Chapter 6 #3
Really look. The way I haven't let myself look at him with all the lights on and all my defenses down maybe ever.
His hair is still damp at the ends. There's a freckle just under his left eye I have never noticed in this much detail before, faint, the size of a pinhead, the kind of thing you'd only catch sitting this close.
His lashes are too long—they always have been—and right now they're wet, because he was almost crying a minute ago and didn't, and the wet has spiked them dark against his cheeks.
His mouth.
His mouth is what gets me, every time. It always has.
Pouty in a way he doesn't know it is. Bitten raw at the lower lip from a habit he can’t kick.
Right now slightly parted because he's been talking about how brave he thinks I am, and it's still doing the thing it does after a confession—shaped half like an apology, like he's pre-emptively sorry he said too much.
He weighs nothing in my arms. He never weighs anything. Slim and warm and curled up against my chest like he was meant for the space, and his hand is at my face, and his thumb is on my cheekbone, and—
I think about a thing I told myself once.
Not even told myself out loud. Just thought through it once.
I was nineteen, I think, and I had just had the kind of day where I'd realized I would inherit my father's whole life if I was not careful—the houses, the money, the reach, all of it—and that none of it would mean anything if I did not have one person who looked at me and saw what I was instead of what I was attached to.
I had thought, that night, that all I wanted, eventually, was someone of my own.
Someone to call mine. Someone to sit in a quiet room with at the end of a long day.
Someone to see me. Just one person. That was the whole list.
I haven't thought about that list in so long.
I am thinking about it now. Thinking about the way Max talks about me, yearns for me, looks at me.
Tonight it is not just a look. It is a hand on my face. It is a body in my lap. It is a confession of envy delivered into the curve of my throat. It is a man twenty years old who has just told me, into my collarbone, that he is jealous of how I exist.
It is the entire list.
Max is everything–and more–than I could ever fucking want.
My chest does a thing it has not done before.
I am not going to put a word to it. There is no word for the specific physical event of a man's heart being too small for what he is currently feeling and trying to widen on the spot.
It just happens. It is happening. I am sitting on this couch in a quiet house with this person curled up against me and I am, for the first time in my adult life, full.
Max is still looking at me.
"You okay?" he asks. Quiet.
"Yeah, baby."
"You sure."
"I'm sure. Come here."
He closes the last small distance between us and presses his forehead to mine, and I let my eyes fall shut, and we breathe.
For a beat. Two.
"Bane."
"Mm."
"What were you thinking about just now?"
I don't answer right away. He waits. He has gotten better at waiting.
"You," I say. Eventually. "Just you."
His breath catches—small, almost not there, but I feel it.
He is the one who closes the last of the distance.
His mouth on mine is soft. Slow. Open already. He tastes like toothpaste and warmth, and his hand is still fisted in my shirt, and I kiss him back the way I have always kissed him.
Patient. Taking. Mine.
It builds.
Not fast. Not the way the kissing has built before, when one of us was about to lose the leash on it. This is slow. Deep. Settling in. His tongue against mine. My hand at his jaw, then his throat, then the back of his neck, where my fingers thread into the damp hair at his nape and stay.
He hums. Soft.
I pull him the rest of the way over me.
He comes easy. Knees on either side of my thighs.
His chest against mine. The borrowed shirt rides up an inch when he moves, exposing the strip of skin at the small of his back, and I splay my hand over it, possessive, warm.
He shivers. Makes a small noise into my mouth that goes straight down my spine and lands between my legs.
"Bane—"
"Mm?"
"Nothing. I just—"
"Just?"
"Just you."
He kisses me again. Sloppier. Breathier.
His hands have moved to my chest, then up under the collar of my shirt, finding the bare skin of my throat, and his thumb rests in the hollow there like he's counting my pulse.
I let my own hand drag up under the back of his shirt, slow, palm flat to the warm skin of his lower back, and he arches into the touch—body unguarded, finally figuring out it is allowed to be.
He grinds down into my lap.
Not on purpose. I'd put money on him not even knowing he's doing it.
Just a small unconscious roll of his hips because I have my hand under his shirt and my mouth on his and his pulse under my thumb.
I feel him hard against my stomach through the thin sweats.
I'm hard against the inside of his thigh.
I drag my mouth off his and down, finding the bond mark at the side of his throat. The newest one. Mine. I press my lips to it. The bond between us sparks bright at the contact and he shudders against me, his hands fisting harder in my shirt, his breath catching at my ear.
"There," I murmur. Into the mark. "There you are."
"Bane—"
"I'm not going anywhere, baby. I've got you."
He makes a noise that is half a laugh and half something more wrecked, and his fingers slide into my hair, and he tilts his head to give me more of his throat, and I take more.
I let him.
I let him because what is happening in my chest right now is a thing I've been trying to find the language for all day, all week, since the cell, since before the cell, since—and the language is not going to be found.
There is no clean word. There is his weight on my thighs.
His cock pressed warm against my stomach through two layers of cotton.
