With All My Education (I Can't Seem To Command It)
Title: With All My Education (I Can't Seem To Command It)
Pairing: Myka Bering/H.G. Wells
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Probably best fitting mid-S2.
Summary: It's funny to think about, but Myka is pretty sure H.G. is trying to steal her.
A/N: Slapdash title from Florence & the Machine's "All This And Heaven Too."
The book in her hands is warm, heavy, overflowing with someone else’s dreams. It feels like aspiration made literal, filling her stomach with the heady sensation of a success she hasn’t quite measured yet. Somehow, despite everything she's lived, this book-any book-still instills in her the same sense of astonishment and joy that has been her instinct since childhood, ever since a little girl with frazzled curls accepted the first Little House on the Prairie novel and never looked back.
She's grown now, all quick thinking and firm rationalizations, and the world makes so much more and less sense all at the same time. Things aren't as simple as black boots or white hats; there are no boys with escaping shadows, no wizards with magic dragons, no princesses fighting their way out of castles. The world is real, tangible, tough and gritty, and she knows it; she's seen people take bullets, risk everything for the sake of their own desires. Make gambles. Fail. She knows reality can't be wrapped up with a neat little conclusion, a sparkling one-liner, or a long-awaited kiss.
Even knowing all of this, books remain her everything when life gets a little too real to handle. Books are bold, adventure cupped between anticipatory hands, and even in this life which has no shortage of chaos or adventure, Myka craves this. The smell of worn pages, riffed through by dozens of hands. The weight of leather binding pressed against her knees as she curls in a beaten-down armchair, her chin resting on one loose fist. It’s home in a way nothing else ever has been-not Sam, not work, not even the ragtag little family she has fallen into here at the Warehouse. All of those things are glass baubles in comparison to the steady comfort of literature.
She is such a nerd.
It’s what Pete would say if not for his being off on a pizza run with Claudia, what the kids at school used to shout after her as she sat nestled on the corner of the blacktop with her nose in a classic. It’s what she has been called all her life, right up until the moment she picked up a standard-issue weapon and a no-nonsense attitude and joined the good fight. Some people might take it as an insult-nerd doesn’t particularly feel bright and fluffy at first, warming the insides like her sister’s adjectives (beautiful, graceful, lovely) might-but Myka’s past that now. She is a nerd. A nerd with a gun. A nerd who travels the world, saving its unwitting occupants from mysterious and dangerous artifacts.
Nerds are cool.
And, honestly, if she hadn’t believed that before…
The hand that falls on her shoulder is slender without being dainty, its owner the sort of person whose confidence outstrips everyone else Myka has met. She doesn’t jump, doesn’t twitch, simply flicks the page carefully with the tip of one finger and allows her eyes to skid across the next paragraph. The hand flexes,fingers tracing minute wrinkles in her shirt. She smiles.
“Yes?”
The woman attached to that hand is living-albeit, surprisingly so-proof that being a nerd is anything but insulting. A mind brimming with fantastical ideas, dreams itching to take wing, inventions more marvelous than Myka could have believed to be real; everything she has ever loved about the human brain is standing right here behind her, encased behind porcelain cheekbones and flowing raven hair. If anyone on this earth qualifies as a nerd, it must be H.G. Wells.
And if anyone sees fit to call this a bad thing, Myka will be the first to Tesla them into a brief coma.
“Not hungry?” H.G. asks mildly, her hand stroking lightly down to rest against Myka’s back. “There’s grease and cheese waiting upstairs. Although, to be quite honest, I can make no promises as to how long that will remain true.”
Myka chuckles, turning another page gingerly before glancing up. “Very little takes away my appetite like watching Pete scarf calories. Feel free to go on without me, though.”
Pleasingly, H.G. doesn’t budge. Instead, she allows her free hand to drop upon Myka’s unburdened right shoulder and gently kneads the first knot she finds. Myka sighs contentedly.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” H.G. points out wryly, and Myka can tell without looking that full lips are rising in a borderline arrogant smirk. She shakes her head and eases the book down in her lap, sinking back against strong, concentrated fingertips.
"Of course.”
