Chapter 17 - Wren
The forest floor is cold against my back.
The damp press of earth and root and leaf litter, the cool air moving over my skin. My heart is still coming down. My body is still humming, satisfied and wrecked in equal measure, every nerve ending lit and slowly dimming like filament after a power cut.
I lie still for a moment and let it happen.
The mangroves press close overhead, their canopy blocking the sky completely. No stars, no moon — just the green-black dark and the smell of salt and wet bark and us. I can hear my own breathing evening out. I can hear his.
Then a cool breeze wafts over my skin and I remember, with a jolt, that I have nothing on.
I sit up slowly.
My dress is beside me in the dirt. I pick it up and hold it in the available dark and the news is not good.
The zipper is intact, technically, but the silk is torn in two places along the bodice and the hem is muddy beyond recovery.
The bottle green is a ruin — completely, irrecoverably — and I set it down in the forest with a small sigh.
My heels are somewhere nearby; I find them by touch, but there's no putting them back on — one strap has snapped clean through, and the forest floor between here and the car is nothing a heel was designed for. I set them down beside the dress.
He's standing a few feet away. Fully dressed, jacket somewhere in the car, but everything else on — shirt, trousers, the belt buckled again.
Composed. Watching me. His hair is slightly disordered; that's the only evidence of the last hour.
He looks like a man who stepped off a path to check something and is now ready to continue.
I am sitting in the dirt naked.
"The dress is ruined," I say.
"Yes."
"You knew it would be."
He looks at me. Says nothing.
I stand, which takes more coordination than usual because my legs have opinions about the previous forty minutes, and I become immediately and comprehensively aware of the cool air on every inch of me.
Goosebumps rise along my arms, my thighs, the back of my neck — the skin asserting its exposure.
I am bare in a dark forest with no idea where the car is or how to get there without him.
He watches me register this.
"Ready?" he says.
I look at the ruined silk on the ground, then up at him.
"Do I have a choice?"
"You always have a choice."
He turns and starts walking, and I follow.
I thought I knew how far I ran.
I didn't. The forest goes on and on — root systems arching out of the mud like ribcages, low branches I have to duck, the path narrowing and widening in patterns that mean nothing to me.
Fifteen minutes in and I still can't see the road.
My feet are bare and careful on the uneven ground, and the cool air has graduated from discomfort to something worse, raising goosebumps I can't seem to shake.
He moves through the dark ahead of me without hesitation.
No pausing to check direction, no moment of uncertainty — he traces this path like he laid it himself, which maybe he did.
He navigates around obstacles before I've seen them, holds aside a low branch without turning so I can pass under it, adjusts his pace when the ground gets soft.
The cold works against me steadily. Each gust through the mangroves finds new skin — my shoulders, the backs of my thighs, the place where my hair is pushed aside by the wind and the air hits my neck.
Walking naked beside a fully clothed man through a dark forest is its own particular vulnerability.
Not shame, exactly — something more fundamental.
The animal awareness of being unprotected while someone with better senses moves ahead of me through the dark.
He keeps glancing back. Brief, unhurried. Making sure I'm following, or making sure I'm still there.
The car, when it appears at the tree line, is the most welcoming thing I've seen all night.
The interior light blinks on when he opens the passenger door and I slide in, my bare ass on the cold leather. He comes around and settles into the driver's seat.
He doesn't start the car immediately.
He looks at me. Here, there's nowhere else to look, no pretense of checking the path.
His eyes move over me in the fading interior light — slow, thorough.
My bare thighs against his leather seat.
The goosebumps still raised along my arms. The flush still in my skin, the loose, wrecked state of my whole body — all of it visible, all of it on display. His jaw does something controlled.
My nipples tighten under his gaze. I watch him notice.
Then he starts the car.
We drive. He keeps looking — every thirty seconds or so, his eyes move from the road to me, quick and involuntary, a man checking a fire to make sure it's still under control.
I'm aware of every inch of bare skin, aware of the leather warming under my thighs, aware of the ache between my legs that his looking does nothing to help.
