Chapter 10 Charlotte
Chapter Ten: Charlotte
We find the cabin at dusk. It took longer than expected because I had to detour away from Ashburn.
It's smaller than the farmhouse. One room, a kitchenette, a bathroom with a door that doesn't fully close. Emilio’s contact left the key under a rock by the front step, which is the least creative hiding spot in the history of hidden keys, but I'm too tired to have opinions about security protocols.
The cabin sits in a clearing surrounded by birch trees.
No neighbors. No road noise. The nearest highway is six miles east, and the dirt track that leads here is narrow enough that only one car can pass at a time.
Claudio drove it at ten miles per hour, scanning the tree line the whole way, his jaw tight, his hand on my knee.
His hand has been on my knee since the county road. Not gripping. Resting. Like he put it there to prove something and forgot to take it back, and now it lives there, warm and heavy through my jeans, and I've stopped pretending it doesn't affect me.
He clears the cabin before he lets me in.
Gun drawn, room by room, which takes about forty-five seconds because there are only three rooms and one of them is a closet.
He comes back to the door and nods, and I walk in and drop my coat on the one chair and sit on the edge of the one bed and look at the ceiling.
No tiles. Wood planks. I can't count them. They blend into each other in the low light, grain lines overlapping. It bothers me more than it should.
Claudio locks the door. Checks the windows.
Draws the curtains. Pulls the burner phone from his pocket and sets it on the counter beside the Glock and a bottle of water he grabbed from the last gas station.
His movements are automatic, the sequence of a man running a protocol he's performed a hundred times.
He checks the mag, racks the slide, sets the gun with the grip facing the door. Ready. Always ready.
He sits on the counter. Not a chair. The counter. Legs hanging, boots muddy from the walk, one hand on his thigh and the other wrapped around the water bottle. He watches me.
I watch him back.
I'm hollowed out. That's the only word for it.
I told him about Daniel on the side of a road, in a car that smells like his brother's cologne, and saying it out loud didn't kill me but it scooped me clean.
Three years of carrying that name behind my teeth like a swallowed razor blade, and I opened my mouth and let it out, and now there's a space where it used to be.
The space is lighter, but it aches the way new emptiness always aches.
The body doesn't know the difference between losing something heavy and losing something vital.
It just registers the absence and panics.
I press my fingers to my neck. Vertebrae. Solid. Stacked.
"You should eat," he says.
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since this morning."
"I'm not hungry, Claudio."
He takes a drink of water. Doesn't push.
I'm grateful for that, and I'm angry about being grateful, because gratitude implies I expect him to push, and expecting men to push is a leftover from a life I'm supposed to have left behind.
The anger sits in my chest beside the emptiness, and together they make a combustible combination that I can feel building behind my ribs.
I need something. Not food. Not sleep. Not another safe house or another highway or another cigarette, and I'm out of those anyway, the last one stubbed out in the cupholder on the county road while I said Daniel's name for the first time in three years.
I need to feel like my body is mine.
I look at him. He's still on the counter.
Still watching. Not with the clinical attention he usually carries.
He's looking at me the way he looked at me in the farmhouse kitchen before everything went sideways.
Like I'm a variable he can't solve. Like the equation changed while he wasn't looking and now the math doesn't work and he's trying to figure out which number moved.
"Stop looking at me like that," I say.
"Like what?"
"Like I'm breakable."
"I don't think you're breakable."
"Then stop looking at me like you're trying to figure out how destroyed my soul is."
He slides off the counter. Crosses the small room in three steps. He's in front of me now, standing between my knees where I sit on the edge of the bed, and I have to tilt my head back to see his face. The light from the kitchenette is behind him, turning his edges gold and his face into shadow.
"You told me something today that hurt you," he says. "I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen, and I'm not going to treat you like glass because of it. But I'm going to look at you. Because I want to, and because you deserve to be looked at by someone who isn't figuring out what he can take."
My throat tightens.
I grab the front of his shirt and pull him down to me.
The kiss is mine. It’s deep and passionate, filled with the longing I’ve been desperately trying to push down and swallow. Intentional. I know exactly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I spent hours on the side of a road giving away pieces of myself, and now I need to take something back.
