Chapter 13
Jesslyn
The compound has a specific quality on the night before something that matters.
I've been here long enough now to know the difference between the ordinary nighttime quiet and this; the coiled-spring stillness of people who have done everything they can do and are waiting for morning to close the distance between preparation and action.
Recon ran the perimeter twice tonight. Stitch restocked the medical kit without being asked.
Kourtney made enough food for twice the number of people actually here, the way she does when she can't fix the thing that needs fixing and cooking is what she has instead.
Sisco's office light was on until almost midnight, and when it finally went off the compound felt slightly less anchored.
Nobody talks about tomorrow directly. They talk around it; logistics, equipment checks, the kind of technical conversation that sounds like planning and is also a way of not saying the thing everyone is thinking. The operation is in fourteen hours.
The Chalmette facility has been confirmed by Recon's ground surveillance, which came back exactly the way I said it would. I don't mention that. This isn't the time for being right, and it doesn't change what happens in the morning.
I sit in the common room until the last brother drifts out. Kourtney squeezes my shoulder on her way past without saying anything, which is more than words would have been.
Cora leaves a cup of tea on the table in front of me. Remy, coming through with her arm still in a brace, meets my eyes from across the room and nods once. It’s the nod of a woman who has decided something about another woman and is done deliberating.
I nod back.
When the compound settles into its nighttime sounds, I sit for another few minutes and think about the bayou at sunrise, the herons lifting off the water, my hand moving on the camera before my brain had registered what my eye was seeing.
I think about how much has happened since that morning.
Then I get up and go upstairs.
Judge's light is off when I knock.
He says come in, and when I open the door the room is dark except for the ambient light from the compound outside the window. Just enough to see the outline of him sitting on the edge of the bed.
Tonight he's not carrying the same weight I saw on him after the shooting. Tonight he's coiled differently. Not weighted, just alert. Waiting.
I close the door behind me, lean against it, and look at him in the low light.
"You're not sleeping," I say.
"No."
"Are you going to?"
"Eventually." He looks at me across the room. "Come here."
I cross to the bed. He reaches up, takes my hand, and pulls me down beside him. Not urgently, just with the specific deliberateness that means he's thought about this, knows what he wants, and has decided.
I sit beside him with his hand still in mine, and neither of us says anything for a moment.
The compound is quiet around us. Outside the window, Recon's perimeter check moves through the lot, a flashlight crossing the grass, and then it's gone and the dark settles back.
I turn to look at him. In the low light his face is still. He's looking at me with the full force of his attention, which is what this man's attention feels like when he gives it to you entirely. It’s like being seen by something that doesn't miss anything.
I reach up and put my hand against his jaw.
He turns his head into it, just slightly, and closes his eyes.
He lets me have that. Of all the things I've watched him hold onto and carry, this is the one he puts down willingly.
He turns his face into my hand like a man who is tired of only taking things from other people and is willing, tonight, to take something given freely.
I kiss him.
Slowly. Nothing urgent in it, nothing that needs anything in return yet. Just my mouth on his, my hand still at his jaw, feeling the day leave him in the specific way tension leaves a body when the right thing touches it.
His hands come up to my waist and rest there, holding rather than pulling, and he kisses me back in the same slow register. Like we have all night. Like neither of us is going anywhere.
We have all night.
He leans back and takes me with him. We settle onto the bed, lying face to face in the dark, and he looks at me for a long moment with his hand in my hair.
"I want to look at you," he says.
"Then look."
He does. He looks at me in the low light with the same attention he brings to everything, and I let him. I don't look away.
I've been photographed by strangers and by people who loved me and by people who wanted something from me, and none of them have ever looked at me the way this man does. Like he's trying to store it, like he wants to keep it.
He undresses me slowly. Not efficiently. Every piece of clothing is treated as something worth taking time with, his hands reading my skin the way I read a frame for everything that might be in it.
My shirt. Then his. He presses his mouth to my collarbone and drags it across my shoulder and I feel it all the way down my spine. His hands map the shape of me without hurrying — waist, hip, the inside of my wrist when he takes my hand and presses his mouth to my palm.
He turns my hand over and presses his mouth to the inside of my wrist where my pulse lives, and he keeps it there for a moment like he's taking the measure of me, like my heartbeat against his lips tells him something.
I get my hands on him and he lets me take my time too.
His shirt is already gone. I press my palms flat to his chest and feel his heartbeat under them, faster than it sounds when I'm sleeping with my head there. I drag my hands down the planes of his stomach and feel the muscles tighten under my palms.
He pulls in a slow breath through his nose and stays very still, letting me learn him, and I take my time about it.
I've been watching this man move through a compound for a while now.
I know the shape of his shoulders under his cut, the way he carries himself when he's on alert versus when he's at ease, but knowing the shape of someone dressed and knowing the shape of them in the dark in your hands are different kinds of knowing.
