CHAPTER FOUR #5
She rode him slow at first, learning it, her breath catching every time she came down flush against him, and then not slow at all, finding the angle and the rhythm that made her gasp and chasing it without one ounce of shyness.
He watched her take her pleasure off his body with her palms braced on his chest and her head dropping back — watched her in the flesh under the lamp and in the spotted mirror behind her both, two of her, the long brown line of her spine and the roll of her hips doubled in gold glass.
He'd handed her the whole thing and she'd taken it, and the man who ran the room everywhere else in his life lay there and let her run this one and had never in his life been so glad to lose.
His hands came up to her breasts and then back down to her hips, not pushing, just holding on, and he met her every time she came down, up into her, deep.
"You feel that?" she gasped, her hand finding his on her hip and lacing through it.
"That's you and me. Nobody put us here. Nobody can take it back.
" "I know," he said, hoarse, watching her ride him in the lamplight and the glass both.
"I know, baby. Don't stop tellin' me." The headboard knocked the wall and neither one of them cared a single thing about whose wall it had once been.
He talked — he couldn't stop talking, seven years of swallowed words coming up all at once, just like that, that's it, you feel so good, you're so — Zola, baby, look at me — and she looked at him, she always looked at him, and when he felt her start to go again he got his thumb between them and circled her where she needed it and she shattered a second time, clenching around him, sobbing his name.
He sat up under her then, wrapped both arms around her back and held her through it, her chest to his chest, her face in his neck, and rocked up into her slow and deep while the last of it rolled through her — face to face now, as close as two people could get and still move, her arms locked around his shoulders, his locked around her ribs.
"I've got you," he said into her hair, over and over, "I've got you, I've got you," and then the years went off in him all at once and he buried his face against her throat and came, his hands going wide and tight on her back, pouring everything he'd buried for seven years into the only person who'd ever made him believe his hands could be trusted with something soft.
She came down onto his chest after, both of them wrecked and slick and breathing like they'd run from something, which they had. He wrapped both arms around her bare back, the ruined hands easy as anything now, and held her while their hearts slowed against each other.
And he waited for the regret. He'd built his whole adult life on a foundation of the thing he'd just smashed.
Bishop's one order. Stay away from my daughter.
He'd said yes sir and meant it with everything he had, and he'd broken it in a dead woman's bedroom off Meeting Street, and tomorrow there would be a price for that, and it would be steep, and it might cost him the only home he'd ever known.
He searched himself for sorry the way you'd pat your pockets for keys.
It wasn't there.
"You're quiet," she murmured into his throat. "You okay? You're not gonna tell me this was a mistake, are you. Because I will fight you."
"No." He pressed his mouth to the top of her head, to her hair, breathed her in.
His hand moved slow up and down her spine, and he made himself watch it do it — the hurt hand, the enforcer's hand, the hand he'd been so afraid of — moving gentle over the woman who'd looked at him across rooms for seven years and never once been afraid.
"It was a lot of things. A mistake's not one of 'em.
" He turned his hurt hand over between them in the lamplight and looked at it — really looked, the split knuckles, the gauze gone soft, the hand that had ended a man's night on a marsh road two hours ago and then learned the shape of her like it had been made for nothing else.
It didn't look like his father's hand anymore.
It just looked like a hand that had been allowed, for once, to be good at something that wasn't hurting.
"I've been afraid of these my whole life," he said, quiet, because she'd earned the truth and he was too wrung out to dress it up.
"And you put one on your heart and told it to stay. "
"Good answer."
"I broke the one thing he asked me not to break."
She lifted her head. Looked at him, serious now, the laugh gone, her thumb tracing his jaw. "We," she said. "We broke it. I'm not a thing that happened to you, Darius. I'm a woman who climbed up here on purpose." A pause. "And I'd do it again. Tomorrow. In front of him, if I had to."
"Don't." He almost smiled. "Let's not do it in front of him."
"We'll do it however you want. But we're doing it." She settled back down against him, her ear over his heart, her leg thrown across his. "I'm not goin' back behind the glass, Knox. Not for him. Not even for you. I'd rather have this and pay for it than be safe and empty for the rest of my life."
He lay there in the lamplight with his hand moving slow on her back and the marsh smell in the room and the spotted mirror across from him showing the two of them tangled up in a stranger's bed, and he understood that he'd just done the worst and best thing he would ever do, and that they were the same thing, and that he could not be sorry for either of them.
Outside, the tide was coming in. He could smell it turn.
In a few hours it would be first light and the sweep would clear the Forge and the world would come back with its order and its debt and its president.
There would be men to find — the wheel he'd dropped in the reeds, the sedan, whoever had pointed them at a nursing student coming off a late shift.
There would be a reckoning with Bishop that he could already feel the weight of, sitting somewhere out past the edge of this lamplit room like a storm still over the water.
He would have to stand in front of the man who'd pulled him up out of nothing at nineteen and account for what he'd taken.
And he'd do it. He already knew he would, and he knew it might cost him everything, and lying here he found he'd pay it. But not yet.
For now there was her weight on his chest, and her heartbeat slowing against his ribs, and his own hands resting easy on her bare skin for the first time in his whole life without a single thing in him afraid of what they were.
He pulled the sheet up over both of them and held the line he'd finally let himself cross, and somewhere past midnight, with her breathing gone deep and even and trusting against him, the enforcer slept.