12. CHAPTER TWELVE #2
My fingers found the cotton, gripped it, and pulled.
He let me. Arms lifting, the fabric sliding over his head with a soft rustle, and then he was bare from the waist up and the room felt smaller because he took up more of it than the walls had accounted for.
Broad shoulders. Scarred chest, old wounds healed into pale ridges that mapped across his skin in patterns I couldn’t decipher.
Tattoos covered his ribs and shoulders — tribal work, dark ink, the designs disappearing under the muscle and reappearing along his collarbones, older pieces faded at the edges where the skin had thickened with age.
The bruise along his left side was darker than it had looked through the shirt — purple black at the center, spreading outward in a bloom that followed the contour of his ribs where something had connected hard enough to leave a mark.
I traced the ink on his ribs with my fingertips.
One tattoo in particular, a pattern that wrapped around his side and disappeared under his arm, the lines thick and raised under my touch.
Mustang went completely still. Not the controlled stillness he used when he was processing information or calculating a response — something deeper.
His breath held. His eyes on my face, watching me look at him, and the weight of being seen by me settled across his features in a way that made my throat tight.
His hands found the buttons of my shirt, the flannel I’d borrowed from his duffel at the cabin, sleeves hanging past my wrists, collar loose at the throat.
He worked each button with the same deliberate precision he brought to everything, his calloused fingers moving slowly enough that I could feel every point of contact: knuckle against fabric, thumb against the buttonhole, the occasional brush of skin against skin when his hand grazed my sternum.
The shirt came open. He pushed it off my shoulders without rushing, letting the fabric slide down my arms and fall to the concrete with a sound too soft to hear over the radio still bleeding under the door.
My bra next. His fingers found the hook between my shoulder blades, unhooked it with a deftness that suggested he’d done this before, many times, in rooms darker than this one.
The straps slid down my arms. Cool air hit my skin, and then his hands were there, warm and certain, palms flat against my shoulder blades, holding me the way a man holds something he’s decided not to let break.
The rest followed the same rhythm. His jeans, unbuttoned, pushed down over his hips with my help, his hands guiding mine when I fumbled with the belt.
My borrowed canvas pants, unzipped, sliding down my legs until I stood bare in front of him on the cold concrete, and the only thing between us was the overhead bulb and twenty years of decisions neither of us could take back.
He didn’t rush. His hands moved from my shoulders down to my waist, tracing the contour of my ribs, the dip above my hipbone, the curve where waist became thigh. Holding me there, his palms flat against my skin, and when he spoke, his voice was rougher than it had been all night.
“I’ve got you.”
Three words. No performance in them, no hedge, just the same conviction he brought to everything that mattered. The kind of truth that didn’t need dressing up because it stood on its own, solid as the concrete under our feet.
We moved to the bed together. His hand on the small of my back, guiding me backward until my knees hit the edge of the frame, and then we were down, the springs complaining under our weight, the narrow mattress protesting the presence of two bodies when it had been built for one.
Mustang’s size was evident in every point of contact — his shoulders wider than the pillow, his forearm braced beside my head taking up space the headboard hadn’t accounted for, his weight settled over me with a careful distribution that said he knew exactly how much of himself to give and how much to hold back.
His mouth found my throat first. Warm, open, the scrape of stubble against sensitive skin pulling a sound from me that I didn’t recognize as my own until it was already in the air between us.
His hand slid up my side, palm flat against my ribcage, thumb brushing the underside of my breast with a deliberateness that made my breath catch.
I arched into the touch because arching was the only honest response my body had, and his mouth followed the line of my collarbone, down to the soft curve where breast met ribs, and then lower, across my stomach, his tongue tracing a path that made my hips lift off the mattress without permission.
My hands were in his hair. Short, thick, the texture rough under my palms, and I gripped it without gentleness because gentleness wasn’t what either of us needed tonight.
His mouth moved lower. His hands spread my thighs with a pressure that was firm but never forcing, and when his tongue found me, hot and flat and exactly where I needed it, the sound I made was louder than the radio, louder than the creak of the bed frame, loud enough that his free hand came up to cover my mouth without breaking rhythm.
He worked me with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything.
Tongue flat, then pointed, then flat again, reading my responses the way he read a room — thoroughly, silently, missing nothing.
My hips moved against his mouth. My nails dragged across the tattoos on his back, following the raised lines of ink from shoulder blade to spine, and when his fingers joined his tongue, curling inside me with a pressure that had me seeing white at the edges of my vision, I bit the heel of his hand and came with his name in my throat.
He didn’t give me time to recover. His mouth was on mine again, tasting himself on my tongue, and I felt him between my thighs, hard and warm and pressing, and then he was inside me, slow, careful, the way a man enters something he’s afraid to break, and the fullness of him drew another sound from my chest, lower this time, something that lived in the space between a groan and a sigh.
The bed frame creaked. Steady, rhythmic, keeping time with the pace he set — unhurried at first, then deeper, his hips rolling against mine with a control that said he was holding back even now, even here, even with my legs wrapped around his waist and my nails digging into the ink on his shoulders.
His mouth was at my throat again. My collarbone.
The junction where neck met shoulder, and when his teeth grazed the skin there, not quite biting, the sound he pulled from me was sharp enough to cut through the radio chatter under the door.
I moved with him. Hips rising to meet each thrust, my body finding the rhythm his body had decided on, and the warmth of skin against skin built into something that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the days we’d spent holding this back.
His hand slid under my lower back, lifting me into him, and the angle changed, deeper, fuller, a pressure that made my vision blur at the edges, and I heard myself say his name, just his name, the word broken into syllables I didn’t recognize.
He said mine once. Just once. Hannah, low, rough, a texture his voice got when something cost him more than he wanted to admit, and then his control finally, fully broke.
His hips drove into me harder, his hand tight on my thigh, his mouth against my throat where the pulse hammered under his lips, and I felt him come with a groan that he muffled against my shoulder, his body shuddering above mine, every muscle locked tight for three long beats before the tension bled out of him all at once.
The radio chatter continued under the door.
Muffled, urgent, the sound of a world that hadn’t stopped demanding things just because we had.
Mustang’s weight settled against me, careful, his forearm braced beside my head taking most of it, and his breath was warm against my neck where his face had pressed into the hollow beneath my jaw.
I could feel his heartbeat against my chest — slowing now, finding its rhythm, the same steady cadence it had maintained through gunfire and concrete rooms and the specific terror of being known by someone who had every reason to walk away.
He didn’t walk away. His arm locked around my waist, pulling me against him, and the narrow bed held us both the way it had been built to hold one, and for a while, the only sound in the room was our breathing and the distant crack of a single shot somewhere beyond the compound walls, and neither of us moved to check it.
We lay tangled in the narrow bed, my head against his chest, his arm locked around my shoulders like something that had decided not to let go even in sleep.
His skin was warm under my cheek, the rise and fall of his breathing steady against my ear, and his free hand rested on the grip of the handgun on the dresser, close enough to reach without moving me, the barrel still pointed at the wall, his fingers curled around the textured polymer with the casual certainty of a man who slept with one hand on a weapon and had for twenty years.
Outside, the radio chatter had gone quieter — sporadic now, single voices cutting through the static, the urgency burned down to something procedural.
Perimeter checks. All-clears. The clipped language of men who had survived the night and were counting the hours until dawn.