10. Beck #2
She made a sound, quiet, breathless, and her fingers curled into the fabric of my shirt.
I pulled it over my head and felt her hands spread across my chest, following the topography of scars I'd stopped explaining to anyone.
She didn't ask about them. She just touched each one like she was memorizing the terrain.
Her mouth followed her hands, lips pressing against the burn mark on my forearm, the healed gash along my ribs, the smooth scar tissue on my shoulder.
Each kiss was an acceptance. A claiming.
"Beck." Her voice was low and steady and undid me completely.
I undid the buttons of her shirt one at a time, pressing my mouth to each inch of skin as it appeared.
The swell of her collarbone. The soft curve above her bra.
The dip between her breasts where her heartbeat pulsed.
She shrugged the shirt off her shoulders and reached behind her back and her bra joined it on the floor, and she was bare in the dim light, beautiful, her skin flushed warm beneath my hands.
I cupped her breasts, running my thumbs across her nipples, and watched her eyes flutter closed.
Lowered my mouth and traced slow circles with my tongue while she arched into me, her breath coming shallow.
My hands moved down her waist, over her hips, and I knelt to slide her jeans down, pressing my lips to the plane of her stomach, the jut of her hip bone, the inside of her knee.
She pulled me back up, her hands on my belt, unfastening it with deliberate fingers, pushing my jeans down.
When we were bare, skin against skin, I laid her down on the bed, the quilt soft under us, and stretched out beside her.
For a moment I just looked at her, my hand resting on the curve of her waist. This room, this bed, her. Enough. More than enough.
I kissed her and let my hand drift lower, between her thighs, touching her gently, feeling how warm she was, how ready.
She gasped against my mouth and her hips tilted toward my hand, seeking, and I stroked her slowly, learning the rhythm that made her breathing fracture, the pressure that made her grip tighten on my arm.
Her head fell back and I kissed her throat, her jaw, the space behind her ear, my fingers moving in patient circles until her whole body tensed against mine.
"Don't stop," she whispered, and I didn't, and she came with a long, shuddering breath, her face pressed into my shoulder, my name repeated like something sacred.
I gave her a moment. Kissed her forehead, her closed eyelids, the bridge of her nose. She opened her eyes, and the look in them was so open, so trusting, that something cracked behind my sternum.
She reached for me, wrapping her hand around me, and the touch sent a jolt through my whole body. She stroked slowly, watching my face with that quiet intensity, and I let her see what it did to me. Let her see the want, the need, the raw ache of wanting someone this much after this long.
"Lila." Her name came out rough. "I need?—"
"I know."
I settled between her thighs, braced on my forearms. Her legs came up around my waist. Her hands found the sides of my face.
"Look at me," she said.
I did. And I pushed inside her, slow, watching her face the whole time, watching her lips part, her eyes widen, her breath catch. I seated myself fully and held there, our foreheads touching, our bodies joined, the weight of it almost more than I could bear.
I moved slowly. Not because I was uncertain, because I wanted to feel everything. Every breath she drew. Every shift of her hips. The way her back arched and her fingers dug into my shoulders. The way she whispered my name like it meant something she hadn't expected.
The rhythm was unhurried, each stroke deep and deliberate, and I felt her body responding, tightening around me, her heels pressing into my lower back, urging me closer.
I dropped my mouth to her neck, her shoulder, the place where her pulse hammered, and she turned her head and caught my lips and kissed me with a tenderness that nearly broke me.
"Stay with me," I said. I didn't mean tonight.
"I'm here." She pulled me closer, impossibly closer, and the shift in angle made us both groan. "I'm right here."
The pace quickened, not frantic but urgent, her body rising to meet mine, my hand sliding down to lift her hips, changing the angle, going deeper.
She gasped, her nails biting into my back, and I felt her start to tremble, felt the tension gathering in her body like a held breath. I pressed my forehead to hers.
"Let go," I whispered.
She did. Her whole body arched beneath me, tightening, pulsing, pulling me with her, and I followed, burying myself deep, a groan torn from somewhere primal.
I felt everything collapse and rebuild at the same time, felt two years of grief and silence give way to something warm and alive and terrifying and mine.
Afterward, she lay against my chest, her fingers drifting lazily across my skin, tracing idle patterns on my stomach.
The room was quiet except for our breathing and the distant sound of the town settling into evening.
