Chapter 37 #2
She crosses the room and stops close enough that I can see the faint bruising on her shoulder through the stretched collar of the borrowed sweatshirt.
The cut at her hairline. The dried salt in her hair.
The way her injured hand hangs slightly away from her body, like even pain has become another system she’s trying not to disturb.
She lifts that hand toward my face. I catch it before she touches me.
Her eyes sharpen. “You always did that.”
“What?”
“Made care look like interception.”
I let go of her hand.
She touches my cheek anyway. Her thumb traces the bruise at my jaw, the cut near my temple, the place where I must look as wrecked as I feel.
“You’re hurt too,” she says. “And still standing there like the room might ask you for a footnote.”
“I’ve been trying to avoid that.”
“Try harder.”
I almost smile.
She sees it and steps closer. Her body almost touches mine. Almost is an unbearable distance for a word so small.
“You used to be more arrogant,” she says.
“I used to be wrong more confidently.”
Her hand slides from my cheek to the back of my neck.
My body remembers. My hands stay at my sides. Barely.
Maren looks down at them. Then back at me. “Are you waiting because you’re being careful or because you think you lost the right?”
My throat goes tight. “Yes.”
Her eyes soften and hurt. “I don’t want old rights,” she says.
Of course she doesn’t.
“I’m not offering them,” she continues. “I’m standing in front of you now.”
I nod once. Words have become unreliable.
She leans in. I meet her halfway.
The first kiss is quieter than the one against the table below. Less panic. More danger.
Her mouth opens, and the past ignites so fast I have to grip my own restraint before I grip her. She tastes like salt, antiseptic, and exhaustion. Alive. Alive. Alive. That is the word my body keeps trying to turn into touch.
When I pull back, she makes a small sound of protest.
I nearly come apart from that alone. I kiss her again, and this time my hands go to her waist. Too carefully.
She bites my lower lip.
I inhale. “Maren.”
“If you touch me like I’m made of glass, I’ll become very unpleasant.”
“You’re concussed.”
“Possibly.”
“Your hand is injured.”
“Definitely.”
“Your shoulder?”
“Annoying.”
“You should be resting.”
“I’m not currently accepting board feedback from my ex-boyfriend.”
Ex-boyfriend.
Ridiculous. Small. Wildly insufficient.
“My former ex-boyfriend,” she corrects.
I take her face in both hands and kiss her.
She moves into me. Hard. Immediate. Her body against mine, her mouth under mine, her hand careful but not absent against my chest. I walk her backward until her legs hit the bed. She sits.
I follow her down only far enough to kneel.
She looks at me, breath unsteady. “What are you doing?”
“Learning.”
Her eyes darken.
I slide my hands up her calves, over the borrowed sweatpants, slow enough to let her stop me, firm enough to make stopping me unnecessary if she doesn’t want to. Her knees part. I settle between them and press my mouth to the inside of one knee.
She goes still.
I kiss higher, over fabric first, then pause with my hands at the waistband of her pants.
She lifts her hips. Permission with impatience.
I pull the sweatpants down. Underwear too. She helps awkwardly with one hand and swears when the waistband catches on the medical tape near her hip where someone patched a scrape I hadn’t seen.
I stop.
Her chin lifts. “It’s not deep.”
I press my mouth above the scrape, beside the tape, close enough to feel her inhale under my lips.
This body isn’t the one I knew at twenty-three. That body was younger, unscarred by this, unmarked by choices I couldn’t understand. I want this body with a reverence that has teeth.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says, breathless, when I pause.
“What thing?”
“Making this solemn. You always turned wanting into a thesis.”
“I’m out of practice at lightness.”
“Then practice.” Her hand fists in my hair, not gentle. “I survived an ocean today. Don’t make me survive your reverence too.”
That breaks something useful loose in me. The worship stops being the only thing in the room.
I kiss the bruise on her thigh. The line of salt along her hip. The soft place low on her belly that still makes her breath change when I get too close.
She grips the blanket with her good hand. “Holden.”
I look up.
Her face is flushed now, eyes bright, mouth parted. She is watching me with a hunger I remember and a steadiness I don’t. The old Maren would have hidden some part of this behind impatience or humor or the next clever thing. This Maren does not hide.
“Tell me,” I say.
Her throat moves. “Don’t make me wait because you’re punishing yourself.”
I lower my mouth to her.
She breaks on the first touch. A sharp inhale, her hand in my hair, her thighs tensing beside my face. I take my time because time is suddenly something I can give her. This room. This breath. This yes.
She tastes different and the same, and both facts destroy me.
Her hips move once, then still like she’s trying not to ask.
I slide one hand under her thigh and hold her open. She makes a sound then, low and rough, and I feel it in every year I wasn’t allowed to hear it.
“Holden.”
The way she says my name when my tongue moves exactly right, and then the way it changes when I learn what right means now.
I listen. To her breath. Her fingers tightening in my hair. The small shift of her hips. The sound she makes when I circle softer. The one she makes when I press firmer.
She comes with her good hand clenched in my hair and my name pulled through her teeth like she is angry pleasure found her this easily after everything else took so much.
I stay with her through it. When she lets go of my hair, her hand slides down to my cheek. I turn my face into her palm.
