15. Crossing Thresholds
CROSSING THRESHOLDS
COLE
She takes my hand at the mouth of the hall and I let her lead, because that's the whole of it, right there, before we've crossed the threshold — she leads, and I let her, and every step from here is hers or it doesn't happen.
I know what I know. I know about the table now.
I know about a girl who got told for four years that her body belonged to a man with good teeth, who learned what wanting got her, who hasn't let one person stay the night in ten years.
A man who's handed all that and doesn't slow down to make sure every door is hers to open is a man who wasn't listening.
I listened. So I let her hand pull me down a dark hall in a house I'm sworn to guard, and I keep my own hands where they are until she tells me differently.
I clear her room every night while making her wait in the hallway.
I check the closet, the bathroom, under her bed, three seconds, exits and angles, and I leave.
Tonight she takes me into it and shuts the door, and the click of the latch is the loudest thing I've heard in fourteen months, because it's a door she's shutting on purpose with me on the inside of it.
There's street-light coming through the blind, enough to see her by.
She turns around. The turquoise over her ear, the level look that doesn't slide off mine, five-foot-two of a woman who runs a room of sixty and told a federal prosecutor she'll stand up in August and isn't afraid of one thing in this dark but the thing she's decided to do anyway.
"Last chance to tell me no," she says. Dry. Testing me. "You gave my father your word, cowboy."
"I gave him my word I wouldn't bring you anything." I bring my hand up slow, telling her the whole way, and tuck the turquoise streak back off her face, and let my thumb stay along her jaw because she lets it. "I'm not bringing you a thing. You came and got me. Both times now."
The corner of her mouth does the thing. And then she stops testing.
She kisses me, and this one isn't the office and it isn't a thing we pull back from.
This one has nowhere to be in the morning.
She kisses me slow and deep and certain, a fistful of my shirt the way she had it the first time, and I let her set every degree of it — how hard, how deep, how fast we go from standing to not — because fifteen years of discipline is losing a fight with six days of wanting her, and taking is the one thing I will not do with this woman.
She gets to take. I get to be taken. That's the deal I made in the hall, and I'm keeping it.
She gets my shirt up and off and runs her hands over me like she's reading me in the dark, the scars and all — the one at my last rib she doesn't ask about, the old white line on my hand she's been looking at since the first night — and her hands don't go soft with pity over any of it.
She maps me like terrain she's claiming.
Fifteen years I made this body a tool and a weapon, a thing I told what to do and it did it, and nobody's touched it like it was worth touching since I can't remember, and her hands flat on my chest in the dark undo something in me I didn't know was still tied off.
When she reaches for the hem of her own shirt I stop her. One hand over both of hers. Gentle.
"Let me," I say. "Slow. You tell me stop, I stop. Anywhere. Any second. You decide."
She looks at me a long beat in the street-light, and I watch her understand exactly why I said it — a man who knows about the table making good and sure not one thing happens to her in this bed that she didn't choose with her eyes open. Something moves through her face that's bigger than want.
"I know," she says, low. "That's why it's you."
Then she lifts her arms and lets me.
I take the shirt off her slow, the way I said, and the light finds her, and the first thing I do — before I let myself look at the rest of her the way a man looks when he's finally allowed — is take her left wrist and turn it up and put my mouth on the brand.
She goes still.
"They marked you to make you theirs," I say against her skin, over a circle and a cross that some animal cooked into a nineteen-year-old while a woman hummed.
"You're not theirs. Not one inch of you.
" I kiss it again, slow, like I can put something back where they took something out.
"Anything that happens in this bed, you gave me.
That's the only kind of yours there is."
When I look up her eyes are wet and her jaw is set against it, the way she sets it against everything, and she gets a hand in my hair and pulls me down to her mouth, and the slow part is over.
We get the rest of it off between the bed and the wall, her hands and mine, no grace in it now and neither of us wanting grace.
I get my mouth on the side of her throat — the side she bared the first night at the bar without knowing she did it — and she makes a sound I feel land in my own chest, and the leash I've kept fifteen years and tightened to nothing since Tuesday finally lets all the way go.
I lay her back and follow her down, and I take my time, because I've got nothing but time tonight, and because every place I put my mouth she chooses to let me, and a man who's waited this long isn't going to rush the one thing he waited for.
I learn her by the sounds. The catch when I find the soft inside of her thigh.
The way her hand fists in my hair when I don't stop.
The way she says my name like it surprises her every time it gets out.
Cole. Not cowboy now. Cole. I file every one of them somewhere I'll never lose them.
I take her apart with my mouth, slow and then not, her hips coming up off the bed and her breath gone to pieces, and when she goes over she goes over saying my name and gripping the sheets and arching into me, and I stay with her the whole way down — because nobody's stayed with this woman through anything in ten years, and I am going to stay with her through this.
"Cole." Wrecked. Breathless. Half a laugh in it. "Get up here."
"Yes, ma'am."