I held her and felt the last locked door inside me swing open, not with force, but with the simple, terrifying ease of a thing that had been ready for a long time.
"Thanksgiving," she said when we separated. Her hands were still on my chest, her fingers playing with the collar of my shirt. "We should do something. Together. A real one."
"I haven't done a real Thanksgiving in years."
"Then it's overdue." She paused. "You'd like my family. My mom's grumpy too."
"I'm not grumpy."
"Beck, you are the definition of grumpy. The dictionary has your picture."
"The dictionary doesn't have pictures."
"Yours does. Right next to 'stoic' and 'emotionally unavailable.'"
"I'm available now."
Her face softened. Her hands moved to my jaw, holding me the way I'd held her in the aftermath of the mill fire. "Yeah," she said. "You are."
Through the window, the mountains were dark shapes against a sky full of stars. I pulled her closer. She hummed something against my chest, low and tuneless and content. I didn't ask what the song was. I just listened.
* * *
Next shift and Cole was cooking.
The station smelled like garlic and roasting vegetables when we walked in for our next shift.
Sadie was setting the table. Ty was arguing with Cole about the correct amount of cheese on anything.
Captain Harding was in his chair, reading a newspaper, an actual paper newspaper, because he was that kind of man, and he looked up when we came through the door together and gave us a nod that carried the weight of everything he'd seen in thirty years on the job.
The losses, the saves, the way life insisted on continuing.
Lila sat on the couch. I sat beside her. My hand found her knee. Her hand covered mine. And for the first time in two years, the firehouse felt like what it was supposed to feel like.
Home.
Outside, the mountains held the dark, and the stars came on one by one, and Ember Falls settled into its November evening with the quiet confidence of a place that knew how to hold people through the worst of it and deliver them, scarred but breathing, into something better.
I was scarred. I was breathing. And the woman beside me, with her sunshine and her stubbornness and her hand warm on mine, was the something better I'd stopped believing in.
I held on.
Epilogue
Beck
Thanksgiving morning, I went to see Jake.
The cemetery was quiet. The oaks had dropped their leaves, bare branches against a sky the color of pewter. Snow was coming. I could smell it, that particular sharpness in the air, the mountains bracing for it.
I crouched by the stone. Pulled a few dead leaves from the base, the way I always did. The grass had finally blended with the older turf around it. You couldn't tell the difference anymore.
“There’s a new nameplate on your locker. Webber. She earned it." I pressed my hand against the cold granite. "You would've liked her, Jake. You would've given me so much shit about the first two months. Youd’ve been right to.”
The wind moved through the bare branches. Somewhere on the hill, a crow called.
"I'm okay," I said. It was the first time I'd said it to him and meant it.
I stood. Brushed the dirt from my knees.
I drove to Lila's apartment. She was in the kitchen, hair loose, barefoot on the cold tile, singing along to something on her phone while she basted a turkey that was slightly too large for her oven.
The apartment smelled like rosemary and brown sugar and the particular warmth of a meal being made by someone who cared about it.
"You're late," she said without turning around.
"I brought wine."
"Then you're forgiven."
I set the bottle on the counter and stood behind her, my hands on her hips, my chin on the top of her head. She leaned back into me. Outside, the first flakes started to fall, sparse and slow, drifting past the window.
"Happy Thanksgiving, Beck."
"Happy Thanksgiving."
We cooked. We ate. We sat on her couch afterward with the plates still on the table and the snow thickening outside and her feet in my lap, and I thought about all the Thanksgivings I'd spent alone in the apartment above the station, heating up whatever the crew had left behind, telling myself that was enough.
My phone buzzed. The crew group chat. Cole had sent a photo of Lily asleep, out for the count having eaten too much. Ty had replied with a turkey emoji. Sadie had replied with an emoji that I’m completely clueless about, and could have meant anything.
Lila laughed at my phone over my shoulder. "I love them," she said.
I put the phone down. Pulled her closer.
"Come on," she said after a while. "Walk with me. There's a trail behind the station. The mountains are beautiful in the snow."
I grabbed her scarf from the hook by the door. The red one. Wrapped it around her neck, my fingers brushing her jaw. She looked up at me with those hazel eyes, and I kissed her, and the snow fell, and I stepped out into the cold and the evening light and walked beside her.