They remain in silence for few minutes, Myka allowing her eyes to close as the other woman works. In the past, this would have been vastly awkward; she never in her wildest dreams would have imagined H.G. Wells to be-well, a woman, but pushing that aside for the moment-a particularly handsy creature. In fact, it turns out H.G. is as charismatic as she is brilliant, and far more interested in working the world between her hands like a potter with new clay than Myka ever knew a person could be. Perhaps it’s a product of having been tucked away, wreathed in a gown of bronze for a century, or maybe H.G. has always been this way: touching what others would be content to simply observe, forever prone to feeling and hefting, tossing and catching-especially those things that do not belong to her.
Myka is fairly certain H.G. is aware of how little she owns in this world. Constantly clutching at that locket around her neck, or wringing her hands together against her own shirtfront-these are the marks of a woman who possesses very little, and therefore has no choice but to hold dear those few things on which she may inscribe her own name.
And, Myka suspects, go on to steal whatever else is necessary to survive.
What seems strange sometimes-although, she admits, that oddity is growing fainter with every passing day-is how hell-bent H.G. seems upon stealing her. Although she can’t quite put her finger on the rhyme or reason for it, not even to the point where she’d feel comfortable discussing her feelings with Pete, there is just something about the way H.G. behaves around her that seems different from anything she’s ever known. It’s all very small-little touches, quiet smiles, the tendency to step just a hair too far into her personal bubble, all the while offering the option for Myka to push her away-and she can’t say she has a problem with it, but it’s hard to deny the sense she gets whenever the author is in the room: that, maybe, Myka is that ball of clay between H.G.’s deft hands. And, for whatever unspoken reason, H.G. is working her into a very specific sort of mold.
H.G.’s thumb digs into a particularly tight knot, and Myka hears herself utter an embarrassing squeak. Her shoulders buck instinctively forward, curling toward her own ears in an effort to escape the uncomfortable pressure. Instantly, the hands on her shoulders release.
“Sorry, darling,” H.G. says softly, mildly. She waits a moment for Myka to regain her bearings, continuing only when she is given a nod to go ahead. “What is the novel that has you so entranced this evening, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Frankenstein.” Myka turns the tattered binding in her hands until the faded title stares up at them both. “Just another run through. It’s been a couple of years, and with the bit of downtime we’ve had lately-“
“It’s a beautiful piece,” H.G. offers, hands pausing in their minstrations. “Shelley was a bit before even my time, of course, but her work is lovely. At times, I’m envious of her successes.”
“Your name is at least as successful,” Myka says, turning in the chair until she can peer up into troubled dark eyes. “And for more titles.”
H.G.’s lips twist, more than a trace of bitterness drawing away from her natural beauty. “My name, perhaps. Not my efforts in specific. Not on my own.”
Myka reaches to clasp one hand in her own, tangling their fingers together a bit more intimately than she might have with anyone else. “Your name,” she says again, “your ideas, your fame. Your brother was just a vessel for the times, Helena. It’s you they all remember, whether they know it or not.”
She squeezes gently, feeling the heft of H.G.’s palm against her own skin, and offers a reassuring smile. “Besides, Shelley just painted the old man vs. God argument in a new light. You invented a time machine.”
She’s pleasantly surprised by the spark of delighted laughter as H.G. squeezes back. It’s rare that the woman reveals real joy; displaced from her own time, fumbling through a new world with all its new trials, constantly plagued by the daughter she lost-it’s not as though H.G. Wells is a bundle of giggles at the best of times. And with Artie breathing down her neck, wooly eyebrows knit tight over suspicious eyes, Myka can’t imagine there are many moments in a day when H.G. might lower her guard enough even to remember how to laugh like that. Her stomach feels warm at the thought that she might be the only person to hear that laughter in all its freedom in over a hundred years.
“You can sit, you know,” she hears herself say, scooting over on the broad chair and patting the spot beside her. There really isn’t enough room for two, but H.G. smiles and steps over all the same, settling in until they are thigh to thigh with the book stretched across their laps.
