Chapter Seven Claudio
I don't sleep.
This isn't new. I haven't slept more than three hours at a stretch since we left the compound, and before that, my record wasn't much better.
But tonight the not-sleeping has a different texture.
It's not tactical. It's not the hum of threat assessment running in the background, scanning for variables, calculating contingencies.
It's her. The fucking girl who turned my life on it’s head and is a thorn in my side.
And my cock.
She's in the bedroom. I'm on the couch in the living room, which is an improvement over six nights in motel chairs but doesn't matter because I could be lying on a king-sized mattress stuffed with angel feathers and I still wouldn't sleep.
Not with the taste of her in my mouth. Not with the phantom pressure of her fist in my shirt and her lips on mine and the sound she made when I bit her, that small sharp gasp that went straight through my chest and lodged somewhere I can't reach to pull it out.
I kissed her. She kissed me. Technically she kissed me first, but I was the one who cornered her, who put my hands on either side of her body and crowded her against the counter and said things I had no business saying.
I told her I see her. I listed every tell, every habit, every piece of her armor I've memorized in six days of watching too closely.
I laid her open in a kitchen and then she laid me open with her mouth, and now I'm lying on a couch in the dark with a hard-on that won't quit and the kind of clarity that only comes when you've fucked up badly enough that the path forward is illuminated by the fire you just started.
Not tonight, she said.
Not no. Not never. Not tonight.
Which means she's thinking about tomorrow the same way I am.
The wood stove has burned down to embers. The living room is cooling, the kind of mountain cold that creeps in through the floorboards and the window frames and settles into your bones. I should add a log.
But I don’t. I can’t will myself to move.
I stare at the ceiling and listen to her breathe through the wall.
At some point, the breathing changes. Shallow. Fast. A small sound, not a word, more like a whimper caught behind teeth. Then movement. The bed frame shifting, sheets rustling.
Nightmare.
I'm on my feet before I've decided to stand.
At the bedroom door before I've decided to walk.
My hand is on the knob and I'm listening, and she makes that sound again, and it's the sound of a woman fighting something in her sleep, and I've heard enough screaming in my life to know the difference between fear and pain and this is both.
I push open the door.
She's tangled in the sheets. One arm thrown over her face, the other gripping the mattress, her knees drawn up.
Her hair is loose and spread across the pillow and her face is twisted into an expression I've never seen on her awake.
Raw. Unguarded. The mask is gone and what's underneath is a woman trapped in a memory her body won't let go of.
"Charlotte."
She doesn't hear me. Her breathing is ragged and her fingers are clawing the sheet, and she makes a sound that's halfway between a sob and a growl, and I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her shoulder.
"Principessa. Wake up."
She comes awake swinging.
Her fist catches me in the jaw. Not hard enough to do real damage, but hard enough that I taste copper and my head snaps sideways. I grab her wrist. Not tight. Enough to stop the second swing.
"It's me. It's Claudio. You're in the farmhouse. You're safe."
Her eyes are open but she's not here yet.
She's somewhere else, somewhere behind those blue irises where the woman before Charlotte Richardson still lives.
Her chest is heaving. Her skin is damp with sweat.
She's wearing my shirt because she ran out of clean clothes two days ago and I gave her one of mine without thinking about it, and now she's sitting in my shirt in the dark with her fist against my face and her pulse hammering so hard I can see it in her throat.
She blinks. Focuses. Sees me.
Her hand drops.
"Shit." She exhales. Pushes her hair back. Her fingers are shaking. "Shit. I'm sorry. Did I hit you?"
"Yes."
"Hard?"
"Not as hard as you think."
She laughs. Short, loud, the laugh of a woman who's still half in the nightmare and trying to claw her way out. "I have a mean right hook. My therapist said it was a trauma response. I said it was self-defence."
"Your therapist was probably right."
"My therapist was a fifty-year-old woman who'd never been punched in her life. She was guessing." Charlotte pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them. Small. Contained. The posture of a woman making herself into the smallest possible target.
