Caroline
The fire takes. I hear it catch and grow, the little spit and pop of dry spruce surrendering to flame. But I refuse to turn around and warm myself by it, because that would be admitting I need him.
So I stand there with my back to him and my arms wrapped around myself, shaking, watching my own breath disappear into the dark.
Behind me, I hear him stand. The crunch of his boots in the snow.
"Spare me, Afon," I cut him off. "I mean it. I'm all out of room for whatever bullshit you're about to throw my way."
"I only wanted to say that you were right."
I turn around.
He's standing maybe two feet away, the firelight catching one side of his face and leaving the other in dark.
The blood at his hip has gone tacky and black in the cold.
His hair is wet with snow that won't melt anymore, and his eyes are open.
Open as in open open, both physically and emotionally.
None of that fuck off concrete poured over the top.
"I—what?"
"You're right." He says it again, slower.
"About all of it. Every word. I've been making decisions for you for a while now.
I chose everything for you without once asking what you wanted.
I think I was afraid that asking would mean you might answer, and that I wouldn't be ready for what you might say. "
The snow keeps coming down between us. I don't trust this. I've trusted half-inches before and watched them slam shut. Fool me twice, et cetera.
"Why?" I say.
He doesn't pretend not to understand. He's done pretending; I can see it in the set of his shoulders. They've come down from around his ears for the first time since the diner.
"Because the day I let you decide for yourself is the day I have to admit you might decide to leave."
I stand very still, because I have the strange sense that if I move too fast, I'll scare it back into him, this true thing, this real thing, the one I've been clawing for since the bunkhouse.
"And that scares you," I infer. "More than Reznik, or dying."
"More than anything."
"Why?"
"Because…" His hand goes to the ring. I watch it go, watch his thumb find the band like it always does, the worry-stone of him, the rosary. But this time he catches himself. He looks down at his own hand like it belongs to a stranger.
And then, deliberately, he lets go of the ring. He lets his hand fall open at his side.
"Because you've come to mean more to me than you ever should have," he explains.
"It's not safe. I keep trying to put you down and walk away from you, and I can't fucking do it.
I look at you laughing at some idiot in a canvas coat and I want to beat him senseless for fucking daring to come near you.
I haven't wanted anything that bad in twenty years.
" His breath fogs, ragged. "But now, suddenly, I want everything.
All this shit that I have no business having.
And the only way I knew how to keep us both safe was to keep deciding things for you.
So you wouldn't have to choose me. So I wouldn't have to find out you didn't."
I've been waiting all this time for the truth, for secrets to come to light. Here it is now, suddenly, out of nowhere. There's nothing between us hiding it anymore, no more cans of beans or walls of emotional concrete. It's just here, so much worse and so much better than I ever imagined.
The terrible secret at the center of Afon Satyrin isn't that he hates me.
It's that he doesn't.
It's that he's been falling, all this time.
"You're such a dumbass," I whisper in disbelief.
His mouth twitches, just barely. "That's all?"
"No, you don't understand." I take a step toward him, ankle screaming, snow up to my shins, and I don't care.
"You want to know what I couldn't survive?
This. Wondering. Lying next to you every night with my hand on your chest and your arm around me and thinking, He hates me, he wishes I'd never come, I'm an inconvenience he can't wait to get rid of.
" I feel hot tears on my cheek "You stood in that diner and said we're not together like it was a fact, and I went home in my head and cried about it on the inside of my own face.
Do you have any idea—you could have just told me. You could have told me on day one!"
"You wouldn't have been able to handle that," he says.
"No, don't you fucking dare." I close the last of the distance.
I have to tip my head back to look at him; that's how it's always been, this man, this mountain.
"I didn't change my mind. Not once. Not concussed.
Not kidnapped. Not freezing. Not when you put me on a bus, not when you said we weren't together, not even thirty seconds ago when I called you a coward and meant it.
" I reach up to put my cold hand flat against the stone of his jaw.
"I'm still here. I keep being here. When are you going to believe that I picked this on purpose? That I picked you?"
