Caroline
Regret hits me as soon as I say it. Did I go too far? Maybe it's not my place to say. Or maybe it was a stupid, empty platitude, insulting with how banal it was.
"Afon," I start to whisper, "I'm so sorry. I—"
"Okay. Then what do you want? Tell me, and I'll—"
He kisses me.
It's hungry and rough, maybe a little desperate, His hand comes up into my hair and holds me there while he takes my mouth apart. "That," he says when he breaks away for a moment. "That's what I want."
I gulp. "Are you sure…?"
He nods. "I've spent twenty years thinking about this shit, Caroline. I don't want to think anymore tonight. I want to stop. Just for a while. And you're the only thing in all that time that's ever made the noise go away."
My heart cracks straight down the middle.
"Okay," I whisper. "I'm yours. Whatever you need."
He kisses me again, harder. Even as I melt into it, I note that, somewhere south of my feet, there's a grumble and a thump and the bed gets a hundred and twenty pounds lighter.
"Did you just evict the dog telepathically?"
"He's polite," Afon remarks against my jaw. "Unlike some other guests I've had."
"Rude. I'm an excellent guest. I patched your bullet hole."
"You talked the entire time."
"That's called bedside manner—oh."
His mouth has found the spot below my ear, and whatever I was going to say next closes up shop. His beard scrapes my throat. His hand drags up under the flannel—his flannel, the one I've been living in—and spreads flat and hot across my stomach.
"This," he growls, "comes off."
"It's yours."
"I know. I want it back. Temporarily."
I laugh as he sits me up and works the buttons with more patience than I've ever had. Then the flannel is gone and the cold hits my skin for half a second before he comes along to smother away the chill. He lays me back down and just looks at me in the red glow from the stove grate.
"Say something," I whisper.
"I'm not going to sleep with you tonight."
I cringe. "That is the worst thing you could have possibly said."
"I mean it. The rule stands. Not until you know everything."
"Afon—"
"But." His hand moves down my stomach and hooks into the waistband of my leggings. "There's a lot of territory between here and there."
"Oh," I say. Very intelligently.
"Is that a yes?"
"That is a yes. That's a notarized yes. That's a yes in triplicate, filed with the county clerk—"
"Caroline. Be serious."
"Yes. Please. Yes."
He drags the leggings down my legs and off. His hands go to my knees, then coax them apart, and then I stop being able to narrate my own life.
He starts with his mouth at the inside of my ankle, the bad one. He presses a tender kiss to the bone there, careful, like an apology to the joint itself, and then he works his way up. Calf. Knee. The soft skin of my inner thigh, where his beard drags and makes me jump.
"Cold?" he asks.
"No. Very much no. The opposite of cold."
He hums against my thigh—and then he proceeds to take the scenic route.
I do mean scenic. The man explores every inch of my inner thigh with his mouth—a slow drag of lips here, a graze of teeth there, the beard a constant, rasping tagalong—and each time he gets close enough that my hips lift on their own to get what I really want, he detours.
Back down toward my knee.
Lower.
Away.
Over to the other thigh, where he starts the entire pilgrimage again from scratch.
"You're doing this on purpose," I gasp.
"I always do."
"This is a war crime. The Hague is going to hear about this."
His breath ghosts over exactly the place I want him and then… nothing. A kiss pressed to my hip bone instead. I emit a squeak. "Afon. Please. I don't think I can take much—"
His mouth lands on me, and the sentence dies.
I have been kissed there before. I want to state that for the record.
I'm twenty-eight years old, I went to college, I have had boyfriends, some of them even half-decent in bed.
But there is a difference between a man who does this because he read somewhere that he should, and a man who does this because he has decided it is the only thing in the world worth doing.
Afon is the second man.
Hell, he may have invented the second category.
He's slow. That's the part that ruins me. He's slow and thorough, completely unhurried, like we have a hundred years and a snowed-in mountain and nowhere to be, which—technically—we do. His hands hold my hips down when they try to rise off the mattress.
And his mouth learns me. There's no other word for it. He finds what makes me gasp and then he stays there, patient, relentless, until gasping isn't a strong enough word for what I'm doing.
"Afon—" I get a fist in his hair. It's the only handhold available. "Afon, oh my God—"
He hums against me. The vibration nearly ends me on the spot.
"You're—I can't—"
He pulls back an inch. "Do you want me to stop?"
"If you stop, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth."
"Hm. Objection sustained."
Then he adds two fingers as he sucks my clit in between his bearded lips, and I lose it.
I come apart on a narrow iron bed in a stone hut on a frozen mountain, with both hands in the hair of a man a decade-plus older than me who kills people, or used to, or might again. As I orgasm, I say his name loud enough that it bounces off the walls around us.
He doesn't stop. He carries me through it, gentling by degrees, until my whole body goes squiggly and my hands fall out of his hair and I'm just lying there, staring at the ceiling, vibrating.
"Oh. My. God," I announce to the roof.
He kisses the inside of my thigh once more and lifts his head. Even in the dark, I can see the satisfaction on his face. The man looks like he just won a war.