For a moment, neither of us moves.
Then she says, “Still inconveniently good.”
The laugh that leaves me is not smooth. It’s barely a laugh at all. It feels like something breaking open after years underground.
I climb up her body carefully, avoiding the scrape, the shoulder. She tolerates this for four seconds before hooking one leg around my hip and dragging me down.
She pushes her tongue against mine with a sound that empties every coherent thought I might have had left. My body presses into hers through borrowed clothes and restraint becomes an increasingly theoretical construct.
Her hands go to my shirt. Then stop. She looks at the buttons with open offense.
I almost smile. “Need help?”
“I hate that you’re wearing actual buttons at a time like this.”
I sit back enough to undo them.
The shirt comes open. Her gaze moves over me, slower than I expect. Bruises. Cuts. Old familiar chest, older now. The man time made out of the boy who left.
She reaches out and touches the center of my chest.
“I missed this,” she says.
I cover her hand with mine. “I missed you.”
She keeps her hand there.
I take off the shirt.
Then the rest. My injured leg objects. My ribs object. My whole body has filed a thick stack of formal complaints. Maren watches every second with increasing impatience until I’m naked enough for her purposes and she reaches for me.
I catch her injured hand again.
Her eyes narrow. She uses the other hand.
My breath leaves.
Her fingers close around my cock, and the room falls away so fast I have to brace a hand beside her hip. She strokes me, and memory rises up, filthy and precise.
She remembers too. Her eyes say it. Her hand says it better. “You still make that face,” she murmurs.
“What face?”
“The one where you’re trying to maintain intellectual dignity while your body betrays you.”
“Intellectual dignity isn’t available right now.”
“Good.” She pulls me down.
We kiss until neither of us can pretend this is anything but the next inevitable thing. I reach into the bedside table because the rescue staff, mercifully or wildly, stocked the emergency guest room for adults making questionable post-catastrophe decisions.
Maren sees the condom and laughs once. It collapses into a gasp when I settle between her thighs. Her hand comes to my jaw.
I push into her. Her body takes me with a familiarity that hits like grief before it becomes pleasure. She closes her eyes. Her mouth opens, no sound at first. I stop halfway because my whole body demands too much too fast.
Her eyes open. “Don’t you dare be noble right now.”
“I’m trying not to hurt you.”
“Good. Continue doing that while also moving.”
I laugh into her shoulder because I love her. Because I’ve always loved her. Because she is alive under me and irritated. I move deeper.
She exhales my name.
This time, I answer with my body.
Careful and close. Her leg tightens around my hip. Her uninjured hand grips my back. The bandaged one rests against my shoulder, present without strain. I learn the new rhythm. The depth she wants.
I kiss that place under her jaw.
She shudders.
“Still?” I whisper.
“Yes.”
The word is everything.
Still yes. Still here. Still her. Still us, in whatever new shape survives the old one.
The room fills with breath and skin and the quiet sounds we keep failing to swallow. I don’t rush. Then she bites my shoulder, and I stop being quite so patient. She makes a satisfied noise against my skin when I thrust harder, and that sound becomes instruction.
I follow it. Every thrust is a confession my mouth would ruin by making too careful.
Maren comes apart beneath me with her eyes open. That’s new. Her body tightens around mine, her hand locks at my back, and her voice breaks around my name in a way that makes years of loneliness feel suddenly obscene.
I follow her over with my face against her throat and her pulse under my mouth.
For a moment, there’s no surface world.
No board. No record. No ocean.
No Kevin in open water.
Only Maren’s body under mine, her hand in my hair, my heart beating too hard in a room with a bed that didn’t exist in our old life.
When I can think again, I roll carefully to avoid putting weight on her.
She makes a disapproving sound and follows me until her head is against my chest.
We lie there badly. Too many bandages. Too many bruises. My leg throbs. Her shoulder doesn’t like the angle. Neither of us moves.
Outside the room, the island keeps working. Footsteps in the corridor. Distant helicopter blades. A radio squawk. Someone calling for a doctor. The world not ending just because we survived one ending inside it.
My tablet lights on the floor beside the bed.
Board follow-up.
Maren sees the glow.
I reach down and turn the tablet face down without opening it.
Her eyes move to mine.
“I won’t ignore them too long,” I say.
“I know.”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Twenty.”
“You’re negotiating from a position of medical instability.”
“You are naked in my bed after years of poor choices. Don’t test me.” She closes her eyes, but her mouth curves.
I press a kiss to the top of her head.
The gesture is old. The woman in my arms isn’t. The man holding her is trying not to be.
“You said the right thing to your mother,” I say.
Her body stills. Then softens again. “I don’t know.”
“You sounded like yourself.”
She’s quiet for a while. “I’m not sure I know what that means anymore.”
“Good.”
She tilts her face up.
I look down at her.
“Good?” she asks.
“Yes.” I brush my thumb along her cheek, careful of the bruise near her temple. “It means no one else gets to define it before you do.”
“Twenty minutes,” she says.
I smile. “For the board?”
“For the world.”
I turn the tablet farther away.
The room goes dim around us, afternoon light softening against the wall, the ocean shining beyond the small window with all its terrible secrets.