For a long moment, he doesn't move. The fire throws orange light across half his face, while the other half stays in shadow. The snow comes down on both of us, and Wolf, lounging behind me, lets out a long sigh as if to say, Finally.
Then Afon's hand comes up and covers mine where it lies against his cheek. His fingers are freezing. They tremble, that fine, familiar tremor I've felt a hundred times, the one I'd look past if I weren't pressed right up against him.
"If I let you in," he says, very low, "I don't think I'll ever be able to put you down again. You understand that? I'm not built for halfway. If I do this, you're mine, and I am the most dangerous, most ruined, least sensible thing you will ever choose, but I will never once let go."
"Good," I say. "I'm tired of the Berlin Wall blanket anyway."
And that's what breaks him.
He makes a sound—a grunt, a grunt, a laugh, I'm not sure—and then his mouth is on mine.
I grab the front of his jacket for balance. He walks me backward, careful even now, even like this, his hand cradling the back of my head so I don't catch it on a branch, until my back hits the rough bark of a spruce and his whole body presses into mine.
He's so warm. How is he always so warm, when everything else up here is ice?
"Your hip," I gasp against his mouth.
"Don't care."
"You'll reopen it—"
"So what?" He pulls back just enough to look at me. His dark eyes are blazing with heat. "I've bled more for less worthy causes. Let me have this one."
There is no arguing with that. There is no arguing with any of it, really.
Especially not when his hands stop being so damn careful with me and start being certain and authoritative instead.
They slide under the flannel—formerly known as His Flannel, though we both know it stopped being his days ago—to find the bare skin of my waist and drag a moan out of me that gets lost in the wind.
I blink and he's transported me onto the blanket with the fire snapping beside us and Wolf relocated to the far edge of the camp with the wounded dignity of a chaperone betrayed.
Afon strips the flannel off me and his eyes go dark looking at me in the firelight, and then he covers me with his body, the bulk and the heat and the gray-threaded chest hair looming over my palms.
"Tell me this is a real yes," he growls as he kisses my throat. "Eyes open. Everything on the table. Tell me you know what you're choosing."
I get my hands in his hair, both of them, and I tip his face up to mine.
"I know I don't have the whole story," I say.
"And I remember that it's going to break my heart once I hear the end; you told me so yourself.
All those things in your past that haunt you, I see them, even if you won't give me the details.
" His jaw flexes under my hands, but I don't let him look away.
"But I'm choosing you anyway. With my eyes wide open.
There isn't a single version of this story where I don't."
He goes still one more time. Just one. I can feel his heart slamming against mine. I understand that I've said the thing he's been waiting half his life to hear and never once let himself believe.
"You were made for me and me alone," he breathes.
And then there's no more talking, no more deciding, no more half-inches.
He kisses me again, slower this time. His hands move down my sides. He finds the waistband of my pants and pulls them down over my hips. I lift up so he can get them off. My socks go, too. Now I'm naked on the blanket with the fire next to me and the snow coming down past the edge of the tarp.
He pulls back to look at me. His eyes go over every exposed part of me.
"Cold?" he asks.
"Not as long as you're here with me."
He puts his mouth on my collarbone. Then lower.
He kisses down between my breasts. He takes one in his hand and brings his mouth to the other.
His tongue moves over my nipple. I arch up.
He does it again, slower. His other hand kneads the breast he isn't using his mouth on.
His thumb rolls my nipple, tweaking it into a stiff and almost painful point.
I reach for his sweater. He lets me pull it up and off. The thermal disappears next. Now, his chest is bare against me, the hair rough on my skin, the scar low on his side, the old swallow tattoo. I run my hands over all of it.
He moves down to feather light kisses across my stomach. He kisses one hip, then the next, like putting an offering on an altar. Then he pushes my knees apart with his hands and settles between them.
I want to moan his name, but he doesn't even give me the chance before his mouth is on my clit.
He goes slow at first, one long lick up the length of my lips, then another, with only the teasing tip of his tongue.
He pins my hips down with his forearm across my belly.
I'm writhing against him as his tongue works tight circles.