Chapter 7 #3
The bond between us has gone alert. He's reading me through it the way he's reading me from across the table, and I have the distinct sensation of being out-strategized—gently, carefully, by someone who's been patient enough to let me think I had time.
I exhale.
"I was going to tell you tonight."
"When tonight?"
"After."
"After what?"
"After I'd taken you to the hotel."
He's quiet for a beat. "...Atlas."
"I know how that sounds. I'm telling you anyway, because I'd rather you know I planned to be a coward than discover later I tried to hide it."
"You were going to wine me, dine me, take me to a hotel, and then tell me you were leaving? Definitely feels like you were hiding it. At the very least trying to butter me up for bad news."
"I was going to tell you tonight. Somewhere that wasn't our parent's house.
I'd been sorting out the words in my head for a week and they were all bad.
" A pause. "The hotel was a separate plan.
A selfish one. I wanted you in a bed I'd picked, with my hands on you, before I told you I was going to be on a plane and gone for a while.
" I look at him. "You caught me, sweetheart. "
He's silent.
I sit in the silence and let myself feel what's in the bond.
He's not angry.
He's, possibly, amused. He's also hurt. A small dark thread of it under the rest, and I can feel him deciding whether to pull on it. The Max from before would have pulled on it. The Max from a month ago would have swallowed it and lied about not having felt it.
This Max picks up his wine glass. "Tell me about the trip."
I tell him.
I tell him most of it.
What I don't:
The names. The cities. The dates. Santos in DC, who took my call two months ago and didn't hang up.
The Chicago prosecutor whose son died from a Kline drug, who has been waiting longer than I have for somebody to bring him a case.
The binder I'm compiling–financial records, transcript copies, the names of three Kline executives who walked away from the company eighteen months ago and have been looking over their shoulders ever since.
None of it goes in Max's head. I can’t afford to have Max know more than he should.
It would incriminate him, put him in danger all over again.
I won’t do that.
What I do tell him:
That what we're building is a case. The kind that ends with people in handcuffs, not the kind that ends with a settlement.
That Kline has spent twenty years buying enough of the legal apparatus that should be policing them that the only path left has been finding the investigators who haven't been touched, and building it with them slowly, face to face.
That the trip is three cities because we've reached the point where the case has to widen—other jurisdictions, more witnesses, evidence partitioned so no single agency can be paid off to make it all disappear.
That if it holds, what happens next is arrests.
I tell him I didn't bring it up sooner because every time I sat down to do it I watched him laugh at something Bane said and decided I'd do it tomorrow.
He listens. His eyes don't leave my face.
When I finish, he turns his glass on the tablecloth.
"So it’s business but now the Graves’ business. And you didn't tell me," he says, "because you didn't want to remind me of the cell."
"Yes."
He goes still.
"I've been, since the morning I drove you out of that facility, very deliberate about what I bring through the door of the house you live in.
Some of that is operational. Most of it isn't. Most of it is me trying not to put the words Kline and facility in the same room with you any more than they already are.
I was—am—wrong to keep the trip from you.
I see that. I knew when I made the choice that I was making it more for me than for you. "
The silence holds.
He takes a breath.
"Let me come."
"Sweetheart."
"On the trip. Or part of it. You said three cities. Pick the safest. I'll come."
"No."
"Atlas—"
"No, Max."
The no lands harder than I want it to. I gentle my voice immediately.
"Listen to me. Please. My brothers and I are handling it.
There's nothing on this trip that needs you.
There's plenty on this trip I wouldn't want within a thousand miles of you.
You aren't—and I want to be specific about this, because I've watched my brothers and me make this exact mistake in the last month—you aren't being protected from information.
You know what the trip is. You know the goal.
You know who I'm meeting and roughly why.
I'm asking you to stay home while I go and do the work, and let me come back to you when it's done. "
He doesn't answer.
I read him in the bond.
He's heard me. He hasn't entirely accepted it.
There's a small steady refusal in him that's new, and unbeautiful, and I love it on sight.
The Max from before would have folded. The Max from a month ago would have said okay and meant I'll think about this later.
This Max isn't folding. He isn't pretending he is.
