21. Lev #2
I put my mouth everywhere she would let me, which was everywhere, and learned that five years had dimmed nothing, that I still knew exactly where to press to make her breath catch and exactly how to draw it out until the catching turned to begging.
I wanted her past thinking. I wanted her past the wall she keeps even with me, down to the place where there is no chef and no widow and no fury in her, only the woman, only mine.
I worked for it the way I have never worked for anything that was not survival, with patience and total attention, until she was shaking under my hands and her fingers had twisted into my hair and she was dragging me up the length of her, done waiting, demanding the rest of me in the one language we have never once lied to each other in.
But I was not done learning her, and I made her wait for the thing she was demanding.
I moved down her body instead, my mouth at the soft inside of her thigh, my hands holding her open and holding her still, and I put that same total attention exactly where she needed it, slow and then less slow, reading every sound and every helpless lift of her hips, until the begging lost its words and she came apart against my mouth, my name torn out of her into the dark of a house full of men who would never hear it.
I stayed with her through all of it, greedy for the proof, because I had spent five years certain I would never be allowed this again, and a man does not waste a thing he was sure he had buried.
She was wrung out and shaking and pleading by then, past patience and past pride, and only then did I rise over her and look at her in the low light, this woman who had buried me and forgiven me and let me back in.
I settled between her thighs and held there, just held, the blunt fact of me pressed against her heat, neither of us moving, both of us caught on the edge of the thing we had climbed toward all night.
She was slick and ready and still trembling from the last time, and I made myself wait one more breath, because I wanted to feel her want it, wanted her hips to lift and chase and ask.
They did. Then I pushed into her, slow, so slow, giving her every inch by degrees, watching her face the whole way down, feeling her body open around me and then close tight and greedy as though it had been counting every day I was gone.
By the time I was fully seated, buried to the root in the only woman I have ever called home, my arms were shaking with the discipline of going slow, and I dropped my forehead to hers, and I gave her the only vow I have ever meant.
“Mine,” I said against the hammer of her pulse, holding still and deep inside her, every word pressed into her skin. “You are mine. I am yours. Whatever comes through that door, it goes through me first. Always.”
She heard the vow for what it was. Not a man’s ownership of a woman, the cheap kind my world trades in.
The other thing entirely. A man laying down all of what he is at the feet of the only two people who ever made him want to be more than a weapon.
I have owned a great deal in my life. This was not owning.
This was being owned, finally, completely, and choosing it with my eyes open.
She met me stroke for stroke, and whatever was left of the careful man went out of the room.
I had meant to make it last, to spend on her every ounce of the patience the day had taught me.
She had other plans. Her legs locked around me, her heels at the small of my back, taking me deeper and setting a pace that burned the patience out of both of us, and I gave her what she pulled for, harder, the headboard finding the wall, her body rising to meet every stroke as if she were trying to climb into my skin.
I have never in my life felt more like a man and less like a weapon.
I braced a hand beside her head and watched her come apart a second time underneath me, the flush climbing her throat, her mouth open around a sound she buried in my shoulder, and the sight of it, the proof of what I could still do to her, took the last of me with it.
For one suspended moment afterward there was no war, no Reznik, no rat at my table, no storm.
There was only this, the man who owns a war reduced to a single grateful animal in the dark.
Her heart slamming against my chest. Her breath wrecked against my ear.
The whole of my impossible life gathered into one warm and shaking woman, alive, here, mine.
After, I held her while her breathing slowed, and I pressed my mouth to her hair and made the vow again, quieter, the version meant only for her and the dark.
That I would not die on her. That I would burn the world flat before I let it touch them.
That the day we had stolen was the first of ten thousand I intended to steal, war or no war, for as long as I had hands to steal them with.
She slept. She drops the way Mila drops, all at once, trusting, a thing I will never stop being astonished she does in my arms, of all the arms in the world. And I lay there in the quiet of a house I had filled, against every law I ever made for myself, with hostages to fortune.
Nina slept against me, our daughter down the hall, and I lay there counting the things I now had to lose. I’d spent my life making sure that number was zero. It would never be zero again. I could feel the storm leaning on the door.