Chapter Nineteen
THE CLUBHOUSE FINALLY went quiet a little after midnight.
It had been a long, loud day of the right kind, Warden’s table, the whole thing laid out in the daylight at last, Hex’s findings going around the room and every man in it going still and certain the way men like us do when a thing stops being a feeling and starts being a target.
Scyth and Wreck took the first watch on the rise.
Rex set up to follow the ghost the second he left that lot. The machine was running.
For the first time since she pointed up that road, I wasn’t carrying it alone in the dark.
Neither was she.
The difference in the air was something you could almost put your hand on.
By midnight, the bar had emptied. Voices faded one by one behind closed doors. The old pipes knocked in the walls, the floorboards settled, and somewhere out back the wind worried at a loose piece of tin with a low, irregular scrape. The whole building seemed to breathe itself down into sleep.
I was sitting on the edge of my bed unlacing my boots when she came out of the bathroom and shut the door behind her.
The sound of the door closing sounded louder than it should have.
She stood there soft and so damn pretty, wearing one of my old shirts that swallowed her whole, the hem brushing her knees.
Her feet were bare. Her white-blond hair was loose except for one crooked pin barely holding on near the back, and she stood there a second with her spine against the door, looking at me.
Not frightened.
Not exactly.
But holding herself very still, the way she did when something mattered enough to make every movement deliberate.
“Hey,” I said.
Careful, because I was always careful with her.
“You okay?”
“No.”
She shook her head, and the pin gave up. A pale strand slipped down over her shoulder.
“I just—”
She stopped. Gathered herself. Made the words come, the way she always had to make them come when they reached too close to the bone.
“I want to be with you.”
Her fingers tightened briefly against the wood behind her.
“I want you.”
I don’t have the words for what that did to me.
This woman—this woman I had loved silent for years, this woman I had trained myself not to look at too long, not to stand too close to, not to imagine in any room that had a locked door and a bed in it, had walked into my room with nothing hunting her, no crisis in her hands, no blood on her clothes, and said I want you like it was a simple thing.
Like it wasn’t the single most undoing sentence anybody had ever said to me.
“Bee.” My voice came out wrecked. I didn’t try to fix it.
Her gaze dropped to my hands. One still held the lace of my boot. The other was braced on the mattress hard enough that the tendons stood out across the back of it.
She saw everything.
She always did.
“You don’t have to be afraid of wanting me,” she said.
A hard, breathless laugh left me. “I’m not afraid of wanting you.”
“No?”
“I’m afraid of what wanting you does to me.”
That almost-smile touched her mouth then. Small. Unsteady. Real. “What does it do?”
I looked at her.
At the bare line of her legs below my shirt. At her hair falling around her shoulders. At the pulse fluttering in the hollow of her throat.
Then I forced my eyes back to hers. “Makes careful feel like the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Her breath changed. Just slightly. But I heard it. The room was quiet enough to hear everything.
She crossed to me slowly.
I stayed where I was, because with her you always let her set the pace. You never closed the distance she had chosen to cross herself.
She stopped between my knees where I sat. Close enough that the fabric of the shirt brushed my forearms. Close enough that the warmth of her reached me before her hands did.
Then she put them on either side of my face like I was the fragile one.
Her palms were cool.
Her thumbs rested against the roughness of my jaw.
She looked at me for a long time.
“You’ve been so careful with me,” she said quietly. “This whole time. On the floor. On top of the blanket. Two fingers at my wrist when I couldn’t breathe. Never reaching. Never taking more space than I gave you.”
I swallowed. “You set the pace.”
Her thumb moved once along my cheek. “Always,” I said. “That’s not gonna change tonight or any night.”
“I know.”
Something shifted in her face.
It wasn’t fear.
It was almost a smile and almost grief and all the way brave.
“That’s why it’s you,” she said. “That’s why it could only ever have been you.
” She leaned her forehead down to mine. Her hair curtained us in.
“I’m setting it right now, Eli.” Her mouth was close enough that the words warmed my lips. “I’m coming the rest of the way.”
And I couldn’t hold the thing in my chest one second longer.
I had carried it so many years it had gone heavy as a stone, buried under duty and silence and every promise I had made myself about what I would never ask of her. I had never once let it past my teeth.