His gaze is not what it was in the bar that first night — the clinical assessment, the predator measuring distance.
It's something else. Something the arrangement never had a name for.
After a few minutes, without taking his eyes from the road, he says: "Why did you stay?"
"In the penthouse?"
"You had the code from day one."
I look at his profile in the dark. "I know."
He's quiet for a moment, deciding whether to leave it there. He doesn't. "So why?"
The answer is simple and I've been not-saying it for weeks. "Because I didn't want to leave." A pause. "That’s new for me. Wanting to stay somewhere."
His hands tighten briefly on the wheel. He says nothing for long enough that I think that's all — and then, quieter, nearly swallowed by the road noise: "I can’t stay away."
"I noticed."
He glances at me. One long look before the road demands him back. Whatever he was going to say next, he doesn't say. But it sits between us anyway — enormous and patient, taking up all the available air.
We drive. The city rebuilds itself around us, neon bleeding across the wet pavement.
He keeps looking at me. I keep letting him.
Somewhere on the causeway, his right hand leaves the wheel and rests on my bare thigh, palm flat, not moving anywhere, just there — warm and certain and present — and stays for the rest of the drive.
He parks in the garage and comes around to my door before I've decided how to get out.
I'm still working through the logistics — bare feet on concrete, the distance to the elevator — when he opens the door and picks me up. Both arms, no warning, lifting me against his chest easily.
My arms go around his neck. They just go there.
He carries me through the parking garage — fluorescent light honest and indifferent overhead. His shirt is smooth and warm against my bare side.
The elevator opens.
Inside, the mirrors.
I see us from every angle: him in the dark shirt with his hair slightly disordered from the forest, and me, bare, pressed against him, my face close to his throat.
The image is more arresting than I expected.
Not because of the nakedness, though there's that.
Because of how I'm held — the security of it, the deliberateness.
In every mirror I look like a woman being carried by a man who intends to keep her.
I have leaf debris in my hair and the forest still on my skin and I don't mind at all.
The elevator ascends.
He carries me into the penthouse. Through the main room. Past the dining table where my sketchbook sits open. Into the bathroom. He sets me down on the marble counter and stands in front of me, his eyes still doing that thing they were doing in the car.
He turns the shower on. Adjusts the temperature carefully — too hot first, then better.
He turns back to me and starts undressing himself.
Methodical. The cufflinks first, set on the counter beside me.
The shirt next, the buttons one at a time, the fabric coming off and being folded over the towel rack with a precision that strikes me as funny under the circumstances.
He's stripping after the forest and he's folding his shirt.
Then the trousers, the belt looped and placed on top of the folded shirt, and he's standing naked in front of me, the steam beginning to fog the mirror, the gauze on his hands gone — when did that happen?
Earlier, in the car, while I wasn't looking — and the scars I've already mapped catching the bathroom light like topography.
He lifts me down off the counter and walks me into the shower with him.
He steps into the shower beside me and reaches for the soap.
He starts with my shoulders. Both hands, working the lather into my skin with even, thorough pressure.
My arms next, the inside of my wrists, my palms. He turns me to reach my back, and the drag of his hands down my spine is careful and warm and makes my chest ache.
He works down, thorough, deliberate, washing the forest off me — the mud, the sweat, the evidence of what happened in that clearing.
His hands move between my thighs and I exhale sharply, not because it's sexual, though it is, but because it's tender.
The care of it. Being cleaned by someone who did this to you, who chased you through the dark and caught you and fucked you against the earth, now washing you with both hands like you're something worth preserving.
When he's done he holds the soap out to me.
I take it.
My hands find his chest first — familiar ground — and then move outward.
I wash him slowly, learning what the light reveals.
The scars emerge under my palms one by one.
The thin lines on his forearms, faded but there.
The puckered mark on his shoulder that I've pressed my lips to.
I trace each one. Store each one. My hands move lower — his stomach, the cut of muscle there — and his breathing changes when I reach his hips. Deepens.