It’s strange, Myka thinks, how strong the instinct is to lean over and rest her head against the other woman’s shoulder. She doesn’t think of herself as a terribly touchy woman, prone to the caresses and playful pokes that so perfectly suit H.G.’s charm, but under circumstances such as these…There just doesn’t seem anything nicer in the world than to stay here, curled with her face tucked against a long column of pale skin, lulled by the vibrations of H.G’s-Helena’s-accent as she reads…anything, really…
But they’re grown women, and colleagues at that, and H.G. does have the unfortunate history of killing those who stand in her way. And it isn’t that Myka doesn’t trust her, or feels as though she is in any danger at all, but that fact in itself is worrying. Artie doesn’t trust H.G., and neither does Pete, or Leena. Claudia looks upon her with the eyes of youth, half skeptical, half adoring. Myka…
Myka is a grown woman, and she should know better than to give in to childish impulses like mindless devotion, or trust without cause. Myka is an agent of the American government, a woman who knows just how far the human capacity for dishonesty can range. Myka…
Is a reader, and a dreamer, and a cheerful acceptor of the nerd trophy of the year, it’s true, but to sit here all cozily with a woman who has murdered and stolen, who looks at her like she knows something Myka doesn’t, like she’s gearing up for something Myka couldn’t possibly prepare herself for-it’s rash. It’s careless. She shouldn’t.
All the same, H.G.’s hand is soft when it daringly sweeps a curl behind Myka’s ear, and her smile is somewhat sheepish when that same hand skids along Myka’s cheek a second later, thumb catching against her cheekbone. Her eyes sparkle, half-lidded, lip between her teeth as she waits, the way she always does when she moves in just a fraction of an inch too close. Giving Myka that last-ditch chance to reel away.
Myka loves literature, the stories and dreams that can wisk her far away from this place and the horrors that so often mark it, but she is also a firm believer in truth and reality. The principles of a life beyond the adolescent. She knows that, whatever H.G. is planning, however studied the motions of her quick, inquisitive hands around slowly hardening clay, it’s likely to be dangerous somehow. H.G. Wells is, after all, an impossibly dangerous woman.
A dangerous woman who has made it her new life’s work to take what she wants and make it her own, regardless of things like principle, or reality, or frivolous details like right or wrong.
Myka licks her lips, leaning precariously in until a soft mouth yields beneath her own. Against her better judgment, she revels in the sigh Helena releases, the hands that are on her instantly, cradling her face as though rough treatment might shatter all the hard work the sculpter has thus far completed. Unnoticed, Frankenstein slides to the floor with a muted thump, replaced in the next heartbeat by one of Helena’s soft, long hands, trailing up her thigh to tease loose the hem of her neatly-tucked shirt. Myka hears herself release a highly inappropriate whimper, lips parting as she allows the most dangerous woman in the world to ease her closer.
Books are for getaways, trips to other people’s dreams, worlds that might have been, once upon a time. Books are her escape from the world of rules and plans, strategy and procedure. Books are supposed to be the one indulgence among all others, the one she chose long ago to be her thing.
She never chose Helena Wells, with her cheeky smiles and flirtatious glances, hands that sneak under her clothing and steal her focus away from the rest of the world. She never would have, had she been given the chance. But that’s the thing about H.G. Wells: she steals what she needs to survive, regardless of the cost. She is a woman with very little to lose.
Like it or not, Myka has to admit there's something alluring about that, the idea that someone out there has put so much effort into stealing her, shaping her. Someone with such a capacity for wonder and rage, someone she should never have stepped near in the first place.
Helena traps her bottom lip between insistent teeth, nails scraping through waves of curls, and Myka is somehow unsurprised to find her own hand sneaking up the other woman's ribcage, holding firm. To sucuumb to this is more than unwise; Artie will hate it, Pete will judge it, Claudia will learn all the wrong lessons from her actions...
But again, it doesn't feel as though there was ever a decision to make. Not one resting in her own hands, at least. This is Helena's game, carved by Helena's rules, and Myka can only come along for the ride-praying all the while that Helena is precisely as kind as she is skilled, against all evidence to the contrary.
It's foolish. She knows better. There's no denying that. But this is the mind to top all others, the dreamer whose dreams have long shaped her own. This is, despite all violence and risk, the most beautiful chance she has ever had to embrace what she loves.
Helena Wells wants nothing more than to steal Myka Bering, and she knows it. What she didn't know, until right this moment, is how wonderful it feels to be stolen.
Her eyes open just long enough to take in Helena's lashes, stark against flushed cheeks. The heady sensation of hands slung low across her back, of Helena's body angled deliciously toward her own overwhelms her. She sighs, ragged, and leans in again.
It isn't this easy. It isn't this straightforward. Nothing ever is. But regardless of whatever the mold may be, whatever the price, there's no turning back once H.G. Wells sets her sights on a prize.
