Her hands were already working my shorts, fingers hooking the waistband, and I caught her wrist before she got any further.

"Hold on."

"That’s the last thing I want to do." She leaned in, pressed her mouth against the corner of my jaw. "Waiting is genuinely the worst thing you could ask me to do right now."

"Felicity."

"Lukas." She mimicked my tone perfectly, low and flat, and it would have been annoying if it hadn’t landed exactly right. "What."

The movie flickered across her face in blue and gold. On screen, the Tokyo hero team had cornered the threat against a collapsed overpass, and someone was shouting something in Japanese that the subtitles rendered as a very dramatic promise about protecting the city. Her thumb traced circles against my stomach through the fabric she hadn’t quite gotten past.

"Are we still friends after this."

The circles stopped.

I felt the shift before I saw it, that quiet recalibration behind her eyes where the girl who’d just come apart in my lap reassembled herself into someone thinking two moves ahead. She sat back a few inches. Her weight settled more solidly against my thighs. The overhead light from the projector caught the sheen of sweat along her collarbone, the loose strands of blonde stuck to her temple, the flush that hadn’t faded from her chest.

"That’s the question you want to ask." Not accusatory. Just processing. "While I’m sitting here soaked through my underwear and about to return the favor. You want to know if we’re still going to eat lunch together."

"I want to know if I just traded something good for something temporary."

She stayed quiet long enough for the hero on screen to deliver his finishing blow, receive congratulations from his team, and exit frame while the orchestral score peaked and then softened into its resolution cue. Felicity’s eyes never left mine. I didn’t look away. Neither of us pretended there was somewhere else to be.

"Yeah." Her voice came out lower than I expected, steadier. "We’re still friends. That’s why I’m so obnoxious about the whole relationship label thing. I don’t want the version where we date for six months and it goes sideways and suddenly we can’t sit next to each other in Combat Theory without making it everyone else’s problem." She shifted forward slightly, enough that her breath warmed my jaw. "I want the version where we figure out something that works and I get to keep you regardless of how the rest of it plays out."

"Greedy."

"Incredibly." The smile that pulled at her mouth was genuine and asymmetric, the kind that showed teeth on only one side. "I told you that on day one. I want to be in the room with all the interesting things. I never said I only wanted to look at them through glass."

She leaned in and kissed me again, and this time the desperation had drained out of it, replaced by something slower and more deliberate. Her hands returned to my waistband with a clear and unmistakable intention, fingers working the button loose with the kind of practiced ease that suggested she’d been thinking about the mechanics of this for longer than our current situation strictly accounted for. I could have stopped her. I probably should have stopped her. The Oracle Feed wasn’t offering commentary, which meant it had decided this particular trajectory was my problem to navigate, not its problem to flag. That was the thing about Felicity Hardy. She didn’t seduce you. She just made you realize you’d already decided, and then stood there looking pleased about it while you caught up to your own conclusions.

"Also." She got my shorts down my hips in one smooth motion, practiced and efficient, and her hand wrapped around me before I finished processing the transition from clothed to not. Warm. Sure. No hesitation anywhere in the grip or the pressure or the way her palm settled like she’d been holding this exact shape her entire life and was simply reclaiming familiar territory. "For the record. We should have picked somewhere private."

"You picked this place."

"I picked this place before I knew whatever happens here stays here." She stroked once, slow, watching my face for the reaction she got. "Which is a terrible policy for the specific thing I want to do to you, because I am going to be loud, and I am not sorry about it in advance."

I opened my mouth to say something about acoustics and empty theaters and the reasonable statistical unlikelihood of a Wednesday afternoon crowd, and she chose that exact moment to slide her thumb across the head, and the something turned into a sound I would deny making under oath.

"There he is." Delight, pure and mean. "The mid-tier telekinetic who quotes Radiant on national television. Reduced to noises."

"You’re insufferable."

"You said you liked the real me." Another stroke, tighter, her wrist finding a rhythm that suggested she’d thought about this in more detail than a friend technically should. "This is her. She’s insufferable and she’s very, very good with her hands."

She was not exaggerating.

I’d been with Sloane, who fought her own pleasure like it was a personal insult until it overwhelmed her. I’d been with Diane, who treated intimacy the way she treated everything, with total control and the patient certainty of someone who’d never once been rushed. Felicity was neither of those things. Felicity was hunger with no governor on it, all appetite and no shame, and the way she touched me carried the specific confidence of a woman who genuinely loved this and had never once been told she should feel bad about that.

"You’re staring." She said it without looking up, her attention fixed on the movement of her own hand. "Analyzing me?"

"Trying to figure out what your deal is."

"My deal." A soft laugh, and she shifted lower on my thighs to get a better angle, her skirt riding up around her waist, stockings catching the projector light. "My deal is that I like this. Sex. Bodies. The way people fall apart when you get them right. I always have, and I spent a long time pretending I didn’t because that’s the acceptable thing for a girl who wants people to keep liking her. And then I stopped pretending, and it turns out I’m kind of a lot." She squeezed, and I felt it in my spine. "Is that a problem for you?"

"No."