14. Lev #2
And then I wanted to give her more than my hands could reach.
I went to my knees in front of her, slowly, my eyes up on hers the whole way down, asking it without a word, and she answered by threading her fingers into my hair and drawing me to where she wanted me.
I set my mouth to the heat of her, to the slick, wanting center of her, and learned this the only way I have ever learned anything, by her, by the hitch of her breath and the press of her hand and the broken sound she made when I found the place that lifted her onto her toes.
I stayed there, patient and relentless at once, her thigh trembling over my shoulder, until she was past words and past control, until she came apart against my mouth with my name bitten off in her teeth and her fist tight in my hair, and I held her through every wave of it.
The sound of the most composed woman I have ever known undone because I had given her that, not taken it, given it, was the most powerful thing I have done in a life that has not been short of power.
She walked me back to the bed and pressed me down onto it, one flat hand on my chest, and she climbed over me, and for a long moment she only looked down at me in the gold light, her hair loose around us both, her hands spread over the star above my heart.
I lay still beneath her, the most dangerous man in the city held down by nothing but her certainty, and I had never in my life wanted less to move.
“You are letting me,” she said. Not a question. A wonder.
“I am letting you.”
“Say it again.” Her hips settled over mine, the heat of her against me through what little was left, and it took everything my whole brutal life had built into me to hold still under it.
“I am yours to lead.” It came out raw, stripped of every defense I own. “Take what you want from me. I will not move until you tell me to.”
She kissed me for that, hard, and then she reached between us and took me in her hand and guided me to her, to the slick heat of her, and held my eyes as she began to sink down.
She drew me into her slowly, by inches, the exquisite stretch and give of her body accepting mine, her breath catching at the fullness of it, and the tight clutch of her closing around me an inch at a time dragged a sound out of me I had never made in my life, low and broken, my hands at her hips and only holding, not steering, letting her take me exactly as deep and as fast as she chose.
She took all of me by slow degrees, until nothing of either of us was held back, and then she stilled, the both of us shaking at the edge of it, and let her body learn the whole of mine.
“Look at me,” she said, and I did, because I would have done anything she asked in that moment. “Stay here. With me. The whole way.”
Then she began to move.
I had believed, before her, that I knew what this was.
I knew nothing. She rode me slow and sure above me, hands braced on my chest, taking her own pleasure and giving mine in the same unbroken motion, and every time my hips rose to chase the having of it she gentled me, held my eyes, brought me back to level.
Back to here. Back to the only room that has ever mattered.
The clause held even now, even under her.
Nothing by force. When my hands moved on her they asked first, in the wordless grammar bodies use, for the arch of her or the broken yes she gave against my mouth, and only then went on, and I gave and was given to in the same breath until I could no longer find the seam between them, until there was no seam, until the man who only takes and the man finally, terribly, given to were one shaking man undone beneath his wife.
When she bent and breathed against my ear that I could move now, that she wanted my weight, I turned us in a single motion and laid her back into the pillows, and she pulled me down over her and wound her legs around me, and I sank into her again, deep and slow, and this time she let me set the pace and watched me do it, her hands roaming the scarred country of my back.
I took my time the way she had taught me, long unhurried strokes that drew a helpless rhythm of sound out of her, her hips rising to meet each one, the heat of her pulling me deeper, until the slowness became its own unbearable thing and neither of us had the patience left that had built it.
Even then I kept asking, in the only honest language I had left, and she kept answering yes against my mouth, yes, more, here, and I gave her everything she asked, and found that taking and being given had become, somewhere in the dark, the same single act.
I felt it gather in her before she did, because I know her now, the breath going ragged, the rhythm drawing tight, her control coming apart the way she had taken mine apart.
I sat up under her and wrapped her against me so we moved together, chest to chest, her face buried in my neck, and I said her name into her hair like a prayer I had only just been taught the words to.
When it took us, it took us together, her body clenching around me and her cry breaking hot against my throat and her hands fisted over the star, and I followed her a heartbeat behind, helpless, emptying everything I am into the one person I had sworn never to need, her name breaking out of me like something I had been holding under water my whole life and finally let surface.
I have stood in front of guns and felt nothing move.
I felt everything move then. I felt the floor of me, the one my father poured, crack clean across, and something warm came up through the break that I had no name for and did not try to find one.
Afterward we lay tangled in the wrecked light, her head on my chest, over the star, her breath slowing against my skin, and I held her the way I have never held a single thing in my life.
Because here is what I understood, lying there, that no enemy ever managed to teach me.
I had spent thirty-four years making certain I owned nothing that could be taken from me.
It is the only real defense. A man with nothing to lose cannot be moved or threatened or brought to his knees by anything short of his own death, and his own death I stopped fearing at twenty-two.
I had built my whole impregnable life on holding nothing I could not afford to lose.
And I had just lost.
Not her. She was right here, warm and breathing against me, mine in the only sense that word has ever meant anything.
I had lost the safety. The great cold safety of caring for nothing.
It was gone, drawn out of me by a woman in a dark hallway who said slow, and I lay there with her heartbeat under my hand and understood, with a dread that made every gun I have ever faced look like a child’s toy, that I now held a thing that could be taken from me.
That I had, for the first time since I was a boy, something to lose.
It frightened me. I want that on the record, because I am not a man who frightens, and I was frightened, lying in the warm dark with everything I had spent my life avoiding asleep against my chest.
She stirred, half asleep, and traced the star with one fingertip, then found my hand in the dark and drew it over the open palm of hers, the scarred one, the locked room, and left it there.
My hand on her secret. She did not explain it and did not need to.
Some doors you are only let near. You do not get to open them.
It turns out to be enough, more than enough, to be allowed to stand at one.
I meant to say something. There was a thing in my chest the size of the harbor, and I went looking for the words to carry it and found, as I have found my whole life, that I do not own them.
I have never needed words. I state. I command.
I read the room and I move first. None of that is built to say the thing I needed to say to the woman asleep on my chest, and for once the failure did not frighten me, because she, of all people, would not require the saying. She reads everything.
So I said nothing. I kept her against me in the dark, her breath gone slow and even and trusting, her scarred hand under mine, the star she had kissed rising and falling with the breath she had given back to me.
And for the first time in two years, with someone in my arms, the most dangerous man in the city closed his eyes and fell all the way asleep.