Chapter 14
BONES
I've checked her twice. Pulse, pupils, the split in her bottom lip where she's been biting it raw. Nothing on her that won't heal in a few days.
I click the penlight off and set it on the nightstand, and that's the moment I quit being a doctor.
She's on the edge of my bed in one of my shirts, hair dark and wet from the shower, knees pressed together, and she's looking up at me like she's braced for the next order.
Eat. Drink. Sleep. I've handed her orders since the lobby because orders were the only thing standing between me and coming apart in front of my brothers.
I'm out of orders.
"Bandit."
I go down. Big man, bad knees, and I put both on the floor in front of her anyway, and I bring my forehead to the center of her chest and stay there. Her heart goes against my skull, fast and stubborn, the exact thing I confirmed alive ninety seconds ago with a stethoscope.
Her hands come into my hair. Careful. Like I'm the one who was captive and escaped.
"You found me," she says.
"Took too long."
"You found me."
She says it again, quieter, like she still doesn't trust it. I don't rush her out of it.
I lift my head. She's so young in this light and she's been through a thing tonight that would've folded men I've buried, and she's the one comforting me, because that's the problem with her, she can't stop.
I put my thumb on her bottom lip, light, over the split. "Stop taking care of everybody. Tonight, let me take care of you."
She doesn't answer with words. She reaches down, pulls my shirt up over her head, and drops it on the floor. Then she sits there in the lamplight with her chin up, daring me to keep treating her like something breakable.
That's the end of careful.
I come up off the floor and put her into the mattress with me over her, and I start with her bitten lip, soft under mine. The pulse at her throat, the inside of her wrist. I put my mouth on every place this day got its hands on her before I let myself touch anywhere that's only mine.
"Bones." Her voice has gone thin. "I'm not glass."
"I know what you're made of."
I still have to learn her body, and I take my time at it, my mouth chasing my hands, every inch of her until she's fisted in the sheets and saying things she'll go red about tomorrow. I don't let up, because tonight she falls and finds me already there.
She tries to take over. Of course she wants to be the one giving. Twenty-one years of never letting anyone carry her, and it lives in her hands. I catch her wrist. Bring it up over her head and pin it gentle to the pillow and hold it there.
"No," I tell her, mouth against her ear. "Not tonight. Tonight you let go and I catch it. Every bit of it."
She shudders under me, and it isn't fear. It's the surrender she's been white-knuckling out of since the lobby finally coming loose. She lets me carry the weight of her, all of it, the thing she hands nobody.
I enter her slowly and feel it when it tears … Fuck! I'm her first. I'm about to pull out when she whispers, "Don't you dare stop."
So I stay and let her ease into it. Her name is her throat and her heels dug into my back when I start moving again.
I'm savoring every second of it, greedy for what she's giving me. I take my time to push into her all the way, and the sound that comes out of me isn't one I make in front of anybody alive before.
"Here." Forehead to hers. "You're here. With me."
I say it on every stroke. Low, into her mouth, against her jaw. I need it true worse than she does, that she's under me and breathing and not locked up in some far away place. Her hands map my back, the old scar, the spread of my shoulders, and she holds on.
In her eyes, there's just me, and the bed, and her grip telling me she wants this as badly as I do.
Her hand finds mine on the pillow and laces through it, fingers between my fingers. It's the thing that finishes me.
She goes over a second time, clenched tight around me, and I follow her with my lips buried in her hair and my whole weight coming down warm and welcome.
I don't move off her right away. She doesn't ask me to.
When I do, it's only enough to take the crush off, and then I've got her hauled back into my chest, my arm a bar across her, my mouth at the top of her spine. My hand settles at the base of her throat, over the pulse.
Her lanyard's coiled on the nightstand where she dropped it, the cheap gold lightning bolt still clipped to it. The dumb little charm that rode on her chest through a building built to swallow every signal a person sends. I reach over her and pick it up. Turn it in the lamplight.
"That piece of junk did the work," I say.
"Don't talk about my jewelry like that."
She gets the rumble of my laugh against her back. I close the charm in my fist and bring the fist down over her heart and hold it there.
"You don't go back out there alone," I whisper.
She doesn't argue. Could be because she's fast asleep. Her breath slows, her hand comes up to cover my fist over the charm. She let go like a woman who finally believes the room won't be gone when she opens her eyes.
She's right, she found her way home.