12. Jakob #2
"I told you it was cabin fever because I thought if you hated me you'd leave clean.
No looking back. You'd go back to Chicago and find someone with a normal life and a working thermostat and I'd stay up here and be fine because I've always been fine.
" My throat tightens. I force the next words through it like pushing a round through a fouled barrel.
"But I'm not fine. I haven't been fine. And lying to you was the worst thing I've done in a life that includes considerable violence, and I am asking you, Kinsley, to stay. "
Her hands come up to frame my jaw. Her thumbs brush through my beard. Her eyes search mine with an intensity that pins me harder than any round ever has.
"Stay here. In the wilderness. With me."
Her thumbs stop moving against my jaw. The fire pops behind us, a sharp crack of sap-soaked cedar that sends a shower of sparks up the flue, and in the silence between that sound and the next the entire cabin holds its breath.
"You absolute idiot," she whispers.
Then her mouth is on mine.
Not the way I kissed her yesterday, all teeth and desperation and the blind animal hunger of a man who has been starving for something he didn't know existed.
This is different. This is her hands pulling my face down to hers, her lips soft and open and tasting of salt from the tears still tracking down her cheeks, and the kiss is slow and deliberate and it undoes me in a way that violence never has.
I have been shot at and blown up and buried under rubble and none of it, none of it, ever made my knees buckle. Her mouth does.
I gather her off the counter. She wraps around me, arms looping my neck, her injured ankle hooking carefully against my lower back, and I haul her through the cabin to the bedroom.
The floorboards groan under my weight. The oil lamp on the bedside table is still burning from this morning, throwing a low amber wash across the wool blankets and the rough-hewn headboard and the indent in the pillow where her head has rested for four nights.
I lay her down on the bed like she is something that will break if I move too fast. She looks up at me and her hair fans across the pillow in tangled waves and her eyes are still wet and her lower lip is swollen from the kiss and she is wearing my shirt and nothing else, and the sight of her in my bed in my clothes in the home I built with my own hands rewires something in my heart so permanently that I can feel the old structure collapsing, the walls I spent years constructing folding inward like a controlled demolition.
I pull my henley over my head. Drop it on the floor.
Her gaze tracks across my body, my stomach, the bandage on my forearm where the bear's claw opened a six-inch gash that she sutured shut with a sewing needle and dental floss while her hands trembled and her jaw set with a determination that made me want to get on my knees for her.
She reaches up and pushes her palm against me, over the thickest knot of scar tissue, a souvenir from Kandahar that I have never let another person touch.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
She traces it with her fingertip. "You're lying again."
"Not about this." I lower myself over her, bracing my weight on my forearms so I don't crush her.
The size difference is absurd. My shoulders block the lamplight and cast her face in shadow and she tips her chin up to find my mouth and I give it to her, kissing her slow, tasting the salt and the sweetness and something underneath both that is just her, just Kinsley, the thing I've been missing for thirty-four years without knowing it had a name.
I unbutton the flannel one button at a time.
My hands works down the front, my scarred knuckles fumbling with the small buttons, and when I spread the fabric open she arches up off the mattress in a way that pulls a sound from the back of my throat that I don't recognize.
My mouth moves to the hollow of her throat.
Her pulse hammers against my lips, fast and fragile and alive.
"Jakob."
"I'm here."
"I know." Her fingers thread into my hair and grip and the small bite of pain at my scalp grounds me, keeps me from rushing, keeps me in this moment where everything is slow and close and unbearably tender. "I know you're here. That's why I'm not leaving."
I work my mouth down her body with a patience I didn't know I possessed.
Every inch of skin I uncover gets my full attention.
The freckle below her left collarbone. The soft curve beneath her breast where her ribs give way to the warm slope of her stomach.
The faded stretch marks on her hips that she tries to cover with her hand before I move it away and press my mouth there instead, letting my beard scrape against the sensitive skin until she gasps and her fingers tighten in my hair.
"Don't hide from me," I tell her stomach. "Not any of it. Not ever."
She makes a sound that is half laugh, half sob, and I feel it vibrate through her belly against my lips.
I hook my thumbs into the waistband of the underwear she borrowed from my emergency kit, the cotton boxer briefs she rolled and knotted at her hip to make them fit, and I drag them down her legs with a reverence that would embarrass me if I were capable of embarrassment right now.
I'm not. I am capable of nothing except worshipping every square inch of this woman who showed up at my door half-dead with a container of pastries and cracked my life open like an egg.
I settle between her thighs and press them apart with my shoulders and she tenses, her fingers scrambling at the sheets, and I look up the length of her body and hold her gaze while I lower my mouth to her.
The first taste of her buckles something in my spine.
She cries out, sharp and startled, her hips lifting off the bed.
I pin them down with one hand spread across her lower stomach, my fingers spanning hipbone to hipbone, and I work her with my tongue in long, slow, measured strokes that have nothing to do with the frantic energy of yesterday and everything to do with the words I just said in the kitchen and the ones I don't have language for.
I learn her the way I learn terrain. Methodically.
Obsessively. I catalog which angle makes her breath catch and which pressure makes her thighs clamp against my ears and which rhythm builds the tension in her stomach until the muscles under my palm go rigid and her spine arcs off the mattress and she comes apart with my name in her mouth, broken into two syllables that she repeats like a prayer while her body pulses against my tongue.
I don't stop. I bring her through it and then I start again, slower, and she grabs at my hair and my shoulders and the headboard behind her, gasping that she can't, that it's too much, and then proving herself wrong when the second wave hits harder than the first and her whole body shakes under my hands holding her through it with my mouth against her until she goes limp and boneless and quiet.
I rise over her. She pulls me down with both hands and kisses me deep, tasting herself on my tongue and not flinching from it, and that single act of acceptance does something to the last locked door in my heart. I feel it give way. I feel everything behind it come flooding through.