Maybe Myka isn't quite as grown-up as she thought, after all.
Pairing: Myka Bering/H.G. Wells
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Probably best fitting mid-S2.
Summary: It's funny to think about, but Myka is pretty sure H.G. is trying to steal her.
A/N: Slapdash title from Florence & the Machine's "All This And Heaven Too."
The book in her hands is warm, heavy, overflowing with someone else’s dreams. It feels like aspiration made literal, filling her stomach with the heady sensation of a success she hasn’t quite measured yet. Somehow, despite everything she's lived, this book-any book-still instills in her the same sense of astonishment and joy that has been her instinct since childhood, ever since a little girl with frazzled curls accepted the first Little House on the Prairie novel and never looked back.
She's grown now, all quick thinking and firm rationalizations, and the world makes so much more and less sense all at the same time. Things aren't as simple as black boots or white hats; there are no boys with escaping shadows, no wizards with magic dragons, no princesses fighting their way out of castles. The world is real, tangible, tough and gritty, and she knows it; she's seen people take bullets, risk everything for the sake of their own desires. Make gambles. Fail. She knows reality can't be wrapped up with a neat little conclusion, a sparkling one-liner, or a long-awaited kiss.
Even knowing all of this, books remain her everything when life gets a little too real to handle. Books are bold, adventure cupped between anticipatory hands, and even in this life which has no shortage of chaos or adventure, Myka craves this. The smell of worn pages, riffed through by dozens of hands. The weight of leather binding pressed against her knees as she curls in a beaten-down armchair, her chin resting on one loose fist. It’s home in a way nothing else ever has been-not Sam, not work, not even the ragtag little family she has fallen into here at the Warehouse. All of those things are glass baubles in comparison to the steady comfort of literature.
She is such a nerd.
It’s what Pete would say if not for his being off on a pizza run with Claudia, what the kids at school used to shout after her as she sat nestled on the corner of the blacktop with her nose in a classic. It’s what she has been called all her life, right up until the moment she picked up a standard-issue weapon and a no-nonsense attitude and joined the good fight. Some people might take it as an insult-nerd doesn’t particularly feel bright and fluffy at first, warming the insides like her sister’s adjectives (beautiful, graceful, lovely) might-but Myka’s past that now. She is a nerd. A nerd with a gun. A nerd who travels the world, saving its unwitting occupants from mysterious and dangerous artifacts.
Nerds are cool.
And, honestly, if she hadn’t believed that before…
The hand that falls on her shoulder is slender without being dainty, its owner the sort of person whose confidence outstrips everyone else Myka has met. She doesn’t jump, doesn’t twitch, simply flicks the page carefully with the tip of one finger and allows her eyes to skid across the next paragraph. The hand flexes,fingers tracing minute wrinkles in her shirt. She smiles.
“Yes?”
The woman attached to that hand is living-albeit, surprisingly so-proof that being a nerd is anything but insulting. A mind brimming with fantastical ideas, dreams itching to take wing, inventions more marvelous than Myka could have believed to be real; everything she has ever loved about the human brain is standing right here behind her, encased behind porcelain cheekbones and flowing raven hair. If anyone on this earth qualifies as a nerd, it must be H.G. Wells.
And if anyone sees fit to call this a bad thing, Myka will be the first to Tesla them into a brief coma.
“Not hungry?” H.G. asks mildly, her hand stroking lightly down to rest against Myka’s back. “There’s grease and cheese waiting upstairs. Although, to be quite honest, I can make no promises as to how long that will remain true.”
Myka chuckles, turning another page gingerly before glancing up. “Very little takes away my appetite like watching Pete scarf calories. Feel free to go on without me, though.”
Pleasingly, H.G. doesn’t budge. Instead, she allows her free hand to drop upon Myka’s unburdened right shoulder and gently kneads the first knot she finds. Myka sighs contentedly.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” H.G. points out wryly, and Myka can tell without looking that full lips are rising in a borderline arrogant smirk. She shakes her head and eases the book down in her lap, sinking back against strong, concentrated fingertips.
"Of course.”
