But, still. But even as she hasn’t been much further than his arm’s reach for weeks, she’s been remote in a way that he’s almost never known her to be— she’d been an almost aggressively open book from that first day, coming out swinging, loosing an arrow from the balcony adjoining what is now their bedroom. The small ways she’s held him, too, at a distance lately have been a gulf between them and it’s a physical relief to relax into him, to murmur,

“I know,” because she knows exactly what he’s talking about. Because she’s missed him, too, and saying so felt more selfish for being — her doing. (Sarrux’s doing. But no one responsible for that place is left to care; wouldn’t, if they were. And it feels like her responsibility, like things settled on her shoulders or beneath her shoulder-blades tend to.) “I know,” softer, a hitched breath where his fingers find her wetter than she’d realised, the slow build of heat between them winding taut inside her. The feel of his arm around her is different, her wings newly sensitive to the heat of his body and even where the lower set catches the scrape of the hair on his arm. They’re deceptive in their size, the length of about half her torso, seeming bigger when spread out but folding low; folded down, they rest just at the crest of her ass.

Everything feels heightened by the newness of touching this new part of her, by the raw sense of reconnection, and she leans back to chase his mouth with her own, one hand gripping the outside of his thigh and the other working the grip she has on his cock in a way that could reasonably be described as emphatically. The flutter of her wings over his arm is as strange as the way her hips shift to encourage his fingers inside her is familiar—

“I still need you,” she murmurs, and she means more than this, but: this, too.