Chapter 10
Noah
She tastes like the joke she was halfway through making.
That’s the first intel of the new world: Abby kisses the way she does everything—all in, no perimeter, laughing into it.
Her mouth opens under mine and the sound she makes, half hum, half sigh, goes through me like current through seawater, and eight years of discipline reorganizes itself on the spot around a single new priority.
Her fingers are already in my hair. Her glass of water is abandoned somewhere behind us, and the rain is coming down like applause.
I walk her back one step, two, until she’s against the counter, and lift her onto it because the height difference has been an open logistical issue for weeks and I am, at the end of everything, a problem-solver.
She laughs, bright and breathless, right against my lips, and hooks her knees around me and pulls me in like I’m the one being rescued.
“Hi,” she says, glowing, absurd, her nose an inch from mine, like we’re being introduced at the world’s smallest conference.
“Hi yourself.”
“Just confirming this is happening. For the record. Timestamped.”
“Noted for the record.” I kiss the corner of her jaw, the spot below her ear, and feel her whole body answer, a shiver that starts where my mouth is and ends in her heels at the small of my back. “Countersigned.”
“Oh, he does paperwork jokes now—” and then my teeth find her earlobe and the sentence dies somewhere lovely.
I’ve imagined this—I can admit that now, in the red dark, with her hands sliding under my shirt like she’s checking me for a heartbeat. Weeks of not-imagining it on a too-short couch. Every version I didn’t let myself finish was quieter than this. None of them had her narrating.
“For science,” she gasps, as I map the line of her throat, “I need to report that the wall thing was a complete misread, you’re—oh—you’re extremely warm-blooded—”
“You talk during this.”
“I talk during everything, this was disclosed, you signed off—”
I kiss her quiet. It works for a glorious half a minute, her fingers curling against my chest, and then she pulls back an inch, and her eyes in the dim are enormous and sure, and the humor in them has banked down into something that stops my breath.
“Take me to bed, Noah,” she says. “I’ve been sleeping twelve feet from you all summer. It’s the worst-designed experiment I’ve ever run.”
“You’re sure,” I say, against her mouth, because the last clear-headed cell I own insists on it. “Once I’m through that door, Doc, I’m not good at partial commitments. Ask my enlistment record.”
She pulls back to look at me. Rain-light on her face, her mouth kiss-bruised, her eyes steadier than I’ve ever seen them, and when she answers there’s no joke riding shotgun for once.
“Noah. I’ve been sure since the sticky note.
I was sure at the soccer game, and the bingo hall, and the night you told me the worst thing about yourself expecting me to leave, and I did the opposite of leave.
You’re the one who needed the full dataset.
” She takes my face in both hands the way I’ve wanted her to since the muffin. “Peer review’s over. Findings are in.”
I pick her up off the counter. She wraps around me, and I carry her down the hall past the whiteboard, past the door I’ve verified every night, and this time I go through it.
Her room smells like her—sunscreen and rain-damp air and the ghost of that shampoo that’s been sabotaging me since June, coconut and something green under it.
Turtle charts on the wall. A fern on the sill, doomed, beloved.
I set her down on the bed like the high-value cargo she is, and she immediately ruins the solemnity by scooting back and yanking off the sleep shirt—tonight’s says I LIKE BIG BOATS AND I CANNOT LIE—and flinging it toward the hamper, missing entirely.
Then she’s bare to the waist in the storm light, and everything in my head goes to sea.
“You’re staring,” she says. Not shy. Pleased. Cataloging me right back.
“Building the file.”
“Anything to declare?”
“Yeah.” My voice comes out wrecked. “I’m never getting over you. That’s a preliminary finding.”
Her breath catches—I hear it over the rain, I’ll hear it for years—and she reaches up and takes the hem of my shirt, and I let her peel it off me, let her look, her palms flat over the scars she doesn’t ask about, tracing them like coastline on a chart, like they’re geography instead of history.
Nobody’s touched me like that. Like all of it can stay.
“Come here,” she whispers, and I do, and the world narrows to the two of us and the drumming roof.
