Some things are better than words."
"Mhm."
Another thing he should have done before now: "Turn off your translator."
A quirk of the eyebrow, followed by a slow, private smile as she kisses the pad of his index, guides it to the hollow behind her ear. He can feel the faint irregularity in her skin at the subdermal implant, little bigger than one of the constellation of freckles on her shoulders. There's a small pop, felt more than heard, and the shut-off is complete. Her smile persists as she reaches for his visor.
A blink in the second before it comes off: her likeness as she looks up at him, captured.
The restraint with which they begin unencumbering one another of clothing is short lived. They don't bother with the bed, but grab and fumble at each other's garments—it galvanizes, the knowledge they're running out of time. The need to wrench out of her everything left unsaid uncoils and snaps within him. His larynxes vibrate, a low, feral hum. He pins her against the fish tank, its blue glow a halo around her dark form, and runs his hands across her torso, from shoulders to waist and back again. It takes focus to pace himself, to keep the pressure behind his groin plates contained.
Her gasp is sharp, a near hiss, in response to the slow raking of his talons across the whisper-soft skin on the sides of her breasts. He squeezes her hardened nipples between thumbs and forefingers, lowers his head to circle each of them with his tongue. Her fingers half-grab half-stroke his fringe, and she arches into him, writhing with need.
Sounds escape her. The part of his brain trained to inspect and analyze stimuli instinctively categorizes: implosive, open, liquid, round, sibilant. Clarity emerges out of the aural chaos. She's saying his name. "Garrus," she says. And again: "Garrus."
The hum builds in his chest. As he works his way down, nipping here, licking there, rumbling against the taut plane between her navel and pubic bone, he scents the tang of her arousal. He takes endless care as he slides his fingers across her heated core, within it, back across again.
It's never felt so good to hear her moan. He replaces his fingers with his tongue, intensifies his hum. With the same precision he dedicates to lining up a shot, he coaxes ripple after ripple of excitement out of her, each one punctuated by keening, inarticulate sounds. He doesn't let up, doesn't let his groin plates open until he hears her rapid, ragged intake of breath, feels the deep, rhythmic pulsing of her orgasm.
He stands. Her irises are but darkened rings around widened pupils while her mouth forms a string of breathy ejectives, heady diphthongs, and low slung stops, all wrapped around that maddening smile of hers. His mandibles flare in reciprocation as she grabs at him with uncoordinated movements. She trails fevered open-mouthed kisses across his jaw, imitates his hum against the steady vibration of his anterior larynx, pulls at him, hands closing and unclosing around his erection.
Part of him considers it a victory for them both, that he can curve his arm around her hips and pull her close, taste the salt in the hollows of her neck, without letting her wrap her legs around his waist. He grabs her hips, turns her around. She continues echoing his humming as her pelvis begins a languorous grind against him, heated core beckoning. Over her shoulder she watches him watch her, a piercing, direct stare.
The challenge is clear, but he will not be hurried. In the aquarium's ghostly light, the smooth curves and planes of her body seem sculpted out of the lambent paleness of distant nebulae, so unlike his own iridium-dark crags and angles. He hums his pleasure as he trails his talons across the small of her back, angles her hips just so, and eases himself into her center. She sounds a whimper, something guttural, half-exhaled through the teeth. The light and shadow interplay on her tensing back reminds him of spectral desert planet landscapes. Faint aftershocks of her orgasm ripple all along his length, and he savors the fading throbbing before setting a deliberate pace.
She clenches around him with each stroke, hips rocking to meet his thrusts. His humming turns into a steady thrum, and he picks up tempo. The familiar pressure builds with each stroke, urging him to slam into her faster and faster. Electric shivers radiate throughout his body.
He has just enough presence of mind to reach around, place his palm so that the friction of their grinding brings her a second release. She voices a single vowel, low and open, pushes back against him.
He leans in, his thrumming dark and low. The pressure is too much to bear. Behind closed lids, supernovas explode in synch with the orgasm ripping through him. All he wants to do is hold on, tumble forever into this unknowable, familiar abyss.
Three hundred and two seconds later, she turns to face him. Her palm sears his chest. That smile coils around a lazy, satisfied sigh: "Garrus."
He tucks a strand of rust-colored hair behind her ear, traces the line of her jaw. He will remember this moment later, recognize it as the precise instant where everything between them changed. He'll even be able to break down the sounds to their component parts: an alveolar slash, leading into the low arch of a high vowel, rushing into a vibrant fricative, and underneath all that, a soft thump.
He sees her tapping the top of her sternum. He hears her saying, "Liv."
At any other time he might have asked questions, but here, her body next to his, he knows she's asking him to use her name. It's a drawing back of the veil she keeps over her private spaces, an invitation in.
He follows without hesitation. With his palm splayed against her heartbeat, he draws out the flanging, and says, "Liv."