Chapter 9
Jesslyn
Remy is in the infirmary when I go to check on her.
It’s long after midnight, and the compound is still running on the exhausted adrenaline of people who have been through something and haven't come down from it yet.
Stitch has been working on her for a while. The bullet missed the femoral artery by a margin he describes as adequate, which from Stitch means it was close enough that he's still running on cortisol himself.
I stand in the doorway and look at her.
She's propped up in the infirmary cot, leg bandaged, a cup of something Stitch made her drink on the table beside her.
She looks smaller than she looked in the common room, which is the thing about people who take up a lot of space.
When something knocks them down, you see how much of that space was posture and how much was earned.
She sees me in the doorway. She doesn't look away. Instead, she holds my gaze for a long moment with eyes that are flat from pain and medication and the specific exhaustion of a body that's been through trauma, and then she nods. Once. Short.
I nod back.
That's the whole conversation, and it's enough.
Something has shifted between us. We both know it, and neither of us needs to put language to it.
I came out of the dark and kept pressure on a wound that would have killed her.
I didn't hesitate doing it, and Remy has been in this world long enough to understand what that means.
I go back to the common room.
The compound is running hot on adrenaline and exhaustion.
The brothers move through the aftermath efficiently, without ceremony, each man doing the thing that needs doing and finding the next thing.
Recon is on the radio with Templar going over the perimeter report.
Sisco is at his desk doing whatever Sisco does at four in the morning when the club needs its institutional memory running.
West and Sting are in the lot cleaning up what Judge left out there, which is not a thing I'm going to think about too directly.
I sit at the long table with my laptop closed and my hands around a cup of coffee Kourtney pressed into them at some point, and I look at the wall.
I'm not shaking. That's the thing I keep noticing. My hands are steady, my breathing is even, the delayed reaction hasn't come and might not come at all. Seven years of field work teaches your body to save the falling apart for later, and later keeps not arriving.
Remy's blood is still in the creases of my palms. I washed my hands twice and can still feel the ghost of it there. I didn't look at her face while I worked on her. I looked at the wound, at where my hands needed to be, at whether the pressure was enough.
Looking at her face would have made it personal, and personal would have made it harder, and I learned that from photography. The minute you start seeing the person instead of the frame, your hand shakes.
My hand didn't shake. I keep coming back to that fact, turning it over, not sure what it means about me.
Maybe nothing. Maybe it just means that seven years of teaching yourself to be useful in difficult situations produces something that looks like courage from the outside and feels, from the inside, mostly like focus.
Whatever it is, Remy is alive because of it. And whatever she thought of me before tonight, something shifted in her face when she looked up at me in the dirt, and something shifted in mine when she nodded from the infirmary cot, and neither of us needs to say what that was.
Judge is somewhere in the compound. I've been aware of his absence from the common room the way I'm always aware of him in any room: precisely, peripherally, the specific frequency of his presence that I've been cataloguing since the truck.
He dealt with the aftermath and the debrief and then he disappeared somewhere, and the compound has been moving around the space he vacated without quite filling it.
I pick up my coffee and go find him.
The light is on under his door.
I knock once. He says come in, which means he knows it's me, because Judge doesn't say come in to people he isn't expecting.
His room is sparse. There’s nothing on the walls except a framed photograph of men in a place that looks like Afghanistan, all of them young and squinting into the sun. Six men.
His cut is on the back of the chair. His boots are by the door. He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his forearms on his knees, still in his clothes from the night, and he looks up when I come in.
The night is in the room with us. In the weight of his shoulders and the way his hands are clasped between his knees and the specific quality of his face right now.
That face is somewhere else. What's here is the man underneath it, and he's been carrying something alone for the past three hours, and it shows.
I cross the room and push open the bathroom door.
"Shower," I say.
He looks at me. A long moment of it, the way he looks at things before he decides what to do with them.
"You've been carrying what happened tonight on you for hours," I say. "Shower."
Something in his face releases. Not relief, because Judge doesn't do relief visibly, but the specific thing that happens when a man who has been holding everything together is given permission to stop.
He stands. He goes into the bathroom, and I hear the water start.
I sit on the edge of his bed and look at the photograph. Six men squinting into the sun in a place that looks hot and flat and far from Mississippi.
Military, from the gear and the posture.
Young, all of them. Judge is in there. I can see it, the specific way he holds himself that doesn't change, only gets more settled.
I don't know who the others are or what the photograph means or why it's the only thing on his walls.
I file it the way I file things I don't yet have context for: present, significant, to be understood later.
I think about Remy's face when she looked up at me in the dirt; the way shock moved toward something else, something that recognized what had just happened between us without either of us having to say it.
I think about Judge pulling me down behind the truck, placing himself between me and the remaining threat without hesitation, like the placement was already decided before the situation required it.
