Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

“I thought you were going back to reunify with the rest of you,” Naoto said. “I thought that was whole the point of all this.”

I shook my head slowly. “I lost myself in Bloom City. I lost my mind. I couldn’t think. I only knew I had to get out of there or die—and I thought if I could just make it back to Redhill, at least I’d be with them again, my other selves. They can pass whatever judgment they want on me. I deserve it. I just needed to see the rest of me one more time.” I gripped him tighter and met his eyes again. “But if you want to unify, that changes everything. That gives me a reason to go on. The first real reason I’ve had in five years.”

He studied me—not fully understanding, but listening.

“I’m sorry for what I made you promise yesterday,” I said. “Forget it. It was unbelievably cruel of me to ask that of you, and I know that now. But there’s something else I’d like to ask instead.”

He nodded warily.

“Whatever happens,” I said, “put yourself first. No more taking risks to protect me. From now on, let me protect you. I’m expendable. You’re the one who has to survive and make it to Redhill.”

He didn’t answer. We weren’t trapped in the walls of a drowning city anymore. There was no duress. He had time to think about it.

“It’s for my own sake,” I said. “You can do something I can’t: you can carry the memory of me back into the mind I used to be. And if you do, then for a split second, maybe, that mind will love me and forgive me as much as you do. That’s the closest I’ll ever be to being whole again. It’s more than I could ever have hoped for before today.”

He stroked my head. Even his touch was pensive. I thought I could feel him reaching for something to say in a hapless attempt to comfort me: that it couldn’t really be so bad; that I must not really have murdered a man; that he didn’t care, he still wanted to unify with me. I was ready to pull away. Ready to shout. Instead he just kissed the side of my head and croaked out the words, “Okay. I promise.”

I listened to his heart beat. I breathed in the sea in his hair and the wasteland dust and smoke in his second-hand clothes. I raised my hand, palm open—and heard his heart quicken its beat when I asked, “Do you want to do again . . . what we did that night?”

He knew which night I meant.

“Here?” he whispered. “Now?”

“If you want to. It’s probably the last chance we’ll ever have.” I leaned away from him and added sadly, “Look, I don’t want to play with your emotions, but I . . . I feel more things than I could ever process with only one head, and there’s so much fear out here, and I just need . . .” I sighed. There were no words for what I was trying to say. “I’ve been alone in this one body so long, and I need . . . I need.”

“I know.” He lay his open palm against mine. I could feel his fingers trembling, warming with sweat.

“Are you sure?”

He kissed me softly once, then many times hard. I tasted the blood iron on his chapped lips, the dry salt in his thin stubble. His right hand caressed my neck while his left laced its fingers through mine—and in the moment I willed our sensoria to merge, I felt us both gasp from the burst of sensation. I felt both our bodies shiver. I tasted both our litanies of small pains.

“Fuck,” I groaned. “That headache.”

“I’ve had it since we surfaced,” he stammered. “My eyes don’t work right out here. I’m not, uh. Not used to focusing on anything more than . . . two meters away—”

“Shh.” I groped for the right pressure points on his body and kneaded hard, until I felt his pain start to lessen. I needed to make room for other sensations.

Through the haze of stress and fatigue and decompression, the ache of desire began to rise in both our bodies: a biochemical duet of arousal, growing louder, falling into harmony.

Do you still want this? I mouthed the words silently, knowing he could feel their shapes on my lips.

“Want,” I felt his throat say. I heard the sound from inside his own head. “Need.”

Every part of us itched and burned as we peeled all our layers off—the skin beneath dirty, clammy, chafed, but I savored every sensation: the roughness of his skin from inside, the sensitivity of the fine trail of hair on his belly; the way my curves felt to his hands. The taste of my tongue to his mouth. My smell to his nose.

For a moment we pulled back and lay apart on the hard metal floor, taking each other in—seeing my body through his eyes and letting him see himself through mine. That had been the most unsettling part of this when we’d done it before, but this time we were prepared. This time it felt almost natural.

We buried our bodies in each other, coiling tightly together—all our bones knowing where they stabbed too hard, turning to settle into muscle or fat. I felt the tremble in his long fingers when he first reached out to roll my nipple between them, and I felt his body shiver even more ecstatically than my own at the sensation. I felt the rhythmic throb of desire catching like a fire in his pelvis.

It was too easy to become overwhelmed. I was being careful not to move too fast for him—I knew I was much more used to the sensation of male arousal than he was to female—but I felt, from both our perspectives, the irresistible hunger in his touch when his hand pushed down my side, rounded my hips, traced