Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Reese
Ican still smell him.
It isn’t constant. It surfaces and fades, the ghost of Quinton’s cologne on the collar of my blazer. Every time it comes back I’m on that landing again, concrete at my spine, his fingertips under my chin.
Bo drives us home while Gray sits in the back seat directly behind me and doesn’t say a word for eleven miles.
The house is empty when we get there. Tyler’s note sits on the counter in his blocky handwriting: Library until six. Text if you need us sooner. Underneath, in Zane’s loopy scrawl: There’s gumbo. EAT IT.
I stand in the kitchen with my bag still over my shoulder and read it four times.
Bo sets his keys on the hook. Gray stops in the doorway to the hall and stays there, one shoulder against the frame, jaw set hard enough that I can see the muscle jumping.
“He touched my chin,” I say.
I don’t plan on saying it. It comes out sideways into the middle of a quiet kitchen, and once it’s out there’s no putting it back.
Bo goes still with his hand on the counter.
“In the truck you said he blocked the stairs.”
“He did.”
“You said you told him you’d break his fingers.” Bo still hasn’t moved. “You didn’t say what for.”
“For this.” I put two fingers under my own chin, in the same place. My voice comes out flat and far away. “He tilted my face up and had a look at it.”
“And?”
“And it took me three seconds to tell him to move his hand.” I dig my thumbnail into the seam of my bag strap. “Three seconds where I just stood there.”
The refrigerator kicks on. Outside, a car goes past, and the sound of it stretches out longer than it should.
Gray pushes off the door frame.
“I have to go,” he says.
He’s already got his keys in his hand by the time I turn around.
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you yet.”
“Try.”
“Reese.” His eyes come up to mine, and whatever’s happening behind them is locked down so tight I can’t get a single reading off it. “It isn’t what you think.”
“You have no idea what I think.”
He stops, starts again, and his voice comes out worse the second time. “I’ll be back tonight. I’m asking you to trust that.”
“Then go.”
The front door closes with a soft click, which is worse than a slam would have been. His engine turns over and the gravel noise shrinks down the drive until it quits.
I stare at the empty hallway.
“He isn’t running,” Bo says behind me.
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve sat behind that man for three years.” Bo comes around the counter. He doesn’t touch me. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“I know it.”
He pulls a chair out anyway and stands beside it with his arms crossed until I give in and sit down, resenting it the whole time.
He heats the gumbo slowly, with his back to me, giving me the length of a stovetop to get my breathing under control, and he doesn’t fill any of it with talking. When he sets the bowl down in front of me my stomach turns over.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Six bites.”
“Bo.”
He sits across from me, forearms on the table. “You had a granola bar at seven this morning and you’ve been running on adrenaline and spite for nine hours. Six bites, then you can do whatever you want.”
I eat six bites while he watches without making a production of it. Somewhere around the fourth one my hands quit shaking and my shoulders come down off my ears for the first time since I walked into that hearing room.
I set the spoon down.
“He was right,” I say.
“Say again?”
“Quinton. About the university.” I push the bowl an inch away.
“Okafor as good as told me. We won and the win opened a door I can’t close.
Carmine’s already writing her report. Kinsley’s finished and it doesn’t matter, since every administrator in that building now knows what I am, and they’re never going to look at me as a person again. ”
“They’ll look at you however they look at you.” He waits until I’m looking at him. “Doesn’t change what you are.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“Best cox in this conference. Meanest woman I ever met.”
A laugh comes out of me, cracked and unattractive. Then my eyes are burning, and I press the heels of my hands against them until I see static.
Bo doesn’t move or say anything. He sits there like a piling in a current and lets me have it until I take my hands down.
“I need a shower,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I need his smell off me.”
“I know what you need it for.”
I stand up, and he’s out of his chair before I’m all the way out of mine. We’re eighteen inches apart, and now I can smell him instead. Cut grass, warm hay, the faint diesel of his truck. My whole body pulls toward it hard enough that I have to plant my feet.