But with her forehead against mine, with her breath unsteady and her hands holding my face, with her telling me she was coming the rest of the way, it rose out of me before I could stop it.
Before I could be careful. Before I could talk myself out of being allowed to say it. The truest thing I owned. “I love you.”
She went still.
Not backward.
Not away.
Just still.
“God help me, Bee, I have loved you so long I forgot it was a thing that could ever be said out loud. Years. From across rooms. From the wrong side of glass. Loving you with my mouth shut because you weren’t mine to want, and I’d made my peace with dying that way.”
Her eyes filled.
I watched it happen.
Watched the shine gather and hold without falling.
“I couldn’t seem to ever stop loving you,” I said. “I loved you when you looked straight through me. I loved you every time you came apart and every time you put yourself back together before I could even reach you. I loved you when all I had was the privilege of being in the room.”
“Eli—”
“I know this doesn’t buy me anything.” My hands stayed flat on the bed, though every part of me wanted to touch her. “I’m not saying it to make you give me something back. I just need you to know. I need there to be one place in this world where the truth about you is spoken plain.”
Her hands trembled against my face.
“What truth?”
“That you are loved beyond reason.”
The first tear slipped free.
She looked furious at it.
I lifted one hand slowly, giving her every chance to stop me, and caught it with the side of my thumb before it reached her jaw.
She leaned into the touch.
Barely.
Enough.
Then she pulled back just far enough to look at me, eyes wet and steady at once, and gave me the thing she had been holding. The words she had kept locked behind the glass for weeks. Saving them, she had told me once, to give whole instead of letting some nightmare drag them out of her in the dark.
“I love you too,” she said.
The world narrowed to her mouth.
“I’ve loved you for so long. And I wanted to give it to you like this, with nothing chasing me into it. No fear making the choice. No pain speaking for me.” Her fingers slid back into my hair. “So here.” Her voice softened. “It’s yours. Whole.”
My eyes closed.
I couldn’t help it.
Then, quieter, the corner of her mouth lifting, she handed me back my own words from that first morning over the coffee.
“And the rest of it you’ll just have to find out.” Her lips nearly brushed mine. “Try it three ways.” A whisper now. “Pick the one you like.”
And it undid the last of me. A sound left me that I would have denied making to any living man.
Her smile widened, just enough for me to feel it where her mouth hovered over mine.
“You’re enjoying this,” I murmured.
“A little.”
“Cruel woman.”
“You have no idea.”
Then she kissed me.
Not cautiously.
Not by accident.
She kissed me with both hands in my hair and her body coming close between my knees, and every thought I had ever had about restraint went white at the edges.
I still didn’t move. Not until she drew back half an inch, frowned at me, and whispered, “Eli.”
“What?”
“You’re allowed to touch me.”
The words struck deeper than they should have.
My hands lifted slowly. I set them first at her waist, over the soft cotton of my shirt. No skin. No pressure. Just the shape of her beneath my palms and the terrible sweetness of being permitted even that.
Her eyes closed.
“Here?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I let my hands settle.
She exhaled.
The sound went through me like heat under a door.
Then she kissed me again.
Slower this time.
Learning.
Her mouth moved against mine with a kind of deliberate wonder, as though she had thought about this and thought about it and still hadn’t expected it to feel the way it did. I felt the instant she stopped thinking. The instant something in her loosened.
Her fingers tightened in my hair.
My hands moved no farther than her waist.
She shifted closer on her own until her knees touched the bed on either side of me, until the space between us disappeared, until I could feel the quick beat of her heart through the thin cotton between us.
I broke the kiss first. Barely. “Still okay?”
She opened her eyes. There was color high in her cheeks.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Ask me again and I’m going to bite you.”
My mouth twitched. “There she is.”
She did bite me then. Not hard. Just the edge of my lower lip, a quick pressure that sent something hot and sharp straight through me.
“Bee.”
“That one,” she whispered.
“What?”
“One of the three ways.”
I stared at her.
Then she laughed.
Softly.
It was not a sound I had heard enough in my life, and never like this. Never breathless against my mouth, never with her hands still buried in my hair.
I kissed her again just to feel the laugh disappear into me.
It was slow after that.
Slow, but not cold.
There was heat in it now, a deepening current under every careful touch.
She led every inch, and I followed.