Chapter 19 Homecoming #2
Gideon noticed, because Gideon always noticed.
“What do you need?”
I looked at him. Really looked. At the way exhaustion had carved shadows under his eyes, at the tension still held in his shoulders despite being home, at the careful way he was watching me like he was trying to solve a problem that didn't have an easy answer.
“You,” I said. Simple. Honest. “I need you.”
Gideon took my hand and let me pull him up, let me lead him toward the bedroom.
I kissed him as soon as we crossed the threshold.
Slow and deliberate, my hands sliding into his hair the way I'd learned he liked, tugging just enough to make him gasp against my mouth. He responded immediately, his body pressing against mine with a hunger that matched my own, his hands finding my hips and gripping hard enough to leave marks.
I remembered this. Remembered the way he tasted, the particular sound he made when I bit his lower lip, the way his control started to fracture when I touched him with intent.
But this time we weren't rushing. This time I could take my time mapping every response, cataloging what made his breath catch and his hands tighten.
“Bed,” he managed between kisses. “Before I take you against the wall.”
“Who says I'd object to that?”
He laughed, rough and heated. “Next time. Right now I want you under me where I can see you properly.”
The promise in his voice made heat pool low in my stomach.
We moved to the bed with hands already pulling at clothes, buttons coming undone between kisses, fabric sliding away to reveal skin I had touched before but could touch now without the cold biting at us.
Gideon's shirt came off and I traced the scars across his ribs with my mouth, remembering the pattern from before, adding to my mental map of what made him shudder.
His hands found the waistband of my jeans and made quick work of the button and zipper, pushing them down my hips with unhurried grace. I kicked them off and pulled him down onto the bed, rolling us so I was on top, straddling his hips while his hands found my thighs and gripped.
“You're beautiful.” His voice had gone rough. His eyes tracked across my body with open appreciation, with desire that was clear and uncomplicated. “Even wrecked. Even exhausted. You're...”
Nobody had looked at me the way Gideon was looking at me right now, with that particular quality of attention that had nothing calculating in it, no angle, no agenda, no assessment of what I was worth or what I could be used for.
Just want. Just honest, uncomplicated want directed at me specifically, at the battered and still-healing body I had spent years treating as a liability.
My throat tightened around something I did not have a word for yet.
I kissed him before he could finish, before the compliment could make me feel too much too fast. His mouth opened under mine and I deepened the kiss with intent, letting my tongue slide against his, tasting him thoroughly while my hips rocked against his in a slow grind that made us both groan.
His hands slid up my thighs to my hips, guiding the rhythm, and I felt how hard he was beneath me, the evidence of his want pressing against my own.
I moved against him with more purpose and felt his breath catch, felt his fingers dig into my hips with a pressure that would leave marks I already knew I wanted.
“Ronan.” My name in his mouth had a different quality in the warmth of a room than it had by the cold lake. More private. More certain.
I broke the kiss to catch my breath and his mouth found my throat, teeth grazing the sensitive skin there before his tongue soothed the sting.
“Gideon...”
“I know.” Wrecked. “I know what you need.”
He rolled us with the easy strength that came from decades of physical work, pinning me beneath him with my wrists caught in one hand above my head.
The position should have made my wolf bristle, should have triggered the instinct to fight for dominance.
Instead I felt myself relax, felt the trust I had in him settle into my bones as I let him hold me down.
And that was the thing that surprised me most, not the physical fact of being held but the internal quiet of it.
My wolf, which had spent years in a constant low-grade argument with every alpha register in every room, went utterly and completely still.
Not suppressed. Not fighting its own instincts through gritted teeth.
Still, the way a body goes still in warm water, the way tension leaves muscles that have been braced for so long they forgot what rest felt like.
He watched my face while the stillness settled into me and understood what he was seeing.
His grip on my wrists eased just slightly. Not releasing, just softening, communicating something with his hand that he did not say with words. I tightened my own fingers against his palm in answer.
His free hand traced down my chest, fingers trailing across scars old and new, learning the geography of damage I carried.
He followed a long scar along my left ribs with two fingers, tracing it from end to end with a patience that made my breath go shallow.
Then his mouth followed where his hand had been, pressing against the scar tissue with a warmth that was not pity, not careful tolerance, but something I had to sit with for a moment before I could name it.
Affection. Simple, uncomplicated affection for the body I came in, damage and all.
My free hand found his hair.
He worked his way down with that same unhurried attention, mouth moving across my stomach, pausing at each scar to acknowledge it without making a ceremony of the acknowledgment.
When he reached my hip his grip tightened, pulling me closer, and then his mouth was on my chest, my ribs, my stomach, moving lower with clear intent.
“Yes,” I managed. “Yes, please...”
He took me into his mouth with the same focused attention he brought to everything, and the wet heat of it made my back arch off the bed.
He knew how I liked it now, knew the rhythm and pressure that would take me apart, and he used that knowledge with a deliberate thoroughness that had my fingers twisting in his hair while I tried to remember how to breathe.
The knowledge component of it was its own particular undoing.
That he had paid attention. That he had filed away what worked and what made me gasp and what made the wolf surface and what made the man surface and was deploying all of it now with careful, merciless intent.