They remain in silence for few minutes, Myka allowing her eyes to close as the other woman works. In the past, this would have been vastly awkward; she never in her wildest dreams would have imagined H.G. Wells to be-well, a woman, but pushing that aside for the moment-a particularly handsy creature. In fact, it turns out H.G. is as charismatic as she is brilliant, and far more interested in working the world between her hands like a potter with new clay than Myka ever knew a person could be. Perhaps it’s a product of having been tucked away, wreathed in a gown of bronze for a century, or maybe H.G. has always been this way: touching what others would be content to simply observe, forever prone to feeling and hefting, tossing and catching-especially those things that do not belong to her.
Myka is fairly certain H.G. is aware of how little she owns in this world. Constantly clutching at that locket around her neck, or wringing her hands together against her own shirtfront-these are the marks of a woman who possesses very little, and therefore has no choice but to hold dear those few things on which she may inscribe her own name.
And, Myka suspects, go on to steal whatever else is necessary to survive.
What seems strange sometimes-although, she admits, that oddity is growing fainter with every passing day-is how hell-bent H.G. seems upon stealing her. Although she can’t quite put her finger on the rhyme or reason for it, not even to the point where she’d feel comfortable discussing her feelings with Pete, there is just something about the way H.G. behaves around her that seems different from anything she’s ever known. It’s all very small-little touches, quiet smiles, the tendency to step just a hair too far into her personal bubble, all the while offering the option for Myka to push her away-and she can’t say she has a problem with it, but it’s hard to deny the sense she gets whenever the author is in the room: that, maybe, Myka is that ball of clay between H.G.’s deft hands. And, for whatever unspoken reason, H.G. is working her into a very specific sort of mold.
H.G.’s thumb digs into a particularly tight knot, and Myka hears herself utter an embarrassing squeak. Her shoulders buck instinctively forward, curling toward her own ears in an effort to escape the uncomfortable pressure. Instantly, the hands on her shoulders release.
“Sorry, darling,” H.G. says softly, mildly. She waits a moment for Myka to regain her bearings, continuing only when she is given a nod to go ahead. “What is the novel that has you so entranced this evening, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Frankenstein.” Myka turns the tattered binding in her hands until the faded title stares up at them both. “Just another run through. It’s been a couple of years, and with the bit of downtime we’ve had lately-“
“It’s a beautiful piece,” H.G. offers, hands pausing in their minstrations. “Shelley was a bit before even my time, of course, but her work is lovely. At times, I’m envious of her successes.”
“Your name is at least as successful,” Myka says, turning in the chair until she can peer up into troubled dark eyes. “And for more titles.”
H.G.’s lips twist, more than a trace of bitterness drawing away from her natural beauty. “My name, perhaps. Not my efforts in specific. Not on my own.”
Myka reaches to clasp one hand in her own, tangling their fingers together a bit more intimately than she might have with anyone else. “Your name,” she says again, “your ideas, your fame. Your brother was just a vessel for the times, Helena. It’s you they all remember, whether they know it or not.”
She squeezes gently, feeling the heft of H.G.’s palm against her own skin, and offers a reassuring smile. “Besides, Shelley just painted the old man vs. God argument in a new light. You invented a time machine.”
She’s pleasantly surprised by the spark of delighted laughter as H.G. squeezes back. It’s rare that the woman reveals real joy; displaced from her own time, fumbling through a new world with all its new trials, constantly plagued by the daughter she lost-it’s not as though H.G. Wells is a bundle of giggles at the best of times. And with Artie breathing down her neck, wooly eyebrows knit tight over suspicious eyes, Myka can’t imagine there are many moments in a day when H.G. might lower her guard enough even to remember how to laugh like that. Her stomach feels warm at the thought that she might be the only person to hear that laughter in all its freedom in over a hundred years.
“You can sit, you know,” she hears herself say, scooting over on the broad chair and patting the spot beside her. There really isn’t enough room for two, but H.G. smiles and steps over all the same, settling in until they are thigh to thigh with the book stretched across their laps.
