Chapter 508 | Just Misato

Chapter 508: 508 | Just Misato

Misato Ayame closed her apartment door and leaned against it, forehead pressed to the wood, and stood there for thirty seconds doing absolutely nothing.

The training field was done. The squad was fed and dismissed. The gate-bid strategy session had run forty-seven minutes and Blair had only interrupted twelve times, which was a personal record for restraint, and Jace had sat in the back corner looking at his phone and occasionally glancing up at Misato with something in his eyes that made her forget what sentence she was in the middle of.

She had kissed him.

She had grabbed his shirt and pulled him down and kissed him like she was trying to climb inside his mouth and live there, and he had kissed her back, and his hands had been in her hair and on her spine and everywhere she’d spent nine years pretending she didn’t want hands to be.

Misato pushed off the door and walked into her bathroom without turning on the lights. The afternoon sun came through the frosted window and painted everything gold, and she stood in front of the mirror and looked at the woman looking back.

Lime green ponytail. Sharp features. Captain’s insignia on the collar of a uniform that had seen six hours of drills and smelled like it. Dark circles under her eyes from three days of not sleeping while Jace was dead in a river somewhere, and then three more days of not sleeping while Jace was alive in a hospital bed and she couldn’t touch him because the line between captain and field lead was supposed to mean something.

The line didn’t mean anything anymore. She’d burned it down in a tree line with her tongue in his mouth and her hands fisted in his shirt and the taste of him still sitting on her lips like a brand.

Misato pulled the hair tie free and let her ponytail fall. The lime green spilled over her shoulders and down her back, longer than most people realized because she always wore it up, always kept it contained, always made sure nothing about her suggested softness or accessibility or anything that could be grabbed in a fight.

She undid the buttons of her uniform jacket one at a time. The fabric fell away and revealed the compression sports bra beneath, industrial gray, functional, built to flatten and contain rather than display. She’d worn bras like this since she was fourteen and her body had decided to become a problem, since boys had started looking and men had started commenting and her mother had started suggesting that maybe Misato should dress differently, act differently, be less.

Misato had refused. She’d doubled down. She’d made herself harder and sharper and meaner until people stopped seeing her body and started seeing the threat, and that had worked for nine years, and then Jace Monroe had looked at her on a cliff edge like she was the most important thing in any direction and the entire fucking strategy had collapsed.

She pulled the sports bra over her head.

Her breasts fell free, heavy and full and impossible to ignore. 40F, according to the last fitting she’d done two years ago when her old bras had finally given up the fight. She’d grown up hating them. They got in the way during combat. They drew attention she didn’t want. They made people assume things about her intelligence and her capability and her worth.

But standing in her bathroom with the golden light sliding over her skin, Misato looked at herself in the mirror and thought about the way Jace had said her name. Just Misato. Not Captain Ayame. Not any of the titles she hid behind. Just her name, spoken like it mattered, like she mattered, like she was someone worth needing rather than just someone useful.

She wondered what his face would look like if he saw her like this.

The thought came unbidden and unwanted and she shoved it away with the same force she used to shove away everything else, but it didn’t go. It sat in the back of her skull next to the memory of his mouth and his hands and the specific noise he’d made when she bit his lip, and it refused to move.

Misato stripped off the rest of her uniform. Pants. Underwear. Socks. She left everything in a pile on the floor, which was unlike her, which was sloppy, which was the kind of thing she would have criticized in any of her squad members, but she couldn’t bring herself to care right now.

The shower was small, because her apartment was small, because captains at San Nicolas Academy made enough to live on and not much more. She’d never minded before. Privacy was privacy. Four walls and a door that locked and a space that belonged entirely to her.

She turned the water hot. Hotter. Hot enough that the steam rose immediately and fogged the mirror and filled the bathroom with warmth that sank into her bones. She stepped under the spray and gasped at the heat of it, the almost-painful temperature that she always chose because she liked the way it made her skin flush and her muscles unclench and her brain finally, finally stop running tactical assessments of every situation around her.

Water poured over her hair and down her face and across the curves of her body. She tilted her head back and let the spray hit her throat, her collarbones, the space between her breasts where Jace’s forehead had pressed when he’d pulled her close.

She had kissed him.

She had told him she needed him. Out loud. With words. Like some kind of disaster in a romance novel, standing on a cliff edge at sunrise, spilling her guts to a boy she was supposed to be commanding rather than wanting.

And he hadn’t laughed. He hadn’t pulled away. He hadn’t said any of the things she’d spent nine years preparing herself to hear. He’d just looked at her with those dark eyes and touched her face and said her name like it was sacred, and then he’d kissed her until she forgot what breathing was for.

Misato reached for the soap. Lavender, because her mother had always used lavender and the smell reminded her of being small and safe and loved, back before her mother had become another person who wanted Misato to be less than she was. She worked the soap into a lather between her palms and started with her arms, her shoulders, the muscles that ached from a morning of commanding clones and pretending she wasn’t watching Jace’s mouth the entire time.

She washed her neck, her collarbones, the hollow of her throat where his lips had pressed. Her hands moved lower and cupped her breasts, lifting them, soaping the undersides where sweat collected during long training sessions. The weight of them in her palms felt different than it had an hour ago. Familiar and foreign at the same time.

Jace had other women. She knew that. Everyone knew that. Naomi with her pink hair and her gentle hands. Belle with her amber eyes and her spreadsheets. Aurora with her orange hair and her chaos energy. Addison, apparently, based on the marks Misato had seen on Jace’s shoulders during morning drills, bite marks and scratches that looked like someone had tried to climb inside his skin through force of will.

And now Misato.