“Bo.”
“Yeah.”
“Come upstairs.”
He takes his time answering, and the look he gives me isn’t the hungry one. It’s the careful one that used to make me want to throw a clipboard at his head.
“Not for that,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” He tucks a piece of hair behind my ear and leaves his hand there, warm along my jaw, deliberately covering every place Quinton put his fingers. “You’re still halfway out of your body. I’m not touching you till you’re all the way back in it.”
“Don’t handle me.”
“I’m not.” His thumb moves once across my cheekbone. “I’m telling you what I’ll do. You want me to wash that boy off you, I’ll do it. You want me to sit outside the bathroom door and keep my mouth shut, I’ll do that too. But I’m not going to help you get around it.”
I stand there with my heart going hard enough to hurt.
“That’s the meanest thing anybody’s said to me today,” I tell him, “and I spent two hours with a lawyer.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
He follows me up. In the bathroom he runs the water hot enough to fog the mirror in under a minute, and I start on my buttons with hands that won’t cooperate.
The blazer is the problem. I get it half off my shoulders and stop, since the collar is where the smell lives and I can’t make myself pull it up past my face.
Bo takes it off me from behind, one sleeve and then the other, no comment about any of it, and carries it out into the hall. He comes back without it.
“Trash?”
“Washer, for now. You can burn it in a month if you still want to.”
The rest comes off easier. He keeps his eyes on the water and his hands to himself. By the time I’m down to nothing the mirror has gone white and the steam has soaked the air past comfortable.
I sit on the edge of the tub in the steam with my knees pulled up while he works shampoo through my hair with those enormous hands, gentle as anything, and I cry the entire time.
It comes up from somewhere under my ribs in noises I don’t recognize, and Bo doesn’t shush me or tell me it’s all right.
He keeps his hands moving and lets me get through it.
When the water runs clear he wraps me in a towel, carries me down the hall to his room, sets me on his bed. Then he sits on the floor with his back against the frame.
“Better?” he asks.
“Emptier.”
He takes that without argument.
The ceiling fan has a wobble in it. I’ve been staring at that wobble since the first night I slept in here and I’ve never once asked him to fix it.
“Bo.”
“Mm.”
“I’m back in my body.”
He turns his head and actually checks, eyes moving over my face for whatever tell he’s been waiting on.
“Yeah,” he says. “There you are.”
“Then get up here.”
He doesn’t move right away. He stays on the floor with his forearms on his knees and his head tipped back against the bed frame, and there’s a tendon standing up the side of his neck.
“Bo.”
“Give me a second.” His voice has dropped out of its usual register. “I’ve been holding this since the truck.”
“So stop.”
“That’s what I’m working up to.”
He comes off the floor and stands over me, and the room changes with him in it, the whole late-summer smell of him going dark and heavy at the edges. I’m slick before he’s laid a hand on me, and his nostrils flare when he catches it.
I pull the towel loose and let it fall open.
Bo doesn’t touch it. He puts one knee on the mattress, and the frame takes his weight with a groan, and then he’s above me with a hand braced beside my head and no air left between us.
“Say it again.”
“Get down here.”
He kisses me with no hurry at all, one hand cradling the back of my skull, and when I try to speed it up he catches my wrist, pins it to the mattress, and slows me right back down. He decided how this was going before we got up the stairs, and he isn’t taking suggestions.
The towel comes off and his shirt goes with it. He works his mouth down my throat, across my collarbone, over the marks the others left. When he reaches Jackson’s he stops there and drags his teeth across it until my back comes off the bed.
“Bo.”
“I got you.”
He puts his mouth between my legs and stays there past the point of reason.
Long slow passes of his tongue, building, easing off, building again, one enormous hand splayed flat across my stomach to hold me down.
When I finally come it takes forever to arrive and longer to finish, rolling through me in waves that leave me boneless and swearing.