"Was that okay?" he asks.
"I have no bones. You stole them."
"Ah, bones are overrated. You'll grow new ones."
"Come here, please," I whine.
He crawls up the bed. When he's within reach, I grab him and kiss him, deep. I can taste myself on his mouth and I don't even care. It might actually be the best kiss of my life.
His weight settles half over me. It's perfect, exactly the right weight and size, everything I've ever needed to heal me.
That's when I make my move. My hand goes for his waistband.
He catches my wrist. "Caroline."
"Let me—"
"No."
"That's not fair!" I protest. "You can't just do that to a person and then declare the evening concluded."
"I can and I am."
"Afon." I push up on one elbow. "I want you. Right now. All of you. I am begging. Do you understand?"
It hurts to watch the turmoil on his face. He wants to; I know he wants to. I can feel exactly how much he wants to, pressed against my hip.
"Please," I whisper.
"You don't know what you're asking for."
"I'm asking for you. I've been asking for days. I hiked up a mountain and got concussed and kidnapped and shot at, and the one thing I have not done is change my mind about you. Not once."
"Because you don't have all the facts."
"Screw the facts!"
"Spoken like no lawyer ever." He laughs and presses his forehead to mine. "Listen to me. Tonight, you wanted to give me something, and I took it. Selfishly. I needed to forget for a little while, and you let me. But I'm not taking the rest. Not yet."
"Why not? Give me one good reason."
"Because when I have you—" He stops. Breathes.
"If I have you. It's not going to be because I was sad about the past and you felt sorry for me.
And it's not going to be with you half-informed about the man on top of you.
When you say yes, I need it to be a real yes. Eyes open. Everything on the table."
"My eyes are open."
"They're not. And that's my fault, not yours." He kisses my forehead. The tenderness of it, after everything his mouth just did, scrambles me completely. "Soon. I promise you. The rest of the story, and then—if you still want this—everything else."
"And if I still want this, you won't stop me?"
"If you still want this," he says, "God himself won't stop me."
Well.
That's one way to phrase that.
You can accuse Afon of many things, but you cannot deny that the man has a way with words.
He releases my wrist. I flex my fingers and consider my options.
It doesn't take long. In short, I have none, because the man has the self-control of a monument and I just discovered I have the self-control of a spazzy golden retriever.
"This is extortion," I inform him. "Again. You keep extorting me, and I keep letting you get away with it."
"I never claimed to be a good man."
"Agree to disagree." I gesture at myself, then at Wolf. "Exhibit A. Exhibit B."
"Those prove nothing."
"Au contraire—Wolf and I prove everything, Your Honor. You're constitutionally incapable of not saving things that need saving. You see a stray dog, you save a stray dog. You see a concussed girl, you save a concussed girl. Et cetera."
He sighs and rubs his face. "Go to sleep, Caroline."
"You always say that when you're losing."
"It's late, and we've both had a long day." He reaches down, finds the flannel where it landed, and hands it back to me. "Put your shirt on before you freeze."
"I thought it was your shirt?" I tease.
"It stopped being my shirt three days ago and we both know it."
I pull it on. He drags the quilt up over both of us, and Wolf, sensing that the coast is clear, hops back onto the foot of the bed and flattens our feet with his entire body weight. Nobody objects.
I tuck myself against Afon's side, my head on his chest, and his arm drapes around me without any hesitation at all.
That's new. Four days ago, this man wouldn't share a coffee mug's worth of personal information.
Now, I can hear his heartbeat slowing under my ear and his thumb is moving in small circles on my shoulder like it's been doing it for years.
"Afon?"
"Mm."
"Did it work? The forgetting?"
He's quiet for a moment. "For a while," he says. "Yeah. It worked."
"Good." I press a kiss to his chest, right over the scar on his sternum. "Then we can call it a successful medical intervention. For your condition."
"I have a condition?"
"Oh, big time. Chronic Brooding. It's in the DSM. Dr. Levinson would back me up."
He chuckles. "Your therapist would have a field day with this whole week."
"My therapist would need her own therapist after this week. We'd be funding an entire pyramid of therapists. A therapy MLM." I yawn, enormous and unflattering, into his sweater. "I'm going to charge you for tonight's session, by the way. My rates are very reasonable."
"What's the going rate?"
"Breakfast that isn't beans."
"Guess it's an IOU until we find a way off this mountain, then."
His chest bounces under my cheek. It takes me a moment to realize that he's laughing. Barely, and it's rusty, but it's a laugh. I feel a surge of pride.
I close my eyes. There's so much out in this world to fret about, and we have only these flimsy walls and a few strings of paracord with tin cans on them to keep us safe. But as long as Afon is here, it's enough. None of it can get to me. Not here. Not with his arm where it is.
I find his hand in the dark and lace my fingers through his, right over the bronze ring, and that's how I fall asleep: holding the hand of a man who staved off twenty years of ghosts for one night because I asked him to.
Or was it because he asked me to? At this point, I honestly don't know who's saving who anymore.
I'm not sure it matters.