I stand up, take off my clothes, and go into the bathroom.
He's under the water with his back to me, hands flat against the tile, head down, and he's already stripped. Everything’s gone, just him and the steam and the water running down his back. He turned it hot. The room is thick with it.
He doesn't move when I come in. He knows it's me.
I reach past him and turn the temperature up another degree because the water should be hotter than that.
Then I step in behind him, put my hands flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, and feel the tension in him.
The whole night held in the muscles of his back, the specific tightness of a man who has been braced for hours and hasn't let go yet.
He turns.
He looks at me the way he looks at things he's already decided about completely, the deciding done. His hands come up and frame my face, thumbs at my jaw, and he looks at me in the steam with water running between us. I look back at him, and neither of us speaks.
Then he kisses me.
Not like the gun room. Not careful, not the deliberate weighing of a cost and the choice to pay it.
His mouth opens over mine and his hands pull me against him with nothing measured in it.
It’s the specific urgency of a man who has spent hours keeping everything intact and needs, right now, to put it down somewhere.
I give him somewhere to put it.
His mouth drags down my throat, his teeth at my collarbone, and his hands move over me in the steam — my waist, my hips, the curve of my ass — learning me thoroughly and without apology.
He walks me backward until my shoulders hit the tile.
The contrast of the cool wall against my back, the heat of the water, and his chest against mine makes me gasp against his mouth.
He drops to his knees.
The water runs over both of us as his mouth finds the inside of my thigh.
I get my hand in his hair and stop thinking about anything except where his mouth is going.
He takes his time. He learned me once already and he uses that knowledge now, his mouth and his tongue working me until my knee buckles.
My head goes back against the tile and I say his name loud enough that it doesn't matter who hears it.
He keeps going after that. He doesn't stop until I'm shaking and gripping his hair and coming against his mouth with my whole body, the orgasm rolling through me in long waves.
His hands hold my hips against the tile and he works me through every second of it.
He stands, lifts me against the tile in one motion, and I wrap my legs around him. He pushes inside me and we both go still for a moment. Just breathing, just the weight of being joined, just the steam and the water and both of us looking at each other.
Then he moves.
He moves like he has something to say that doesn't have words for it.
Deep and unhurried at first, his eyes on mine, his hands on my hips directing every angle, like he knows exactly what I need and intends to give me all of it before he's done.
His mouth goes to my throat and my shoulder and back to my mouth, and I kiss him back with everything I have, my hands in his hair, my legs pulling him deeper.
Then unhurried becomes something else.
His hands grip hard and he drives into me with the full force of everything he's been holding together all night — the compound, the shots, Remy on the ground, the hours of keeping it all intact and not breaking under it — and I take all of it.
I rise to meet every thrust and the tile is cool against my back where he pins me and his mouth is hot at my throat and I stop thinking about anything except him. The sounds I'm making bounce off the walls and I don't care.
His name comes out of me in pieces and I don't care about that either. I drag my nails down his back. He groans against my throat and drives harder in answer. I do it again because I want that sound, because the sounds he makes are the most honest thing I've heard from him yet.
He gets his hand between us and works his thumb against me while he moves inside me.
I go taut immediately, my whole body pulling toward the edge, my legs locking around him.
He doesn't relent. He keeps his thumb moving and his hips driving and his mouth at my throat, and I can feel every nerve ending I have converging on one point.
When I come it's with his name torn out of me and my teeth in his shoulder and my whole body clenching around him in waves that go on until I'm limp against the tile.
He follows me. His grip tightens past the point of caution and he buries himself deep and stays there, shuddering through it, my name in his mouth against my hair like he's saying the thing he's been meaning to say all night and is finally saying it.
He turns off the water. He reaches past me for the towel on the rack and wraps it around me before he reaches for one for himself, which I notice. We dry off in the quiet of the bathroom with the steam still thick around us and neither of us says anything because there's nothing that needs saying.
We go back into his room. He pulls back the covers without asking. We get in and he pulls me against his chest with the same certainty he's done everything else tonight — no question in it, no performance, just the decision made and acted on.
I let myself stay exactly where I am.
I don't tell him I've never let anyone hold me like this before.
That I've never stayed. That I've spent seven years learning to travel light, to keep connections shallow, to never need anything from any place I'm going to leave, because leaving is the job and the job is the life and needing things from places you leave makes the leaving harder.
He can probably tell. He reads everything. He's been reading me since the bar on Bourbon Street. He knows I've never let anyone hold me like this.
He holds me anyway. Like he's already decided what to do with the knowledge.
His hand moves through my hair once, slow and deliberate.
I close my eyes.
Outside the compound breathes in the Mississippi dark: old wood, the distant sound of the perimeter rotation, the ordinary sounds of a place that came through the night still standing. We came through it still standing.
That's enough for tonight. That's more than enough.