He's letting it land. He's reserving judgment.
I file it.
I'll think about that later, in the dark, after I have him in a hotel bed and his breathing has slowed.
For now I reach across the table and take his hand again.
"Thank you for asking to go with me," I say. Quiet. "I know what it costs you. And please know how much it costs me to say no."
"...you're welcome."
"Will you come to the hotel with me anyway?"
He looks up. My heart skips a beat.
He looks at me for a long moment, and I can feel him decide.
"Yes."
I pay the bill. Henrik walks us out. Max is quiet in the elevator down to the street, quiet in the car.
He puts his hand on the console between us and I take it.
The bond between us is a low steady warmth I keep checking on the way I keep checking the road.
He doesn't let go of my hand for the whole drive.
We pull up to the hotel, give the car to valet, and head up to our suite on the fourteenth floor.
Max is silent again in the elevator.
Not the bad silent. The post-confession silent. He's leaning into my side with his shoulder pressed against my ribs, one hand still in mine, watching the floors count up in the small mirrored panel.
The doors open.
We walk down the carpeted hallway.
I get the door open on the first try, my hand on the small of Max's back.. I push the door open with my hip and let him in ahead of me. Watch him take in the room.
The suite isn't ostentatious. King bed turned down. Low lamps. Heavy curtains drawn against the city. A bottle of water and a small dish of something sweet on the nightstand the staff knows to leave when I check in. I don’t stay here often anymore but I used to need a night away from the estate every so often and there was always a room available when I called.
Max looks at the room. He looks at me.
The bond between us is humming.
He puts his coat on the chair. He turns and walks back to me, stopping a hand-span from my chest the way he stopped a hand-span from my face on the stairs four hours ago, and he reaches up and starts loosening the tie I knotted for him.
"Slow," I say.
"Slow?"
My lips part. “I want this entire night to be slow. No rushing,” I tell him.
He laughs, soft, and his hands keep working the tie. The silk slides loose. He lets it drop on the carpet between us. He starts on my shirt buttons.
I let him.
He's undressed me before, but not like this—not when we have all night and a door that locks and nowhere to be.
I've undressed him; over the few months I've learned the order of his clothes and the small habits of how he wears them.
Left sock first. The watch on his wrist Margot gave him at eighteen.
He prefers comfy clothes and items big enough that he can hide behind them.
He works one button at a time, careful, the way a person is careful when he's afraid he'll rush and ruin it. Each button gives. Each parting of fabric is a degree of skin he looks at like he’s been dying to. His knuckles brush my chest on the third button.
I feel it in my teeth.
He reaches the last button.
His hands rest flat against my chest. He looks up at me through his lashes, mouth a little parted, the bond between us pulled tight as a wire.
I take both his wrists. Bring them up between us. Press a slow open kiss to the inside of one, then the other, watching his face the whole time. His eyes close. His breath catches.
"On the bed, sweetheart."
"Atlas—"
"Now."
He gets on the bed.
I take my time, getting the shirt off, then the watch and the cufflinks Bane gave me a year ago for my birthday, setting them down on the nightstand together. I'm—I notice—performing some of this for him. Watching him watch me.
He's up on his elbows on top of the duvet still mostly dressed and his pupils are blown and he's biting his lower lip the way he does when he doesn't know what to do with his face.
I crawl up the bed to him.
I undress him the way he undressed me—shirt button by button, trousers sliding down past his hips. He lets me. He watches me. The bond is wide open between us and I can feel him in it: quiet, steady, there in a way that hasn't been possible for him in his own body until very recently.
He's down to his briefs when I move down the bed.
I press a kiss to the bone of his hip. He makes a small sound.
"Atlas—"
"Mm?"
"What are you—"
I hook my thumbs under the elastic of his briefs and pull them down his thighs.
His cock springs up against his stomach. Hard. Leaking at the tip already.
Christ.
I press my mouth to the inside of his thigh. Slow. Then higher. He inhales sharp.
"Atlas—"
"Roll over for me, sweetheart."
"...wh—"
"On your stomach. Hands under your pillow."
He rolls over. He puts his hands under his pillow.