He kisses me back. Careful. Testing. His hands hover at his sides like he's waiting for instructions.
"Sit down," I say against his mouth.
He sits on the bed. I push him back until he's leaning against the headboard, legs stretched out, and I climb into his lap and straddle him. His hands finally land on my hips and the breath he lets out is ragged and broken, and the sound of it goes through me like a match striking.
"Principessa."
"Shut up."
"Are you sure—"
"I said shut up. Stop asking. Just fucking take me.
Use me." I pull back enough to look at him.
His eyes are dark, pupils eating the green, and his mouth is a line and his hands are flexing on my hips, and I can feel him getting hard beneath me, the thick ridge of him pressing against the seam of my jeans.
"I need this. Not because I'm sad. Not because I'm broken.
Because I just gave you the worst thing that ever happened to me and I'm still here and I need to feel like my body belongs to me. Do you understand?"
His throat moves. "Yes."
"Good. Then let me fuck you."
I pull my shirt over my head. His shirt.
The one I've been wearing for days, the one that smells like both of us.
I drop it on the floor, and the cold air hits my bare skin and my nipples tighten and I don't flinch. God, I don’t flinch.
His eyes drop to my chest, and I watch him look and I let him, because this is different from being looked at by a man who thinks your body belongs to him.
This is being looked at by a man who knows it doesn't. Who knows that every inch of skin he sees is mine, offered, not owed.
His hand comes up. Fingers trace the line of my collarbone. Slow. Down. Between my breasts. The backs of his knuckles brush the swell of one, then the other, not grabbing, not squeezing, tracing. Learning. His calluses catch on my skin and the rough drag of them makes my breath hitch.
"You're beautiful," he says. Not a compliment. An observation. The way he'd say the gun is loaded.
I undo his belt. The buckle clinks and the leather hisses through the loops and I pull it free and drop it on the floor.
He lifts his hips and I drag his jeans down and he kicks them off.
His shirt goes next. I pull it over his head, and he lets me and now he's beneath me in just his boxers, and I can see every scar and every ridge of muscle and the tattoo on his forearm that I still haven't read, and the hard outline of his cock straining against the cotton.
I grind down against him. One slow roll of my hips, pressing the seam of my jeans against the ridge of him, and the friction sends a pulse of heat between my legs so sharp my thighs clench. His head drops back against the headboard. His fingers dig into my hips.
"Fuck," he breathes.
I do it again. Slower this time. Rocking forward, dragging myself along the length of him, and the pressure hits my clit through the denim and I gasp. He groans. The sounds we make tangle together in the small room and the cabin walls hold them close.
"Off," I say, tugging at my own jeans. "I need these off."
I stand just long enough to strip. Jeans, underwear, kicked to the floor.
He watches me from the bed, propped against the headboard, his chest rising and falling too fast, his hands gripping his own thighs like he's stopping himself from reaching for me.
The restraint is visible. The cords in his neck are pulled taut, and his knuckles are white and he's letting me set the pace, letting me decide, and the power of that makes me dizzy.
I straddle him again. Nothing between us now except the thin cotton of his boxers, and the heat of his cock against my bare center is so good I make a sound that doesn't belong to me. A moan. Low and open. The sound of a woman who wants something and isn't afraid to take it.
I reach between us. Slide my hand into his boxers. Wrap my fingers around him. He's thick and hard and hot, the skin smooth over rigid flesh, and when I stroke him from root to tip his whole body goes tense. Every muscle. His stomach, his thighs, his arms. Like I plugged him into a current.
"Charlotte." Through his teeth. Strained. Barely language. "If you keep doing that—"
"You'll lose control?" I stroke him again. Twist my wrist at the head. His hips jerk off the bed. "That's the point."
I strip his boxers off. He springs free, hard and flushed, the tip slick.
I wrap my hand around him again and give him three slow strokes, watching his face the whole time.
His brow furrows. His lips part. His eyes are locked on mine and they're burning, dark and desperate, the eyes of a man who has handed the reins to someone else and is terrified and exhilarated in equal measure.