Gray light through the broken window.
He woke slow. Body coming back in pieces: hands first, then the weight of his own legs, then the soreness in his shoulder from sleeping on a hardwood floor and then a mattress that was only marginally better. His left arm was numb. Someone was lying on it.
Felicia.
She was on her side, facing away from him, her back against his chest. His dead arm was trapped under her ribs. Her hair was in his face. Everywhere. He could taste it when he breathed. It smelled like her perfume and sweat and sex and he didn't move it.
She was asleep. Her breathing was deep and even and her face was turned into the pillow and he could see one side of it from his angle. A crease from the pillow pressed into her cheek. Mascara smudged under her eye in a dark half-circle. Mouth open, lips dry. Her shoulders were bare. The sheet had slid to her waist during the night and she hadn't pulled it up.
He watched her breathe. His arm was losing feeling at a rate that suggested permanent nerve damage but moving it would mean moving her and he didn't want to move her.
The apartment was cold. The window. Glass on the floor under it, still there from last night, catching the gray morning light. Traffic sounds from the street, distant, a garbage truck doing its rounds. Early. Six, maybe. The lamp was still on, warm orange against the gray.
She stirred. A small sound, half-awake, and she pressed back against him. Her ass against his hips. She was warm. Her skin was warm and the sheet was bunched between them at the waist and he could feel the line of her back against his chest, the bumps of her spine, the curve of her lower back fitting into his stomach.
His cock was hard. Morning, proximity, the heat of her skin. She shifted again and felt it against her and went still.
"Staring is creepy." Her voice was rough. Sleep and too much screaming last night.
"Then stop being worth staring at."
She snorted. Pressed her face into the pillow. Didn't move away from him. Her ass pushed back against his cock, small, testing, and he didn't know if she was awake or if her hips were doing this on their own.
He put his mouth on her neck. The spot below her ear, where the hair was thinnest and the skin was warm from the pillow. He kissed it. Slow. She hummed.
His free hand found her waist. Slid down her hip, over the curve, fingertips tracing the crease where her thigh met her body. She was naked under the sheet. He'd known that. Feeling it with his hand in the gray morning was different from knowing it in the lamplight at two AM.
She shifted. Opened her legs slightly, her top leg sliding forward on the sheet, without looking at him, without waking up all the way. She reached behind her and found his cock and guided him between her thighs and the heat of her there, the wetness still left from last night, made him press his forehead against the back of her neck.
She positioned him at her entrance. He could feel her, slick, swollen, her body still marked from everything they'd done. She pressed back. The head slipped in.
He held still.
The stretch was different from this angle. Tighter. He was pressed against the front wall of her and she was swollen and tender and the friction was intense on the first inch. She exhaled, slow, through her nose. He pushed in further. Two inches. The slide was easier, she was still wet, and the heat of her closed around him and he made a sound against the back of her neck that he didn't plan.
All the way in. His hips flush against her ass. Her hand on his hip behind her, holding him there. Neither of them moving.
He could hear her breathing. Could feel it, the rise of her ribs expanding against his chest, her back shifting against him. Outside, the garbage truck was getting closer. A horn. Brakes.
She started moving. Slow. Barely movement at all. A rocking of her hips, forward and back, with him buried inside her, and the friction was gentle, lazy, a rhythm so slow it matched her breathing.
His hand slid from her hip to her stomach. Down. Between her legs. His fingers found her clit, swollen, and she flinched at the first touch.
"Gentle," she murmured. "I'm still-"
Gentle. His fingertip circled slow, barely there, and she rocked against his hand and his cock at the same time, small movements, her breathing going uneven through her nose. His mouth on her neck, open, tasting the salt. Her hair in his face. The sheet tangled around their legs.
She reached back and put her hand on his neck, holding his mouth against her skin, and her hips rolled in slow circles with him deep inside her and his finger on her clit matching the rhythm.
Her thumb traced circles on his wrist. His mouth open on her neck. The garbage truck outside getting closer. They kept moving.
Her breathing changed. Shorter through her nose. A catch. Her hand on his neck tightened. Her hips rolled harder, pressing back against him, taking him deeper, and her clit swelled under his fingertip.
"Mm- nn-"
Quiet. Barely sounds. Her whole body tensed against his, her back going rigid, and she came in a shudder that rolled through her from her stomach to her thighs. A held breath. A small sound against the pillow and her walls squeezing him in gentle pulses and her hand on his neck gripping hard enough to leave marks.
He kept moving. Slow. The same rhythm. Her body was still clenching around him in soft contractions and each one pulled along his full length and he was close, he'd been close since she pressed back against him, and the slow friction was dragging him toward the edge faster than the hard fucking on the floor had.
He pressed his face into the back of her neck. Breathed her in. Pushed deep and stayed there and came inside her with his arm around her waist and his mouth on her skin.
Her body clenched around him, pulling him deeper. Her hand reached back and pressed his hip flush against her ass. Keeping him there. Keeping him in.
They lay still.
The garbage truck passed. A car alarm went off two blocks over and stopped. The light through the window went from gray to gray-blue. His arm was completely dead. He couldn't feel his fingers.
