Chapter 6 #2
The sound goes through me. It goes through the wolf. The wolf, who has been holding still, lets out a long slow breath against the inside of my chest, and the breath is approving, and the breath is hungry, and the breath is finally, finally, yes.
I kiss her throat. I kiss the hollow at the base of it. I kiss the curve of her shoulder where the camisole strap is, and I slide the strap down with my finger, and I kiss the new skin it exposes. She tilts her head back. Her hands have moved to my belt.
She undoes the belt slowly.
I undo the camisole more slowly.
The camisole goes over her head. She is bare to the waist on the workbench in the lamp light with the cedar dust still drifting in the air around us, and I look at her, and she looks at me, and neither of us moves for a moment because the looking itself is a thing we have not, in two weeks of slow kisses, allowed ourselves.
"Beautiful," I say.
"Thaddeus—"
"Beautiful. I mean it. I have not said it. I should have said it weeks ago. I am saying it now."
She closes her eyes for a second.
When she opens them, they are wet.
"Come here," she says.
I come. I lower my mouth to her breast. The skin is warm and soft and smells like the violet-water and her own clean sweat and a faint trace of the lavender soap she uses in the cottage.
I kiss her there. I kiss her slowly. Her hand goes into my hair.
She arches up against my mouth, and I move, and I take my time, and the wolf in the back of my mind goes from awake to alert to wholly, completely present, watching her through my eyes the way I am watching her through my eyes, and the watching is the same watching, and it is the watching of a man and a wolf and a body and a heart that have all, finally, agreed.
I kiss her ribs. Her stomach. The faint line of a scar low on her abdomen that I have not asked about and will, one day, ask about.
The waistband of her jeans. I unbutton them.
I draw them off. She lifts her hips to help me.
Her boots are still on; I unlace them slowly, kneeling on the floor of the workshop in front of her, and she watches me do it with her hand resting in my hair and her thumb at the silver at my temple.
The boots come off.
The jeans come off.
She is in nothing but the cherry medallion and a pair of pale cotton underthings, and I sit back on my heels and look at her, and I find that I am not, now, shaking.
The wolf is here.
The wolf is here, and the man is here, and we are not afraid.
I rise. I press her back, gently, against the workbench, and I lay her down on the wood—the wood I have been sanding for hours, smooth as skin—and the cedar dust at the edge of the bench mixes with the soft warmth of her skin and the lamp light is gold across her body and the cherry medallion has slid to the hollow of her throat.
I undress the rest of the way. She watches me. Her eyes do not look away.
I lower myself over her.
I take my time.
I kiss her mouth, her jaw, her throat. I kiss her breastbone and the cherry medallion and the soft place beneath.
I draw my mouth slowly down the line of her sternum and across the soft warm slope of her breast. I take the point of it between my lips—she gasps, her back arching off the workbench—and I learn the shape of her there with my mouth, slow, deliberate, the way I have learned every other thing I have ever cared about learning.
I move to the other breast. I do the same.
Her hand has found my hair and is fisted tight in it, and her hips are lifting toward me of their own small accord, and the sound she makes against my temple is not a word but it is, distinctly, an instruction.
I move lower. I kiss the soft curve of her stomach. The faint line of a scar I have not asked about and will, one day, ask about. The slope of her hipbone. The soft inside of her thigh.
My hand finds her first.
She is, I realize with a kind of dazed reverence, already wet—soaked, soft, hot against the pad of my finger—and the discovery of it makes the wolf in the back of my mind go entirely still.
I touch her slowly. I find the small soft place that makes her hips jerk against my hand.
I circle it. I press. She gasps, loud and unguarded, and her hand tightens in my hair.
"Thaddeus—"
"Tell me."
"Yes. There. That."
I keep there. I do not rush. I have spent forty years not rushing wood; I am not going to rush her.
I learn her with my fingers, slow and patient, finding the rhythm that makes her breath hitch and then keeping it, building it, watching her face in the lamp light for the small precise tells of a body coming undone.
Her breathing fractures. Her hips lift into my hand.
I slide one finger inside her—then, after a moment, another—and the heat of her around my fingers is going to be the thing I think about every time I touch a piece of cedar for the rest of my life.
She is breathless beneath me. She is saying my name in small soft pieces, Thaddeus, Thaddeus, and the saying of my name is a thing I have not heard in this voice or in this room or in this life in fourteen years, and the saying of my name is going to undo me if I am not careful, and I am, I find, choosing not to be careful.
I rise above her.
"Rue."
"Yes."
"Are you—"
"Yes."
"I have not. There is no—"
"I know. I know. Jo took care of it. I am taken care of. I am taken care of, Thaddeus, just—please."
I lower into her.
The joining is slow. I am careful—more careful than I have been with anything in fourteen years.
She is small and warm and tight around me, and the first inch is the inch where the wolf in the back of my mind makes a sound that is not, exactly, a sound.
A low, almost-silent recognition. The click of a key in the lock of a thing that has been locked for too long.
I push in another inch. Her breath catches.
I stop. I look down at her. Her eyes are wide and dark and open, and she is breathing in small soft pulls through her parted mouth, and the cherry medallion is rising and falling on her sternum with the lift of her chest.
"All right?" I ask.
"Yes. Yes. More."
I give her more. Slowly. Inch by careful inch, until I am fully seated in her and the heat of her is wrapped around all of me and her thighs have come up to bracket my hips and the small involuntary sound she makes against my throat is the most honest sound I have heard in fourteen years.
I hold still inside her. I rest my forehead against hers. I breathe.
Her hand is on my face.
"You are here," she says. "You are with me. We are here."
"I am here."
"Move, Thaddeus."
I move.
I draw back almost entirely—slow, deliberate, the slowness a deliberate restraint against the part of me that wants to take more than is wise on a first night—and then I slide back into her, and her hips rise to meet me, and the meeting is the meeting of two bodies that have been waiting two weeks for this exact motion.
I move slowly, the way I do everything. The way I plane wood.
The way I bury the dead. The way I have loved her in increments for sixteen days.
Her legs come around my waist. The workbench is solid beneath her.
The lamp light flickers across the line of her throat, the slope of her breast, the soft pale stretch of her stomach where my hand has spread flat to steady her.
The cedar dust catches in the slow currents of our breathing.
She is wet around me. She is hot. She is making small soft sounds against my collarbone—not words, not yet, just breath shaped into small open vowels—and each sound goes through me like a chisel through soft wood, and the wolf in the back of my mind, who has been watching with the stunned reverence of a thing brought back from sleep, begins, in increments, to move with me.
I drop my mouth to her breast. I take the soft point of it between my lips, and she arches up, and the angle of the arch shifts something inside her, and she gasps—loud, sharp, the first loud sound she has made tonight—and her hand fists in my hair hard enough to sting.
I find the angle again. I keep it. I move into her at that angle, slow and full and deep, and her breath fractures against my temple and the small soft vowels become my name, Thaddeus, Thaddeus, half a prayer and half a plea, and the saying of my name in this voice in this room in this body is going to undo me if I am not careful.
I am, I find, choosing not to be careful.