I should leave. I should go back to the couch and give her space and let her rebuild the walls that keep her safe. That's the smart play. The tactical play. The play that keeps the mission clean and the asset stable and my head where it needs to be.
I don't leave.
"Move over," I say.
She looks at me. I can't read her expression in the dark. Just the shape of her face and the glint of her eyes and the pale column of her throat where my shirt has slipped off one shoulder.
"I'm not going to touch you," I say. "I'm going to sit here until you fall back asleep, and then I'm going back to the couch."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know."
"No."
"Move over, Charlotte."
She moves.
I sit against the headboard with my legs stretched out and my back against the wood. She's beside me, knees still drawn up, arms still wrapped tight. The space between us is maybe six inches. Her body heat radiates across the gap.
The room is quiet. Wind outside, pushing through the pines. The last pop of the embers through the wall. Her breathing, slowing now, dropping from the ragged gasps of the nightmare into something approaching normal.
"I dream about him sometimes," she says. Quiet. Not looking at me. Looking at the window where the dark presses against the glass.
I don't ask who. I just listen.
"Not the bad parts. That's what's fucked up about it.
I don't dream about the hitting or the screaming or the night I left.
I dream about the good parts. The beginning, when he was kind.
When he'd cook dinner and pour me wine and tell me I was the best thing that ever happened to him.
" She pauses. "And then I wake up and I can't tell which version was real.
The man who held my hand or the man who broke it. "
My fingers curl against the sheets. Tight. The fabric strains.
"Both," I say. "Both were real. That's what makes it dangerous."
She turns her head and looks at me. In the dark, her eyes are almost black.
"How do you know that?"
"Because the most dangerous people aren't the ones who are always cruel. They're the ones who know exactly when to be kind."
She's quiet. I feel her processing that. Running it through whatever system she uses to sort the world.
"You're kind sometimes," she says. "The coffee. The lighter. Sitting here right now."
"I'm not kind. I'm strategic."
"Bullshit."
The word comes out soft. An admonishment wrapped in belief. She shifts beside me, and her knee presses against my thigh, and the contact sends a jolt through my body that I feel in the base of my cock.
"It wasn't strategic," she says. "The lighter. You didn't give me a lighter because it served the mission. You gave it to me because I needed it and you noticed."
"Principessa..."
"You notice everything about me. You count my breathing.
You know where I put my shoes. You knew I was lying before I opened my mouth.
" She's turned toward me now, her body angled, her face close enough that I can see the individual lashes framing those beautiful eyes.
"That's not strategy, Claudio. That's something else. "
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't make me into something I'm not."
"I'm not making you into anything. I'm telling you what I see." Her hand comes up and touches my jaw. Where she hit me. Her fingertips press into the spot, light, barely there, and my eyes close before I can stop them. "Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Liar." Her thumb traces the line of my face. My teeth clench under her touch. "You've got a bruise forming."
"I've had worse."
"I know. I've seen your scars."
Her hand stays on my face. Her thumb moves from my chin to the corner of my mouth, tracing the cut on my lip. The touch is so light it's barely contact, and my whole body is vibrating like a string pulled too tight.
"I shouldn't have hit you," she says.
"I shouldn't have walked in."
"I'm glad you did."
I open my eyes. She's right there. Inches away.
Close enough to count the freckles on the bridge of her nose, three of them, faint, hidden under the patchy makeup she stopped using four days ago.
Close enough to see the pulse in her throat jumping fast and hard.
Close enough to smell the shampoo in her hair and the faded tobacco on her skin and the warmth underneath that's just her, just Charlotte, just the woman she is when she stops being the woman she built.
"If you kiss me again," I say, "I'm not going to stop at just kissing."
"I know."
"I need you to be sure."
"I am."
"Say it."
"Claudio." She says my name the way she does everything. Clean. Direct. No decoration. "I haven't been sure about anything in three years. I'm sure about this."
She kisses me.
Not like the kitchen. The kitchen was anger and collision and two people crashing into each other because the alternative was combustion.
This is different. This is slow. Her mouth finds mine and stays, and her hand slides from my jaw into my hair, and she pulls me toward her with a pressure that's not urgent but absolute.