Being known by someone was a different experience entirely from being wanted by them, and being both at once was almost more than I could process.
“Gideon, I can't, I'm going to—”
The heat gathered fast, embarrassingly fast, my hips rolling up with an urgency I could not contain, and I was two breaths from the edge and climbing faster than I wanted when he pulled off and kissed his way back up my body until his mouth found mine again.
I could taste myself on his tongue and it pulled a desperate, broken sound from my throat and made me reach for him with hands that shook.
“Inside me,” I said against his mouth. “Need you inside me.”
He reached for the bedside table and found what he needed, and then his hands were on me again.
His fingers worked into me slowly and I felt the slick still present, my body apparently having committed to this response without asking my permission, and the low, pleased sound he made against my jaw when he felt it undid the last of my self-consciousness about it entirely.
“You're already—”
“I'm aware,” I said, and the roughness in my own voice surprised me.
He pressed deeper and I exhaled a long, unsteady breath against his shoulder, fingers curling into the muscle there.
He took his time, more time than strictly necessary, learning what made me push back against his hand and what made me go loose and what produced the involuntary “mmnhh” from somewhere in my chest that I could not reliably suppress.
He was enjoying this, not in a way that was about power, but in the way of someone who genuinely liked knowing what affected me and wanted more of that information.
“Gideon.” A warning. A request. Both.
“I've got you.” Against my temple. “Just feel it.”
When he finally pressed inside me the fullness was perfect, the stretch exactly what I needed to feel grounded.
He moved slow at first, letting me adjust, his forehead pressed against mine while we breathed together.
His eyes were open. I kept mine open too, watching him, watching the way his expression shifted as he settled into the warmth of me, the particular quality of focus that came over his face when something mattered to him completely.
“You feel like home,” he said, quiet and direct and without ceremony.
My chest cracked open like old wood.
Then his hips snapped forward and I gasped, pleasure spiking hot through my body and chasing every tender feeling into something more urgent.
“More,” I demanded. “Harder. I'm not going to break.”
“I know.” But his next thrust was harder, deeper, the kind that made stars explode behind my eyelids. “I know exactly how much you can take.”
He proved it with every movement, finding the angle that made me cry out, building a rhythm that had me clinging to his shoulders while he took me apart with care and intent.
My wolf was present in every response, in the way my nails dragged down his back and in the sounds I was making, low and rhythmic and climbing in pitch with every drive of his hips.
I let it be present. I stopped managing it, stopped keeping it at arm's length, stopped treating its wants as suspect.
It wanted him. It had always wanted him.
And he was here, above me, inside me, breathing my air, and the wanting did not have to be fought anymore.
“Gideon.” Cracked entirely. “Gideon, please—”
“Here.” His hand wrapped around my cock. “I have you. Come for me.”
When my release hit it devastated me, left me shaking and gasping his name while he followed moments later, his whole body going rigid before he collapsed against me with his face pressed into my neck.
We lay tangled together while our breathing steadied, his weight warm and grounding.
“That was...” I started.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
We shifted positions, his hands on my waist guiding me up until I was straddling him again.
“Your turn,” he said.
I rolled my hips and watched his jaw go slack.
I set my own pace this time, slow and deliberate, learning what made his hands tighten on my thighs and what made his head press back into the pillow and what produced the low, bitten-off sounds he kept trying to swallow.
“Stop thinking,” I told him.
His eyes found mine. “I'm not thinking.”
“You're thinking about whether you deserve this.”
A pause. His hands shifted on my thighs, thumbs pressing in slow circles against the muscle there. “Maybe.”
“You do. You have. For a very long time.”
He reached up and pulled me down to his mouth and kissed me with a thoroughness that tasted like belief, like a man choosing to accept something he had been refusing for longer than either of us wanted to count.
His hands found my hips and guided without directing, letting me keep the rhythm while he met each movement with his own, and the sounds we were making in the warm private dark of the room were a different register entirely from the lake, less desperate, more deliberate, the sounds of two people who had time and warmth and no threats pressing in at the edges.
I felt his magic settle in the room around us as he let go of the vigilance he maintained like a second skeleton, and the quality of the air shifted, warmer and more present, the eerie electric feeling of him relaxing completely for the first time since I had known him.
“You feel that?” I said against his jaw.
“Yes.” Rough and wondering. “I didn't know I could do that.”
“You can. Here. With me.”
His arms wrapped around my back and pulled me down against him, changing the angle, and I groaned at the depth of it, and then neither of us was talking anymore.
The release when it came left us both gasping, tangled together in sheets that smelled like sage and motor oil, the particular scent combination that meant Gideon and home in ways I was still learning to trust.
We lay in the quiet afterward, his fingers tracing patterns across my ribs, and I felt my mind trying to spiral into guilt again. Thinking about the compulsion, about Silas, about all the ways I could still be used to hurt the people I cared about.
“Thank you.” I said.
“You don't need to thank me.” He pressed a kiss to my shoulder. “I'm here. Whatever you need. I'm here.”
I held onto that certainty while we drifted toward sleep, held onto the warmth of his body against mine, held onto the understanding that coming home meant letting someone walk beside me through the ache instead of carrying it alone.