His pulse going under my mouth. And the small fact that he found me, he always finds me, when I need him most.
The words slam into my head.
Protective.
Interested.
Patient.
In love.
It lands inside me like a stone dropped into still water. Quiet. Total. Spreading.
I have not let myself say those two words about him before. Not to Zero in the car two months ago when he asked me what I wanted out of all this. Not to Atlas at any point ever. Not even to myself, in this exact phrasing, in this exact order, with this exact certainty—until just now.
I am in love with Max Carter.
I have probably been in love with Max Carter for longer than I am about to admit.
The mouth on the side of my throat. The pulse under my thumb. The slow grind in my lap that he doesn't know he's doing. My chest doing the thing it has been doing for an hour now, the heart-too-small thing, the full thing, except now I have a word for it and the word is so simple it's embarrassing.
His hand slides down off my throat. Past my collarbone. Down my chest. Past the waistband of my jeans.
He palms me through the cotton.
"Maxie—"
"Mm?"
"You're—"
"I know."
He squeezes. Slow. Confident in a way Max is never confident—he is teasing me, deliberate, his thumb finding the head of my cock through the fabric and pressing there. My hips push up against his hand without my permission. He smiles against my mouth.
"Bane."
"Yeah."
"I want—"
He kisses me again. Open. Hot. His hand still working me through my jeans, slow and merciless. The bond between us flares and I feel his want pour down it into my own body and it nearly takes me out.
I have to break the kiss to breathe.
His mouth goes to my jaw. His hand stays where it is. He is half-curled into me with his hand on my cock and his breath at my ear and the fire popping in the hearth and the bond singing under my ribs, and the word I just found for what I am has settled into my chest and is not going anywhere, and—
"I love you."
It comes out against his temple. Quiet. On an exhale. Before I've made a decision about whether to say it. Not whispered, exactly. Just spoken.
He goes still.
Everything in him. All at once.
His hand on my cock goes very still and very warm. He isn't breathing. I'm not breathing.
For a long second neither of us does anything.
Then, slow, he pulls back.
His hand slides off me. He sits up enough to look at my face. His mouth is wet. His eyes are wide. He is reading me the way he used to when he first moved in—careful, listening, deciding whether the floor will hold.
I don't say it again.
I don't say anything.
I reach up and I touch his cheek. Once. Light.
He turns his face into my palm.
His eyes are bright.
His mouth moves. It tries to make a word. It doesn't make a word.
Then he's moving. Off my lap in one too-fast push, his bare feet hitting the rug, the cushion under my hip still warm where he'd been a second ago.
"I—I forgot—"
"Maxie."
"—I told Wren I'd—she's been—I have to—"
"Maxie. Hey."
"—I have to text her, I forgot, I—"
He stops. He's at the doorway already. He's gotten himself almost out of the room. I haven't stood up. I haven't moved at all. I'm watching him from the couch with my hand still in the air where his face was.
"Hey," I say. Soft.
He looks at me.
His face is doing several things at once. None of them are anger. None of them are no. What they are, mostly, is I don't have the room in me right now to put what you just gave me down anywhere safe.
I know that face.
I'm not going to keep him when he’s spiraling like this.
He crosses back to the couch in three quick steps, leans down, and kisses my mouth—soft, brief, receipt—and his hand cups the side of my jaw for one second before he's gone again.
"I'll—"
"Yeah, Maxie."
"—I'll see you tomorrow."
"Yeah."
He goes.
I hear his footsteps down the hall. The soft shut of his door. The quiet that comes after.
I sit on the couch for a while.
I don't pick the beer up. I do not pick the file up. I don't move at all, actually, for a few minutes. I just look at the fire and let the thing in my chest do what it's going to do, which is settle.
He kissed me before he left.
That's the thing I'm holding on to.
Even if he gave me nothing else to hold on to.
I've spent enough of my life reading rooms to know what that kiss meant. I heard you. I didn't run. I don't have the words to give it back yet. Give me time. Small, brief, deliberate. He took two steps out of his panic to put it on my mouth.
I file it.
I file it next to the concrete floor when I dressed him with the scrubs.
I file it next to the morning after I knotted him in that cell and everything had changed between us.
I file it next to the night at the beach house when he asked me for the bond on purpose and called me by my name and meant it.
It is the same shape.
It keeps being the same shape.
He loves me too.
He doesn't know that yet. He will. He's twenty years old and he's spent every year of those twenty being given love that was conditional on being smaller than he was, and this is going to take him a minute.
I can feel that across the bond now, the bright bewildered bracing of him in his own room down the hall, and it doesn't worry me. Not even a little.
I pick up the beer. Drain the rest of it in one swallow. Lean back into the couch.
I have time.
I've got the rest of my life to make him understand exactly what I meant.
I close my eyes and let him work through whatever emotions are running through his head. Whatever doubt and fear he carries so deep I think I might never be able to wipe away.
The bond hums steady between us.
He'll come back.
He’ll come to me when he’s ready.