Chapter 8
The compound was quiet past midnight.
Nora couldn't sleep. She'd tried — laid in the narrow bunk on the mezzanine with her phone on the mattress beside her and the warehouse sounds settling around her like a house she didn't know yet.
The creak of the roof expanding in the cool air.
The low hum of the rebuilt compressor she could hear through the floor, running smooth and steady in the garage below.
The occasional murmur of a brother on the porch, voice too low to catch, just enough to know someone was there.
She gave up at twelve-thirty and went downstairs barefoot, wearing a tank top and the cutoff shorts she slept in, her brassy hair loose around her shoulders for the first time since she could remember letting it down in front of anyone.
The great room was empty. The mahogany bar was dark, the pool table covered, the leather couches holding nothing but the shapes of the men who'd sat in them.
She padded across the cold concrete toward the garage, following the sound of the compressor and something else — the soft clank of a tool being set down, the quiet rhythm of a man working alone.
Switchback was at the workbench.
He had his back to her, wiping down his hands with a shop rag, the cut hanging on a hook by the lift bay and his T-shirt pulled tight across the wiry lines of his back.
The route-map tattoo on his left shoulder blade moved when he moved, the faded ink stretching across muscle that went taut and slack as he cleaned the grease from between his fingers.
The garage was lit by a single drop light clamped to the bench, and the pool of warm yellow cut him out of the dark like a photograph.
He'd been working on the compressor. She could see the open toolbox, the fresh oil on the bench rag, the careful attention of a man who'd taken the machine she'd rebuilt and fine-tuned it because she'd taught him it mattered.
Nothing was chasing her this time.
No dead man on the concrete. No adrenaline screaming through her blood.
No survival high turning need into something she could blame on the moment.
This was just a man alone in a garage at midnight, and she was walking toward him because she wanted to.
Because wanting him had stopped being a thing that happened in emergencies and started being a thing that lived in her chest full-time, steady as the compressor humming in the dark.
She crossed the concrete on bare feet and he heard her at the last second — turned his head, saw her, and went still.
She kissed him.
She put her hand on the side of his face and turned him toward her and pressed her mouth to his, and it wasn't like the first time — no desperation, no teeth, no fistfuls of leather.
Slow. Her lips soft against his, tasting him without the copper and the sweat and the fight.
Just him. Coffee and the faint bite of solvent and the warmth underneath that was becoming familiar, the taste she was starting to know in the dark.
He made a low sound against her mouth and his clean hands came to her waist, careful, the shop rag still in one fist. She took it from him and dropped it on the floor and put his hands back on her, pressing his palms flat against her hips, and she felt his fingers spread wide like he was trying to hold as much of her as he could reach.
"Nora." Her name in his mouth like a question he already knew the answer to.
"I'm not here because something happened," she said against his lips. "Nothing happened. I just want you."
His hands tightened on her hips. He walked her backward, slow, until her lower back pressed against the workbench.
The edge dug into the base of her spine and she didn't care, because his mouth was on her jaw now, trailing down the line of it to the spot below her ear that made her breath catch, and his hands were sliding up under her tank top with a patience that made her want to crawl out of her skin.
He took his time. That was what undid her — the deliberate, unhurried way he peeled her top up, his rough palms dragging over her ribs, her stomach, the undersides of her breasts, like he was mapping her the way he mapped a mountain pass. Learning the country. Reading what the terrain would allow.
He pulled the tank top over her head and she was bare underneath it, and he looked at her in the yellow drop light with an expression that made her chest ache — not hunger, though there was hunger in it.
Something closer to reverence. The kind of attention a man gives to the one thing in the room he can't afford to get wrong.
His mouth found her collarbone. The hollow at the base of her throat.
The spray of freckles across her shoulders that the sun kept refreshing, traced one by one with his lips while his hands held her hips against the bench.
She threaded her fingers through the short hair on top of his head — shaved to the scalp on the sides, just enough on top to grip — and held on while he worked his way down.
He went to his knees.
The concrete was cold and hard and he didn't hesitate, just sank down in front of her and hooked his fingers in the waistband of her shorts and pulled them down her legs in one slow motion.
