12. Jakob #3
I push into her slowly. Not like yesterday.
Yesterday was the kitchen table and the adrenaline of the bear tracks and the desperate, animal certainty that I needed to be inside her or I would lose my mind.
This is the opposite. This is my forehead pressed against hers, my eyes open, watching her face as I seat myself fully inside her body and feel her stretch to accommodate me with a low, trembling moan that vibrates through her body into mine.
"Look at me," I tell her, because her eyes have fluttered shut and I need them open.
I need her to see me. Not the cabin, not the mountain, not the version of Jakob Billsberry that existed before she got here.
Me. The real one. The one who is terrified and desperate and so full of something he can't name that it is spilling out through every crack in every wall he ever built.
Her eyes open. Gold and green and that deep umber ring. Firelight and lamplight and tears that haven't fallen yet.
I move inside her. Slow. Deep. Each thrust deliberate and full and unhurried, my hips rolling against hers in a rhythm that matches the heavy pound of my heart.
She wraps her legs around my waist and locks her ankles at the small of my back and I slide my arms under her shoulders, cradling the back of her head in my hands, and we are pressed together from mouth to hip with no space between us, no air, no distance, no perimeter, no walls.
"Stay," I say again, and this time it isn't a question. It's a vow.
"Yes." She breathes it into my mouth.
I bury my face in her neck and let her warmth surround me and I move with her, in her, and the structure shrinks and the world shrinks to the size of her body and every sound is her breathing and my breathing and the rhythmic creak of the bed frame and the wind outside that doesn't matter anymore, nothing outside matters anymore, because everything that matters is here, underneath me, wrapped around me, saying my name.
When she comes the third time her entire body locks around mine and her nails drag down my back hard enough to draw blood and she presses her face into my shoulder and sobs, not from pain, from something that has no name in any language I speak but that I understand completely because it is the same thing detonating inside me.
I follow her with a groan that tears out of me from somewhere so deep I didn't know it existed, and I spill into her with my arms crushing her against me and my mouth open against her throat and the absolute disintegrating certainty that I will never, for the rest of my life, let another human being take her off this mountain.
We lie tangled for a long time. My weight is on her and she doesn't push me off. She runs her fingers through my hair with slow, absent strokes and I listen to her heartbeat decelerate through her, counting the beats the way I once counted clicks on a range finder.
"I need a shirt," she murmurs against my temple. "I'm going to freeze the second you move."
I grunt. Roll off her. The cold air hits the space between us and she yelps and curls into a ball and I reach across her to pull the wool blanket up to her chin before swinging my legs off the bed.
"Stay put."
"I can get it." She's already sitting up, the blanket falling away, reaching for the pine dresser beside the bed. She pulls the top drawer open and rummages through the folded thermals, the thick wool socks, the spare henleys I keep stacked with military precision.
Her hand stops.
I hear the small sound of metal clinking against metal. The sound is quiet but distinct, and it goes through me like a bullet.
"Jakob. What is this?"
I turn and see what she's holding. The black velvet pouch that should have been in the false bottom of the drawer, under the panel I screwed shut two years ago, except the screw stripped last winter and I never replaced it and the panel must have shifted and now she is holding the pouch open and the contents are spilling across her bare thigh.
A Bronze Star. A Purple Heart. A Silver Star with a V for valor.
The Distinguished Service Cross, its ribbon faded and its pin bent from the force with which I tore it off my dress uniform the day I walked out of Walter Reed for the last time.
And underneath the medals, the photograph.
She lifts it with her fingertips. Her face goes still.
Her eyes move across the image. Twelve men in desert camo, standing in front of a Humvee in Helmand Province, grinning with the wild stupid invincibility of soldiers who haven't yet learned that the universe keeps a ledger.
I am standing in the back row, clean-shaven, thirty pounds lighter, with eyes that still looked like they belonged to a living person.
Every face in the photograph except mine has been crossed out with a thick black marker. Violent, deliberate strokes. Some of them so hard the pen tore through the paper.
Kinsley looks up at me. The medals glitter against her skin in the lamplight. Her lips part and close and part again and the question in her eyes is the one I have never answered for anyone, the one the VA therapist stopped asking after I put my fist through her office wall.
"Jakob, what happened to them?"