You have been in this room before, or a room shaped exactly like the thing you were afraid to want. Cold comes up through the floor into the soles of your feet. The work lamp makes everything amber, surgical. The rig chairs slouch in their corners like patient animals. The whole city is silent for the first time in four years. You can hear his breathing. You can hear yours.
Ori stands behind you and asks if he can. You say yes.
His hands find your shoulders with the muscle-memory of his trade — thumbs reading the seized place between your blades, professional, diagnostic — and then somewhere along your spine the diagnosis runs out and there is only the pressure of him, the faded tattoos on his forearms catching the light when he moves. You take your shirt off. You do not make it a moment. You fold it and set it on the armrest, because that is true to who you are, and he watches without comment, his mouth moving slightly, reading you the way he can't stop reading anything.
He puts his mouth to the crooked ridge of your collarbone — the old fracture, the one part of you nobody maps because it didn't break from grief. You press your hand flat to his sternum and feel the catch, the change, the thing with no settings menu.
The implant is still recording. You feel it gather you — the heat, the wanting — into data, and you let it. You let it keep this. His fingers reach the waistband of your jeans and stop.
Both of you, still. This far. Exactly this far.
