Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
Jen
The house sleeps around Gabi's hours now.
By midnight it's down — Madison and the baby in the back bedroom, Janet and Mara's doors are shut, the pack settled into the new shape of a place with an infant in it. Nine days and the whole house has rearranged itself around a person who weighs seven pounds.
I don't go to my room.
Crull's in the kitchen. Of course he is. Dough under a cloth for the morning, the oven long cold, and him at the table in the dark doing nothing at all. His amber eyes find me in the doorway before I've made a sound.
"You should sleep," he says.
"So should you."
"I don't sleep much."
"No. You never have." I come in and sit in the chair beside him. Not across. "Up before anyone. Down last. You sat on that porch with Fen for a whole night once and never asked him why he was out there."
He doesn't answer.
"You got shot nine days ago and now you're up at one in the morning making bread rise."
"The bread doesn't rise itself."
"Crull."
The house ticks. Upstairs something small shifts and settles.
I say the thing I've been carrying since the white room.
"I need you."
His eyes meet mine. He's still. Something moves in his face and is gone before I catch it.
I stand and step between his knees.
In the chair he's nearly my height. I put my hands on his face — the heavy jaw, the rough of it, the ivory at his lower lip where the tusks come up past it — and I kiss him.
He holds still under it. Of course he does. That's what he is. The one who doesn't move first. Who waits to be told where the weight goes and doesn't take one inch past it.
I kiss him until he can't stay still anymore.
His good arm comes around the backs of my thighs and hauls me in and the stillness goes out of him all at once, and he kisses me like a man who's spent his whole life waiting. The mark on my wrist goes from cool to a low burn. His bond, awake.
"Shoulder," I say against his mouth. "You be careful of the shoulder."
His hand spreads at the small of my back and covers all of it. "I have the rest."
"Not tonight."
He stops.
"Tonight I have it."
I get him down the hall to the back room, the small one that smells like him and like bread, and I put my hand flat on his chest and push.
He goes.
One of the biggest things in this house sits down on the edge of a bed because I put a hand on him.
"Lie back."
"Jen —"
"Lie back."
He lies back.
His shirt takes both my hands and his good arm and he has to help, and then he's under me in the dark and I can see all of it — the scars laid across his chest and ribs from before I knew he existed, and the new one high on the shoulder where a round went through him on its way to not going through me. Pink at the edges.
I put my mouth on it. He goes rigid.
"Don't," he says. Not don't stop. Don't.
"Why?"
"It's a hole. It closed."
"It went through you instead of me."
"That's what it was for."
I sit up on him. He looks back at me steady, and he means it exactly the way he said it. The shoulder isn't a wound to him. It's a piece of equipment that performed.
I put my mouth back on it. He makes a sound and doesn't stop me. I take my time with the rest of him. He watches me the whole way, like the moment ends if he blinks. When I get my hand around his cock he's enormous and hot in my palm and he says my name once, low, wrecked out of the stone.
"Jen."
"I've got it."
"Jen, if you —"
"I've got it."
I get my clothes off and put my knees either side of his hips. He reaches for me. Both hands, the bad arm too, going for my waist to lift me, to place me, to do the work.
I catch his wrists and put them back down on the bed.
"No. You don't get to carry this one." I hold them there until he stops pulling. "Hands stay down."
His eyes come open all the way. And Crull—who has spent his whole life doing—lies there with his palms flat on the bed and lets me.
I take him in by inches because I have to. He's too much and I have to work for it, breathing, my hands braced on the broad of his chest, and he's shaking under me before I'm halfway. Not from effort.
I take the rest of him and sit down and we both stop breathing. Full. All the way. The wrist-mark sears and the patch at my sternum answers it and he is looking at me like nobody has ever done one thing for him.
Then I move. I ride him and he doesn't touch me.
His hands come up off the bed once. I take his wrists and put them back and he growls — the first real one I've ever pulled out of him — and I feel it go through where we're joined and up my spine.
"Down."
They go down.
I work him. Not slow for long, because my body's figured out the shape of him and the mark on my wrist is burning like a coal and I want this.
The stone's gone out of his face. His jaw's slack, the tusks catching what light there is, his breath ragged, and every time I come down on him he makes a sound like it's being cut out of him.
I get my hand between us and work my clit and his eyes go straight to it and he groans out loud.
"Look at me."
He does.
I come like that — all the way down on him with his palms flat on the bed and my own fingers finishing it, clenched so hard around him he chokes on my name.
He doesn't come. Of course he doesn't. He's holding that too.
I lean down over him with him still in me and put my mouth at his ear.
"Now. Hands."
They come up off the bed like something let go of them. They close on my hips and they grip — actually grip, hard enough that I'll see it tomorrow — and he starts driving up into me from under, deep and hard and fast, and it's so much I have to put my forearms on his chest and hang on.
"That's it. That's it —"
He rolls us over, still in me, gets his legs under me and fucks into me with his mouth at my throat and one arm banded across my shoulders, and I take all of it and tell him to give me more.
He does.
I come again with the tusks against my throat and my hand fisted in the back of his head, and I hold on to him with everything I have and say it into his ear.
"Mine."
He breaks. Not from the fucking. From the word. He goes stiff against me for one second, and breaks.
"I've got you," I tell him. His own words, turned around. The ones he's said to every one of us and never once heard. "I have you. You don't have to do anything."
He makes a sound against my throat that isn't a word. He comes with his face buried in my neck and his arm locked across me and my name wrecked in his mouth, and after, he doesn't move. Doesn't pull out. Doesn't take his weight off. Breathes against my skin until he's ready.
A while later he tries to shift off me anyway. Reflex.
"Stay." My hand light on the shoulder, over the healing. "I have you."
He goes still again. The other stillness now. The settled one.
"You have me," he says. Like he's checking the words for a trick.
"I have you. Sleep."
And the man who's up before everyone and down last and never first to rest puts his head on my shoulder in the room that smells like bread.
The rumble starts in his chest. Low. Continuous. Aimed at nobody, carrying nobody out of anywhere. Just his, in the dark, with nowhere to send it.
He sleeps.