I come up over her and she pulls me down, and I brace on my forearms so I'm not putting my whole weight on five-foot-two of her, and I look at her face in the street-light, because this is the part where a man could miss it, and I'm not missing a second of it.
I wait for the flinch. Some part of me is braced for it — the part that knows about the table, ready to stop dead on a breath if her eyes go anywhere but here.
It doesn't come.
Her eyes stay on mine. Open. Present. Hers.
And she reaches between us and lines me up herself — her hand, her choice, the last door and she's the one who opens it — and pulls me into her slow, both of us going still at the joining, her breath catching and mine gone out of me entirely.
No flinch. Just Sloane, looking up at me, taking me in, choosing it with her eyes wide open in the dark.
"There he is," she says, soft. The thing she said the first night at the bar. And it cracks something open in me the dose couldn't and Mary couldn't and the mountain hasn't yet.
Then she moves under me, and we quit talking.
It's slow at first, and then it isn't. She sets it — of course she sets it, she sets everything — her hands on my back and her heels at my legs telling me harder, there, like that, and I give her every bit of what she asks for and watch her take it.
Fifteen years I made this body obey me. Tonight it obeys her, and there's a freedom in it I've got no name for, handing somebody the wheel after a lifetime of white-knuckling it.
She drives us both to the edge and holds us there until I can't see straight.
I feel her start to go a second time — the clench and the shake of it, her nails dragging down my back, her voice breaking around my name — and I let go of the last of myself and go with her.
Into her. The whole fourteen months of nothing and the whole week of wanting and the whole of a man who decided he'd be nowhere, all of it coming apart at once inside a woman who chose me with her eyes open in the dark.
I say her name into her throat like it's the only word I've got left. Maybe it is.
We come down slow, tangled, her heart pounding under my hand and mine pounding under hers, both of us breathing like we ran here.
I don't move off her. She doesn't make me.
I hold my weight on my forearms and put my forehead down against hers, and we stay there, joined, breathing, the street-light on us, and neither of us says a word, because there's nothing that needs saying and we're the two people on earth best at letting a silence stand.
We don't sleep, the first part of the night.
I slept on her couch a week and didn't sleep; tonight I'm in her bed and don't want to.
We talk, low, in the dark, the kind of talk you only get to after.
She traces the scar on my hand and I tell her where it came from — a kitchen in Mosul, a long time ago — and she tells me about the streak of turquoise, how she started it the year she came home, because it was a color nobody in that place would ever have allowed, a flag she planted on her own head.
I file it. She catalogs me. Somewhere in there I do sleep — hard, dreamless, her back against my chest and my arm over her and her hand holding my forearm the way she held her father's the night she ran.
Except it's not the night she ran. It's the morning she stayed. And the difference is the whole world.
I wake at first light.
That's the part of me that doesn't switch off — I wake when the dark starts to go.
Gray's coming up around the blind and the room's taking shape out of the night, and she's still asleep against me, which I'd put money on that she doesn't do.
Sleep with a man's arm over her. Sleep past five.
Sleep at all without the dream finding her.
She's sleeping now. Her breath even. Her face in the first light younger than I've seen it, the watch off it for once.
I lie still so I don't wake her, and I do the thing a man does at first light when the night was the best thing that ever happened to him.
I count the cost.
Fourteen months I was the most dangerous thing on any ground I stood on, because I had nothing left to lose.
They took the team. They took Holt. I gave the rest away on purpose — every tie, every attachment — because a man who's nowhere can't be hit.
I made myself a thing that couldn't be hurt by making sure there was nothing left in me to hurt.
I just handed all of it back. In one night I undid fourteen months of careful nothing, and I did it gladly, and I'd do it again, and lying here at first light with her hair against my mouth I understand exactly what I've done.
I've made myself a man with everything to lose. Most dangerous thing I ever did, and I did it in a bed, with a woman who's got a price on her head and a date in August and men on the county roads who count guns for a living.
She stirs. Settles. Her hand tightens on my arm in her sleep, like even under she's checking I'm still here.
I'm still here.
And here's the thing the night handed me that I didn't ask for and can't give back.
I'm not afraid of dying. I quit being afraid of that a long time ago, somewhere outside Kandahar.
What I'm afraid of now — brand new, at first light, with her warm and breathing against me — is living through something happening to her.
That's the fear they could use, if they were good enough to find it. And they're good enough.
A man who loves something hands his enemy a map to his own heart.
I look at her in the gray light — the brand on the wrist draped over my arm, the turquoise, the steady sleeping breath of a woman who walked toward me in the dark when every instinct she owns was screaming at her to run — and I make the only vow that matters.
The one I make to nobody, in the quiet, the way Walt does everything.
Nothing gets to her. Not while I'm breathing. They want her, they come through me, and I am a hard thing to come through.
The light comes up. She sleeps. I keep the watch.
And somewhere out past the blind, in a town about to stop being quiet, the men who count guns are counting down to the same August I am — and one of us is going to be wrong about who gets there first.