29. Epilogue #2
It wasn't dead now. Summer even got into that high cold place.
There was grass pushing up through the cracks in the old lift terminal, and a whole slope of lupine gone purple below us, and the sky doing the long slow gold thing it does on a mountain in July when the day can't bring itself to end.
Below us the feast glowed, small and warm, all my impossible people gathered in the bowl of the mountain, and up here it was just the two of us and the wind and the light.
I have my hair long now, I thought, standing up there.
I have my name back. I have a key in my pocket to the only home I've ever let myself keep.
The man who cut it for me stood behind me close enough that I could feel the warmth come off him, and I am not, for the first time in my adult life, keeping one eye on the door.
"You brought me up here for the view," I said. I didn't turn around. I could feel him there.
"I brought you up here because this is the worst ground on this mountain, in my memory," he said, low, at my ear, "the place I nearly lost you before I ever knew your name.
And I've decided I'm not going to let it stay the worst ground.
I'm going to give it a better memory to hold. Starting tonight."
His hands came to my waist, and turned me, and I let myself be turned.
I looked up at Beckett Hale in the last of the gold light, forty-one now, gray coming in at his temples, the deep grave careful face I once looked at over a rifle sight gone soft in a way only I ever got to see.
He walled a river off our doors. He took down every wall in himself for me, one terrible brick at a time.
And here at the top of the world he bent his head and kissed me like the first day of the rest of a life we'd both been sure we'd never get to have, slow and sure and unhurried, with all the time in the world now, finally, at last, all the time in the world.
"Eliza," he said against my mouth. Just that. My name, that he still said like a coin too good to be real.
"I'm here," I said. "I'm not going anywhere. Show me a better memory."
His hands stayed on my waist, thumbs tracing the soft give just above my hips, and the last gold light caught in the gray at his temples as he looked down at me.
The wind up here was thin and clean, carrying the distant scent of pine and the faint metallic tang of the old world still rotting far below.
No one could see us. We both knew that. Still, the openness of it—sky for a ceiling, nothing but grass and air and the long drop if you stepped wrong—made every breath feel stolen.
“Show me,” I whispered again, and kissed the corner of his mouth.
Beckett’s answering sound was low, almost rough.
He backed me a few steps to a flat slab of stone, one that still held the day’s heat.
My back met it, warm through the thin shirt I took to wearing when the world finally quieted enough for soft things.
He followed me down, one knee between my thighs, mouth finding mine again—slower this time, deeper, the kind of kiss that said we had hours, years, whatever was left.
I pushed at his shoulders until he let me roll him.
He went willingly, the careful man who once calculated every angle of every shot now sprawled under me in the open air like he trusted the sky itself.
I straddled his hips and felt him already hard beneath the worn canvas of his pants.
The evidence of how badly he wanted this—wanted me—sent a hot pulse straight between my legs.
“Eliza—”
“Shh.” I leaned down and bit the hinge of his jaw, gentle. “Let me.”
I worked the buttons of his shirt open one by one.
My mouth followed my hands—collarbone, the hollow of his throat, the place over his heart that still beat too hard when I touched it.
Lower. The plane of his stomach tightened under my tongue.
I dragged my teeth along the trail of hair that disappeared into his waistband and felt the full-body shiver that rolled through him.
His hands came up, fingers threading into my hair, not pushing, just holding on.
I freed him with care. The night air was cool against the flushed heat of his cock, and he hissed when I wrapped my fingers around him, stroking once, twice, slow enough to make his hips lift. I looked up the length of his body and found his eyes already on me—dark, wrecked, the careful walls gone.
“Out here?” he rasped, voice scraped raw.
“Especially out here.” I leaned in and licked a long, wet stripe from base to tip, tasting salt and skin and the faint clean soap we rationed like treasure. “Feels like the whole world is watching. And none of them get to have this.”
Then I took him into my mouth.
Beckett’s curse cracked across the open ridge.
His fingers flexed hard in my hair. I sank down slowly, letting the thick head push past my lips, over my tongue, until the stretch burned sweet and my eyes watered.
He was heavy on my tongue, pulsing, glistening with pre-cum.
I hollowed my cheeks and sucked as I rose, then took him deeper on the next stroke, working the base with my fist in the wet rhythm my mouth set.
The wind caught the wet sounds we made and carried them away. Somewhere far below, the ruined world kept its silence. Up here there was only the slide of my lips, the broken breaths tearing out of him, the way his thighs trembled under my free hand.