CHAPTER 19 #2
She bent her head and put her mouth to the shoulder scar.
Soft. Reverent, almost, her lips moving along the ridge of it, and something in Beck's chest came apart that he'd been holding shut for a decade.
Nobody had ever kissed the parts of him that were broke.
They'd cheered the winning and never once asked about the cost of it.
She kissed the cost. She kissed the wrist next, the pin-scars, careful as a prayer, and he stood there shaking and let a woman touch the ruined parts of him with tenderness and didn't bolt.
“Laney,” he said, and his voice had gone to gravel. “God, Laney.”
“I've got you,” she murmured, which was his line, the one he'd been saving up to give her, and she'd gone and given it to him first.
He laid her down on the quilt, on the worn stitching gold in the lamplight, and stretched out over her and just looked for a second, both of them bare and the rain ticking soft and slow on the cabin roof now, almost done.
She looked up at him with her hair fanned copper on his mother's quilt and her chest going fast, and the stillness had left her entirely, gone from her everywhere, and the sight of Laney Cross undone underneath him was going to live behind his eyes till the day he died.
“You're staring,” she said.
“Damn right I am.”
He kissed her again and let his hand go down her, learning, the slope of her breast and the catch of her breath when his thumb crossed her nipple, the flat of her belly, the muscle there jumping under his palm.
Lower. She opened her thighs for him without him asking and the slick heat of her met his fingers and they both went still at the same time, foreheads close, breathing each other's air.
“This okay,” he said. He had to. He'd keep asking till she told him to quit.
“Yes.” It came out broken. Her hand closed over his wrist, pressing him closer instead of stopping him, guiding. “Don't you dare stop.”
He didn't. He touched her slow, found the slick of her and the swell of her clit and learned what made her gasp and what made her go boneless, reading her the way she read everything, and her precision fell off her in pieces.
The careful diagnostic voice broke down into fragments, into his name, into there, Beck, right there, into sounds she wasn't shaping into words at all, and he drank every one of them down like a man who'd been a long time dry.
He wanted his mouth on her. He told her so, blunt, the cowboy in him with no poetry in it, and she said yes again, said please, which undid him worse than anything, Laney Cross who never asked anybody for one thing in her life saying please to him.
So he worked down her body kissing as he went and put his mouth to her, and her hand fisted in his hair and her thighs shook against his ears, and he stayed with her, patient as he'd ever been with anything, until she came apart against his tongue with his name on her broken into syllables, her spine arching off the quilt and her hand gripping his.
He came back up over her with his heart going like a drum and kissed her shaking mouth.
“Beck,” she said, when she could. Her eyes were wet and fierce and right there, no chart between them now, none.
She reached down and took the hard length of him in her hand and he hissed through his teeth and shut his eyes.
“Now. I want you now. I want — ” The list-maker, even now, even ruined, reaching for the exact word.
She gave up on it. “I want you. All of it. Yes.”
He braced on his forearms and looked down at her and lined himself up and went into her slow, slow, watching her face the whole time for any flinch that wasn't pleasure, and there wasn't one, just her breath catching and her hands closing hard on his back and her body taking him, opening, the heat of her closing around him until he was all the way home and had to hold still and breathe or be done before he'd started.
“Okay,” she breathed. “I'm okay. You can — Beck, move.”
He moved.
And every braced and guarded thing in him let go at once. Hold on, the old reflex said, the one that had run his whole life — except it had it backward, had always had it backward. The trick wasn't to hold tight and then let go. The trick was to never let go at all.
He set a rhythm and she met it, her hips rocking up into his, her heels hooked behind his thighs, the slick slide of her around him and the small broken air she let out each time he sank deep, the two of them finding the old sync their bodies had never forgotten even when their hearts had tried, working together the way they worked everything, no wasted motion, and the lamplight swam gold over both of them and over the worn quilt-stitching beneath her bare back.
“Mine,” he said, low, against her throat, and he hadn't meant to, it came up out of him from someplace below thinking.
Mine to stay for. The word turned itself over in him — not mine to take and leave but mine to plant my feet beside.
The whole inversion of his life said in one syllable against her pulse. “Mine. Stay. Let me — ”
“Yours,” she said, fierce, fingers raking his back. “I'm right here. I'm not the one who leaves.”
It landed like a hoof to the chest, that did, and it should have cooled him and instead it lit him up, because she'd named the exact shape of the fear and put herself on the far side of it, and for one suspended beat he believed her about himself.
Then the fear came anyway, the way it always did, in the thick of the best thing.
His breath snagged and went short against her hair.
His hand fisted in the quilt by her shoulder, knuckles drawn white, gripping the way he'd grip rope going slack.
You don't deserve this. The Calhoun who leaves, who breaks what he touches — you'll break this too, you'll find the way.
His forehead pressed hard to the side of her head, jaw clenched, the rest of it crowding up wordless and ugly under the pleasure where the short words couldn't hold it, and he kept moving and hid his face from her and let the want drown it.
“Hey.” Her rhythm under him faltered, her hands going still where they'd been moving, the whole of her catching the shift the half-second it crossed him. She took his face in both her capable hands and made him look at her. “Stay with me. Up here. With me. Don't go in your head.”
“I'm here,” he got out.
“Prove it.”