I take my time. She’d tell you—she does tell me, running commentary dissolving into shorter and shorter words—that I do everything like I’m defusing something, careful, both hands, total attention, and God, does she reward attention.
Every inch of her answers. The dip of her collarbone makes her sigh; the underside of her breast makes her arch; when my mouth closes over her nipple she makes a sound that rewires me, high and broken and honest, her fingers tightening in my hair like I might be recalled.
I learn her the way I learn water—patiently, completely, committing everything, because conditions change and I want to know her in all of them.
By the time I hook my thumbs in her shorts she’s trembling, hips rising to help, saying my name in a tone I’ve never heard her use on any other word. I kiss down her stomach, settle between her thighs, look up the length of her—flushed, wide-eyed, hair a storm across the pillow.
“Okay?” I ask.
“If you stop, I’m calling Rafi. There’s a duty channel and I know the pattern now.”
The laugh comes out of me rough and real, shaking loose ten years of ballast, and then I put my mouth on her and her whole body bows.
She’s loud. Of course she’s loud—she’s Abby, she’s never once experienced anything quietly, and every gasp and plea and broken half-sentence lands on me like commendation.
I take her apart slowly, learning what makes her thighs shake, what makes her grab the headboard, what makes her go suddenly, wonderfully silent—there it is, the three seconds, the quiet before she wins—and then she breaks with a cry that the rain graciously covers for the neighbors, shuddering, her hand fisted in my hair, my name coming apart in her mouth.
I work her through it and then hold still, forehead against her hip, while she comes back in stages.
Her fingers loosen. Smooth over my scalp, absent, tender, like I’m something she’s keeping.
Outside, the storm leans on the little house, and the little house holds, and I stay right where I am, listening to her breathing come back down the altitudes, more at peace than I’ve been in ten years of chasing quiet across two oceans.
“Okay,” she breathes, at last, to the ceiling. “Okay.” Once for the world, once for herself.
“Doc.”
“Give me a second, my legs filed for leave.” She tugs at my shoulders. “Up here. Now. I want—up here.”
I surface, and she kisses me slow and deep, humming like I’m something off Marnie’s seasonal menu.
Her hands chart downward—waistband, drawstring, a brief dignified struggle with the knot that has us both laughing into each other’s mouths, and then her hand closes around me and the laugh punches out of me as a groan.
“Oh, there’s a data point,” she whispers, awed, wicked, working me slow, and I have to catch her wrist before the summer ends right here.
“Abby.”
“Mm?”
“I’ve got a plan for tonight.” I bring her palm up, kiss the center of it, fold her fingers over the kiss like something she can bank. “It’s long. It’s thorough. There’s redundancy built in. You keep doing that, the plan fails on the launch pad.”
“I love it when you talk contingencies.”
There’s a condom in this house because she is, at her core, a scientist who plans for outcomes; she informs me of the location with her mouth against my jaw and no shame whatsoever, and I’ve never been so grateful for rigor in my life.
And then there’s no more logistics. There’s her underneath me in the storm-gray dark, knees rising to bracket my hips, her hands framing my face like I’m worth a long look. The reverence I’ve been rationing all summer comes up out of me all at once—no wall on earth holds against a spring tide.
“Hey,” she whispers. “You’re allowed.”
Sentence unfinished. She means all of it.
I push into her slow, and the sound we make together—her gasp, my groan, one thing, indivisible—burns itself into me like a coordinate I’ll navigate by for the rest of my life.
She’s heat and welcome and impossibly close, and I hold still, shaking with the effort of it, because I want to keep this second.
The rain. Her eyes gone wide and dark. The absolute absence of anywhere else.
“Noah.” Her heels press me deeper. “I’ve got you. Move.”
I move, and her breath breaks against my ear like surf finding shore.
It builds like weather, long and slow and inevitable—deep unhurried strokes while she narrates in fragments, yes and there and my name, my name, my name, until the fragments run out and it’s just breath and the wet drum of rain and the old sweet rhythm two people find when they stop being careful.