It’s strange, Myka thinks, how strong the instinct is to lean over and rest her head against the other woman’s shoulder. She doesn’t think of herself as a terribly touchy woman, prone to the caresses and playful pokes that so perfectly suit H.G.’s charm, but under circumstances such as these…There just doesn’t seem anything nicer in the world than to stay here, curled with her face tucked against a long column of pale skin, lulled by the vibrations of H.G’s-Helena’s-accent as she reads…anything, really…
But they’re grown women, and colleagues at that, and H.G. does have the unfortunate history of killing those who stand in her way. And it isn’t that Myka doesn’t trust her, or feels as though she is in any danger at all, but that fact in itself is worrying. Artie doesn’t trust H.G., and neither does Pete, or Leena. Claudia looks upon her with the eyes of youth, half skeptical, half adoring. Myka…
Myka is a grown woman, and she should know better than to give in to childish impulses like mindless devotion, or trust without cause. Myka is an agent of the American government, a woman who knows just how far the human capacity for dishonesty can range. Myka…
Is a reader, and a dreamer, and a cheerful acceptor of the nerd trophy of the year, it’s true, but to sit here all cozily with a woman who has murdered and stolen, who looks at her like she knows something Myka doesn’t, like she’s gearing up for something Myka couldn’t possibly prepare herself for-it’s rash. It’s careless. She shouldn’t.
All the same, H.G.’s hand is soft when it daringly sweeps a curl behind Myka’s ear, and her smile is somewhat sheepish when that same hand skids along Myka’s cheek a second later, thumb catching against her cheekbone. Her eyes sparkle, half-lidded, lip between her teeth as she waits, the way she always does when she moves in just a fraction of an inch too close. Giving Myka that last-ditch chance to reel away.
Myka loves literature, the stories and dreams that can wisk her far away from this place and the horrors that so often mark it, but she is also a firm believer in truth and reality. The principles of a life beyond the adolescent. She knows that, whatever H.G. is planning, however studied the motions of her quick, inquisitive hands around slowly hardening clay, it’s likely to be dangerous somehow. H.G. Wells is, after all, an impossibly dangerous woman.
A dangerous woman who has made it her new life’s work to take what she wants and make it her own, regardless of things like principle, or reality, or frivolous details like right or wrong.
Myka licks her lips, leaning precariously in until a soft mouth yields beneath her own. Against her better judgment, she revels in the sigh Helena releases, the hands that are on her instantly, cradling her face as though rough treatment might shatter all the hard work the sculpter has thus far completed. Unnoticed, Frankenstein slides to the floor with a muted thump, replaced in the next heartbeat by one of Helena’s soft, long hands, trailing up her thigh to tease loose the hem of her neatly-tucked shirt. Myka hears herself release a highly inappropriate whimper, lips parting as she allows the most dangerous woman in the world to ease her closer.
Books are for getaways, trips to other people’s dreams, worlds that might have been, once upon a time. Books are her escape from the world of rules and plans, strategy and procedure. Books are supposed to be the one indulgence among all others, the one she chose long ago to be her thing.
She never chose Helena Wells, with her cheeky smiles and flirtatious glances, hands that sneak under her clothing and steal her focus away from the rest of the world. She never would have, had she been given the chance. But that’s the thing about H.G. Wells: she steals what she needs to survive, regardless of the cost. She is a woman with very little to lose.
Like it or not, Myka has to admit there's something alluring about that, the idea that someone out there has put so much effort into stealing her, shaping her. Someone with such a capacity for wonder and rage, someone she should never have stepped near in the first place.
Helena traps her bottom lip between insistent teeth, nails scraping through waves of curls, and Myka is somehow unsurprised to find her own hand sneaking up the other woman's ribcage, holding firm. To sucuumb to this is more than unwise; Artie will hate it, Pete will judge it, Claudia will learn all the wrong lessons from her actions...
But again, it doesn't feel as though there was ever a decision to make. Not one resting in her own hands, at least. This is Helena's game, carved by Helena's rules, and Myka can only come along for the ride-praying all the while that Helena is precisely as kind as she is skilled, against all evidence to the contrary.
It's foolish. She knows better. There's no denying that. But this is the mind to top all others, the dreamer whose dreams have long shaped her own. This is, despite all violence and risk, the most beautiful chance she has ever had to embrace what she loves.
Helena Wells wants nothing more than to steal Myka Bering, and she knows it. What she didn't know, until right this moment, is how wonderful it feels to be stolen.
Her eyes open just long enough to take in Helena's lashes, stark against flushed cheeks. The heady sensation of hands slung low across her back, of Helena's body angled deliciously toward her own overwhelms her. She sighs, ragged, and leans in again.
It isn't this easy. It isn't this straightforward. Nothing ever is. But regardless of whatever the mold may be, whatever the price, there's no turning back once H.G. Wells sets her sights on a prize.
Maybe Myka isn't quite as grown-up as she thought, after all.