Chapter 21 #2
Not the clichéd romantic stopped. Actually stopped.
The rain paused. The room held its breath.
Seth's lungs locked and his hands clamped on Zain's shoulders and for three eternal seconds there was only the stretch and the fullness and the look on Zain's face, the composure cracked open like an egg, the raw undone wanting that Zain kept buried under six years of walls and discipline and the lie that he didn't need anyone.
"Move," Seth whispered. "Zain. Move."
Zain moved.
He set a pace that was not kind. Seth didn't want kind.
He wanted to be driven into this mattress until the memory of the gunshot was replaced by the memory of this, Zain's hips snapping against his, the headboard hitting the wall in a rhythm that anyone in the safehouse could hear and neither of them cared, Seth's legs locked around Zain's waist pulling him deeper on every thrust.
"Harder."
Zain gave him harder. Hooked Seth's knee over his shoulder, changing the angle, and Seth nearly came off the bed.
"Fuck! Right there, don't stop, don't you dare stop -"
"I'm not stopping." Zain's voice was gone. Destroyed. The composed, measured, controlled man was gone and what was left was animal and desperate and so focused on Seth that the rest of the world had ceased to exist. "I'm never stopping. You're mine. Say it."
"Yours." The word came from somewhere below conscious thought. "I'm yours."
"Again."
"Yours, you possessive - oh God - yours, always, Zain, please…"
Zain's hand wrapped around Seth's cock. Stroked in time with his thrusts, tight and fast and merciless, and Seth was gone.
He was beyond bratting, beyond words, beyond everything except the point where their bodies connected and the pressure building at the base of his spine like a detonation countdown.
"Come for me." Not a request. An absolution.
Seth came apart.
It hit like the aftermath he'd been bracing for since the trigger pull, except instead of horror it was release.
His whole body seized, clenching around Zain, and the sound he made was Zain's name torn into syllables that didn't fit together anymore.
His vision went white. His hands clawed Zain's back hard enough to draw blood.
He felt it under his fingernails, felt Zain hiss against his neck, and the tiny violence of it, the reciprocal marking, undid the last thread.
Zain buried himself deep and followed. His whole body went rigid, shaking, and the sound he made against Seth's throat was the most honest thing Seth had ever heard from him. Not controlled. Not compressed. Just a man breaking open.
They lay wrecked. Breathing hard. Tangled together in sweat-soaked sheets, sticky with cum, the rain hammering the windows like applause.
"We're disgusting," Seth said when he could speak again. His voice was raw. His body felt like it had been disassembled and reassembled in a slightly different configuration. Better. Looser. More real.
"Completely."
"That wall is never going to be the same."
"The headboard has a dent."
"Jack is going to say something."
"Jack is absolutely going to say something."
Seth laughed. It was wet and shaky and surprised, and it was the first real thing he'd felt since the trigger pull. Not the numbness. Not the clinical distance. Something warm and messy and human, bubbling up from the place the sex had cracked open.
Zain pulled him in. Wrapped around him, chest to back, arms locked, face pressed into the curve of Seth's neck. Holding him together the way you hold something that's been shattered and is slowly, carefully, being glued back.
Seth's hand found Zain's. Laced their fingers together against his own chest, over his heartbeat.
"You brought me back," Seth said.
"You never left."
"I did. On that street. For a minute. I went somewhere cold."
"I know." Zain's lips against his spine. "But you came back."
"Because of you."
Silence. The rain. The distant hum of the refinery. Zain's heartbeat against his back, steady, steady, the metronome that Seth's body had learned to sync to without permission.
"Zain?"
"Hm."
"I killed someone tonight."
"Yes."
"And I don't feel guilty."
Zain was quiet for a moment. His arm tightened. "The guilt will come. It always does. But not feeling it now doesn't make you a monster. It makes you a person who did what was necessary and whose body is still catching up."
"And if the guilt doesn't come?"
"Then we'll deal with that too."
"We."
"We." Zain pressed his mouth to the back of Seth's neck. The spot where he'd bitten earlier. Tender now, over the bruise he'd made. "Everything from here on out is we."
Seth closed his eyes. The tears came then.
Not the shaking sobs of breakdown. Quiet tears, sliding sideways into the pillow, running into the place where Zain's arm held him.
The tears he hadn't shed in the warehouse.
The tears he'd refused for thirty-one hours and for four months and for every year before that when crying meant weakness and weakness meant someone took something from you.
Zain didn't tell him to stop. Didn't tell him it was okay. Just held him, and breathed, and let his own hand shake against Seth's chest where Seth couldn't see it.
The rain kept falling. Detroit kept breathing. And in a bed that smelled like sex and sweat and the fading ghost of violence, two men who had killed for each other lay tangled together and let the night hold what the morning would make them carry.