"Your arm," she said.
"I know."
"You should move it."
"Probably."
He stayed where he was.
She laughed. A small one, sleepy, and she lifted her body enough for him to pull his arm free and the pins and needles were immediate and vicious and he flexed his hand behind her while the blood came back.
"Coffee," she said. She sat up. His cock slid out of her and she didn't react, just swung her legs off the bed and looked around the floor. She found his shirt. Pulled it on. It went to mid-thigh and she didn't button it and the front hung open and he could see the inside curve of one breast and the flat of her stomach and the dark strip of hair between her legs.
She walked to the kitchen area barefoot. Her legs were long and her calves flexed when she reached for the cabinet above the sink. He watched her from the bed. The hem of his shirt riding up when she stretched. The mess of her hair, platinum turned dull in the gray light, piled on top of her head where she'd twisted it.
The coffee maker was old, one of the drip kinds with a glass pot. She filled it, spooned grounds from a jar, pressed the button. Leaned against the counter with her arms crossed, looking at him across the studio.
"You want the version I tell strangers or the real one."
"Whichever one you want to give me."
She told him. Broad strokes. Felicia Hardy. Professional thief, third generation, her father taught her the trade. She'd worked solo, then with a partner, then solo again. The partner had been a complication. Web-slinging type. She didn't name him but she didn't have to.
"He wanted me to stop. Be legitimate. Get a real job." She poured coffee into two mismatched mugs. "I don't do legitimate."
"How'd that end."
"Badly." She brought him a mug. Black. The coffee was better than it had any right to be from that machine. "He went his way. I went mine. This city's big enough."
She sat cross-legged on the end of the bed. His shirt open. Her face bare, no makeup left. Freckles on her nose he hadn't seen last night.
"Your turn."
He told her what he could. New in town. No connections. No family here. He was figuring things out. He left out the system, the transmigration, the fact that he'd died on a kitchen floor in another life. He gave her the shape without the details and she took it and didn't push.
"So you're broke, alone, and you're robbing Maggia vaults for grocery money."
"That's the highlights." New chapters come out on g.com first.
"I have a job." She drank her coffee. "Bigger than the vault. A Maggia club in Hell's Kitchen, Silvermane's operation. There's a safe in the back that's got more in it than cash. Documents. Connections. Worth a lot to the right buyer."
"And you need a partner."
"I need a partner who can get through the front door while I go through the roof. Charisma gets you in. I do the rest." She tilted her head. "In exchange: your cut of the cash, a real apartment in a building I own a lease on, and my contact list. Which is worth more than the cash."
"You own a lease."
"I own several things. I'm not broke, Troy. I'm a thief because I like it."
He drank his coffee. Looked at her. She was watching him over the rim of her mug with her legs crossed and his shirt hanging open and three hours ago she'd been screaming into a pillow and now she was pitching him a business proposition.
"I'm in."
"Obviously." She finished her coffee. Set the mug on the floor. Stood up and stretched and the shirt rode up and he saw everything again and the LP bar twitched in his peripheral vision. She pulled the shirt off over her head and dropped it on the bed. Walked to the catsuit. Stepped into it, worked it up her legs, her hips, pulled the zipper up with a practiced motion.
Black Cat stood in front of him. The catsuit covered the bruises on her hips and the bite mark on her neck and the scratches on her thighs. She ran her fingers through her hair and it fell into place. She pulled the fur trim straight at her collar.
She walked to the broken window. Stepped up on the sill.
"Don't be boring, Troy."
She dropped and the fire escape didn't make a sound.
He sat in the bed with his dead arm tingling and her coffee mug on the floor and the sheet that smelled like her and the morning light getting brighter.
The system pinged.
He opened it.
FELICIA HARDY - AFFECTION TRACKER PREVIOUS: CURIOUS CURRENT: INTRIGUED
PARTNER BONUS UNLOCKED REFLEX ENHANCEMENT (MINOR) AGILITY BOOST (MINOR)
He closed his hand. Opened it. The pins and needles were fading and underneath them his fingers moved faster than they should have. He snapped his hand out to catch the edge of the coffee mug he'd knocked with his knee and caught it before it tipped. His hand was there before he'd decided to reach for it.
Reflexes. The world had slowed half a beat. Or he'd sped up half a beat. The difference was the same.
He looked at the empty window sill. Gray sky beyond it. A pigeon landed on the fire escape and left again.
He got dressed. Left through the front door. Took the stairs because the elevator was broken. The street was waking up, delivery trucks and dog walkers and a man opening a newsstand. Normal city morning. Normal people doing normal things.
He was faster than all of them now. He could feel it in his legs on the stairs, in the way his body navigated the sidewalk without him thinking about it, in the peripheral awareness that tracked two joggers and a cyclist and a woman with a stroller without his head turning.
He walked back to the flophouse. Fifteen blocks. The burner phone was in his pocket. Her number was the only one in it.
The flophouse stairs groaned under his feet. His room was cold. The mattress was thin. The water stain on the ceiling was still shaped like Florida.
The reflexes were real. So was the speed.
And in three days, they had a job.