She stepped out of them, bare feet on the garage floor, and he looked up at her from his knees with those hazel eyes that read weather and women with the same steady attention, and she felt something crack open in her chest.
"Come here," she whispered, but he shook his head.
He put his mouth on the inside of her thigh.
She gripped the edge of the workbench with both hands and her head fell back.
His lips moved up the soft skin of her inner thigh, rough jaw scraping, breath hot against her, and when he reached the center of her she gasped and her fist closed in his hair.
He used his mouth on her slow and thorough, his hands gripping the backs of her thighs, holding her open and steady while he took her apart with his tongue.
She couldn't be quiet. She tried — bit her lip, pressed the back of her hand against her mouth — but the sounds came out anyway, soft desperate sounds that echoed off the concrete walls of the empty garage.
Her hips rocked against his mouth and he let her, moved with her, one hand sliding up to press flat against her stomach and hold her against the bench while he drove her higher.
"God — don't stop — don't—"
He didn't stop. He sucked and licked and worked her with a patience that made the first time look like a race, and she felt the orgasm building from her toes, climbing through her thighs, coiling in her stomach under his pressing hand.
She came with a sound that was almost his name, her whole body arching off the bench, her fist twisting in his hair hard enough to hurt, and he held her through it with his mouth and his hands until the last shudder passed and she sagged back against the workbench, breathing hard.
He rose from his knees. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at her, and the hunger on his face was barely leashed.
She reached for his belt. Got it open with shaking hands, shoved his jeans down, and wrapped her hand around him. He was hard and hot against her palm and he hissed through his teeth when she stroked him, his hips pushing into her grip.
She hopped up onto the workbench. The wood was rough under her bare thighs and she didn't care.
She pulled him between her legs and guided him to her and he pushed in slow — inch by inch, watching her face the way she'd watched his on his knees — and she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him deep.
They moved together. Slower than the first time, longer, the rhythm of two people who weren't running from something or crashing into each other but choosing this, choosing it deliberate and steady in the dark.
She hooked her boots behind his thighs — she hadn't taken them off, realized she'd walked down barefoot but the boots were on the bench, it didn't matter, nothing mattered except the feel of him inside her and the way his forehead dropped against hers and his breath came in ragged pulls against her mouth.
She watched his face. The way his jaw clenched when she tightened around him.
The way his eyes stayed open, stayed on hers, like closing them would mean missing something he couldn't afford to lose.
She'd watched him over the rim of a soda can the first night and dared him to look back, and he'd looked back, and now here he was between her legs in the dark garage with the whole warehouse asleep around them, still looking.
"Aaron," she said.
His real name. She'd heard it once, from Jackpot, in passing. She'd held it in her mouth like a secret and now she gave it back to him, quiet and close, and his whole body shuddered.
He buried his face in her neck and drove into her harder, and she wrapped herself around him and met every thrust, the workbench creaking under them and the compressor humming steady and the drop light swaying on its cord and casting shadows that moved across the walls like weather.
She came again — quieter this time, deeper, the kind that rolled through her whole body instead of breaking — and she felt him let go right after, his hips stuttering against hers and his breath stopping in his chest and her name spilling out of him like something he couldn't hold back.
They stayed wrapped together on the workbench. His face in her hair. Her legs still around him. The garage quiet except for the compressor and their breathing and the faint tick of the drop light swinging on its cord.
"Aaron," she said again, softer, just to feel it in her mouth.
"Nobody calls me that."
"I do." She pressed her lips to his temple, where the shaved hair started, and felt his pulse under her mouth. "When it's just us. I do."
His arms tightened around her. Not the fierce, claiming grip from the first night — something else. Something that held instead of took. His thumb traced the ink band on her bicep, slow circles over the faded line, and she leaned into him and let the quiet settle.
Neither of them reached for a reason to leave.
The garage was dark and warm and theirs, and outside the door the compound slept, and somewhere past the walls the city hummed its three-a.m. hum, and none of it mattered as much as the man still holding her on a workbench in the yellow light of a single drop lamp.
Nora closed her eyes and breathed him in — solvent, leather, the salt of them together — and let herself stay.