I am interested in both.
He says my name against my throat. Jesslyn. Like the name itself means something to him beyond what it refers to, like he's been holding it in his mouth all evening and is only now letting it out.
I memorize the sound of it.
He rolls me onto my back and props himself above me and looks at me again — the same deliberate taking-in — and I reach up and put my hand back against his jaw.
"I'm here," I say, because I know that's what the look is asking.
Something in his face opens up. Just enough.
He kisses me deeper this time, his mouth opening over mine, and his hand moves down my body slowly, learning the shape of me like it matters that he knows it exactly. I arch into his hands and he uses what that tells him, adjusting, reading, the way he reads everything.
His mouth moves to my breast. His tongue drags over my nipple and I pull in a sharp breath. He stays there, working, unhurried, and I grip his hair and hold on because him being patient is exactly what I want right now.
His hand slides between my thighs. He finds me warm and wanting and makes a low sound against my breast that travels straight to my spine.
His fingers move slowly at first. Pressing and circling, learning the specific rhythm that makes my hips move toward him, reading every response and adjusting to it.
I stop being quiet almost immediately. The compound is asleep and I don't care.
He takes his time. He draws it out until my thighs are shaking and my hands are in his hair and I'm saying his name in pieces. Then he keeps going past that, not letting me rush it, keeping the pace deliberate even when I try to move it forward, and the orgasm when it finally breaks is enormous.
It rolls through me in long slow waves while he works me through every second of it. His mouth at my throat saying my name, Jesslyn, Jesslyn, like a deliberate practice of it.
I'm still shaking when he pushes two fingers inside me and curls them. His thumb finds me and he starts again.
"Judge," I gasp.
"I know," he says, against my jaw. He doesn't stop.
The second one comes faster and harder, my whole body clenching around his hand, my voice not quiet at all now.
His name comes out of my mouth in a way that has nothing managed about it.
He works me through that one too, patient as he's been all night, his mouth at my throat saying my name between every breath, not stopping until I'm gripping his wrist with both hands and my hips are moving against him involuntarily.
Only then does he pull me up against him and push inside me.
He goes slow. Deliberately slow, the way he's done everything tonight. He pushes all the way inside and stays there for a moment while I adjust to him, while I feel the full weight of it, while we both breathe. His forehead is against mine.
I look at him in the low light, and he looks at me, and there's nothing in his face that's being held back right now, no door between me and whatever's there. Just him. Just this.
"Jesslyn," he says. Again. Against my jaw, my throat, the curve of my shoulder. Like he's been waiting all night to say it this many times, like there's no version of this that doesn't include it.
He moves slowly and I move with him, both of us still unhurried, building rather than chasing. His hands are on me constantly — learning, present, as if he wants to know exactly how I'm put together before the morning comes and changes everything.
I drag my nails down his back and feel him shudder and drive deeper in answer. I do it again because the sound he makes is the most honest thing I've heard from him yet.
He rolls us so I'm above him and looks up at me with his hands on my hips, holding but not directing, giving me the motion if I want it, waiting to see what I choose. I choose it.
I move the way I want to move. He watches my face and adjusts his grip to match me, his jaw tight, his eyes dark.
His thumb finds me again and starts working in slow circles while I move above him.
I can feel every point of contact between us and I let myself feel it, all of it, instead of managing it.
I come with my hands flat on his chest and his name in my mouth, the orgasm rolling through me in long deliberate waves, and he watches all of it with the same full attention he's had on me all night. Not looking away, not closing his eyes, just watching me come apart on top of him.
I keep moving. He grips my hips and drives up into me, and the rhythm breaks into something harder. I want that too. I want all of it; his hands everywhere and my voice loud in the dark and the compound asleep and neither of us caring.
He follows me over with his forehead pressed against my shoulder, my name on his lips full and deliberate even now, even at the end — Jesslyn — the way you say something you intend to keep saying.
We stay tangled together a long time after. His heartbeat under my palm. The dark. The compound's nighttime sounds working their way through the window.
He doesn't say anything for a while and neither do I. There's nothing that needs saying. We both know what tomorrow is, and we both know it isn't in this room with us tonight.
At some point he pulls me against his chest and his hand settles in my hair.
"Jesslyn," he says. One more time. Quietly. Against my hair.
Not a question. Not asking for anything. Saying it because he wants to, because the saying of it has become something that belongs to him.
"I know," I say.
I keep my eyes closed. I listen to his breathing slow, and I listen to the compound.
I listen to the Mississippi dark outside the window, and I memorize all of it.
The weight of his arm, the specific smell of his skin, the sound of my own name in his mouth, which I have never heard said that way before and which I intend to carry with me regardless of what the morning brings.
Tomorrow there will be the operation and the Chalmette facility and whatever the day delivers.
Tonight there is this.
I stay exactly where I am.