Her nails map my back. My hand finds her thigh and hitches it higher and she cries out at the angle, and something in me that’s been at parade rest for a decade finally, finally breaks formation.
“There he is,” she gasps, triumphant even now, even wrecked—and I drive into her and she meets me, every stroke, greedy and glad, both of us graceless now, headboard keeping time against the wall, and I feel her start to go again, the flutter and clench of her, her spine bowing.
“With me,” I get out, barely words, my hand finding hers on the pillow, fingers lacing, anchor set.
“Yes—Noah—”
She breaks first and takes me with her. White-out. Her pulsing around me, my face buried in her neck, her name the only word I have left and me saying it like a man saying land, land, land.
The rain keeps going. Eventually, so do our lungs.
I deal with necessities and come back to find her exactly where I left her, starfished and boneless, one arm thrown over her eyes, and when I sit on the edge of the bed she reaches out blind and hooks two fingers in my waistband-that-isn’t and tows me down like docking a skiff.
She fits herself against my side, head on my chest, one leg claiming both of mine, a full-body annexation conducted without a word, and then she sighs—this long, whole-summer sigh, the sound of a checklist completing—and goes quiet.
Quiet. Her. I count forty full seconds of it, her heartbeat slowing against my ribs, the rain softening to static, and I’m actually starting to worry when she finally speaks.
“Your heart’s going like a hatchling,” she murmurs, into my sternum. “Flipping sand.”
“Takes a while to stand down. Occupational.”
“Mm. No.” She tips her chin up, and even in the dark I can hear the grin arriving before she deploys it. “That’s not the occupational rate. I’ve fallen asleep on this chest during documentaries, sir. I have baseline readings.”
“For the record,” she says, at some point, sleepy-serious, tracing the oldest scar along my ribs like she’s reading it in braille, “you can wake me up. When the quiet after gets loud. I know you won’t ask, so I’m making it a standing order.
Wake me up, and I’ll talk about parrotfish until it’s boring in here again. ”
I don’t have anything to say to that. Or I have everything to say to that and no currency to pay for it yet, so I press my mouth to her hair and hold her tighter, and she nods against my chest like the message went through anyway.
It did. She’ll never know what it cost to receive it, which is nothing, which is the miracle.
The tide just came in and the boat lifted.
That’s all it ever was, apparently. I needed water instead of a wall.
“So,” Abby says, into the dark, some unmeasurable time later. She’s draped across my chest, one leg thrown over me, drawing idle nonsense on my sternum with a fingertip. “Preliminary findings.”
“Mm.”
“One. The couch is fired.” Her finger taps once, itemizing.
“Two, I’m going to need the file you’ve apparently been building, in discovery, unredacted.
Three—” she props her chin on my chest, and her face in the last of the storm light is soft and smug and mine, mine, the word installing itself without authorization—“you laughed. Mid-operation. Actual audible laughter. I felt it. That’s going on the whiteboard. ”
“It is not going on the whiteboard.”
“NOAH FACTS, item seven, dated and initialed.”
“I’ll deny it.”
“You’ll countersign it.” She yawns, enormous, mid-sentence, exactly the way she falls asleep during documentaries, and settles back down over my heart like she was surveyed for the spot, one hand flattening over the scar on my ribs like she’s keeping a thumb in a book. “You countersign... everything...”
Gone. Mid-word, mid-victory. Her breath goes long and even against my skin, the rain eases toward a hush, and I lie there in a bed I’ve cleared every night and never once slept in, holding the loudest, brightest, best thing that has ever happened to me, listening to the quiet after.
The fern on the sill drips somewhere under the window’s rhythm.
The whiteboard glows faintly down the hall, four colors of a season, one column of me.
Rain’s fine, I told her. It’s the quiet after I don’t like.
Turns out it was a supply problem. The quiet after just needed her in it.
I’m not falling. That word’s for people partway down. I’m at the bottom of the ocean, and the light down here is better than anything on the surface, and I’m not coming up.