He wipes his mouth on his forearm and looks up the length of my body at me. There’s nothing patient left in his face.
“Now,” I tell him.
His jeans hit the floor. He pushes into me bare, one long stroke, and the stretch of it punches the air out of my lungs.
“Look at me,” he says.
I do.
He starts slow, deep grinding strokes that press me down into the mattress, holding my eyes the whole time.
Then his control goes. His hands lock under my shoulders as he drives into me hard enough that the headboard cracks against the wall, and the sounds coming out of him are low and rough, nothing that belongs to whoever was heating soup an hour ago.
“Harder.”
“You sure?”
“Bo. I’m not asking twice.”
He gives it to me, and every hour he spent standing behind me today with his mouth shut, in the lobby, in the truck, in that kitchen, comes out of him at once.
“I’m gonna knot,” he says against my ear.
“Do it.”
“Reese.” His rhythm stutters. “If I knot you I’m biting you.”
“I know.” I get a fistful of his hair and turn my face into his neck. “I’ve known since the truck. Do it.”
He pulls out of me. Before I can ask what’s wrong he’s got a hand on my hip and he’s turning me over onto my stomach, dragging me up onto my knees, and there’s nothing careful anywhere in it. He puts one palm flat between my shoulder blades, presses me down into the mattress, and pushes back in.
“Bo.”
“I know.” His voice has gone to pieces. “I know.”
He sweeps my wet hair off the back of my neck with his free hand and fucks me in short deep strokes that don’t let up, the headboard knocking against the wall on every one, his grip on my hip promising bruises by morning.
The knot swells and locks, and the pressure tips me over for the second time. I clench around him, shaking, and his hand comes off my back to fist in my hair.
His teeth sink into the nape of my neck, right over the top of my spine, and hold.
The bond goes into me like a stake into ground.
There’s no light in it, no wave or flood, nothing the others were.
It’s weight. It’s a house settling onto its foundation, every board finding its place, and underneath it I get him.
The mother he drives four hours to see on a weeknight.
The father who died when he was thirteen and left him the truck.
The bone-deep, unglamorous terror of being the biggest man in every room and knowing exactly how much damage he could do if he ever stopped choosing not to.
Under all of it there’s nothing complicated at all. He’d get between me and anything, and it would never once occur to him to mention it.
“Oh,” I say.
He holds the bite while his knot pulses inside me, one arm banded under my ribs, and he lowers us onto our sides by degrees, careful not to pull. Every muscle I’ve been holding since this morning lets go at once.
When his teeth finally come free he presses his mouth to the mark and stays there.
“Hey.” His voice has gone to gravel.
“Still here.”
“You’re crying again.”
“I’m aware.”
“All right.” His hand spreads out over my sternum. “Cry, then.”
We stay locked together while the light on the wall goes orange. Five bonds now, and I can pick out every one. Jackson burns low behind my ribs. Beckett flickers at the edges. Zane pours in gold. Eli runs still and deep.
Bo runs under all of them, and every one of them is quieter for it.
Downstairs the front door bangs open. Zane’s voice comes up through the floor first, Tyler’s under it too quiet to make out, and Cameron’s boots still on the porch steps behind them both.
A cabinet door bumps shut in the kitchen.
“Bowl in the sink,” Zane announces. “She ate. Everybody relax.”
Then everything down there stops at once.
“They can smell it,” I say.
“Mm-hm.”
“They’re going to be unbearable.”
“Beckett will be. The rest of ’em will manage.”
I laugh, which shifts his knot, and I stop laughing.
It’s full dark by the time we come downstairs, and all six of them are in the living room pretending they haven’t been waiting. Zane opens his mouth, and whatever he had lined up dies when he gets a look at my face.
“Sit down,” I tell them. “All of you.”
Bo takes the arm of the couch beside me. Gray’s car still isn’t in the drive.
“I’m going to tell you what Quinton said to me in that stairwell,” I say. “All of it. And then Tyler’s going to tell me how much of it is true.”