16. Rhys
Rhys
We didn't really speak about the night in the nest. The next morning we all woke up and went about the business of the day like it was all the most natural thing that had ever happened to us. Then, as the evening started closing in we came back, because where else were we supposed to be.
We'd worked the evening in her kitchen, the four of us, the last of the Sale prep humming along the long table.
Then, somewhere around nine, Miles stood up and announced that he was exhausted.
Miles has never once been exhausted in his life.
Hudson agreed that they were both exhausted, and the pair of them got their coats with the synchronised discretion of two cathedral bells.
Miles paused at the yard door. He looked at me.
He looked at her. He said, "Goodnight, children," in a voice soaked through with meaning, and Hudson took him away by the collar before he could ruin it.
That left the kitchen, and the banked range, and her, and me.
"Subtle," she said.
"Pebbles in a tin," I said, and she laughed, the proper laugh, and the room went warm round it.
"I'd forgotten that I'd learned that phrase from you." She smiled at me then and my heart nearly burst out of my chest just to be closer to her.
I walked her upstairs. That was all it was meant to be.
Sale prep ends, the man sees the woman to her stairs, the man goes home.
I'd done the arithmetic on the evening before it started, the way I do.
It ended with me on the hill, her lamp going on above the café, and the night staying inside its lines.
At the top of the stairs she turned round, and the arithmetic died quietly somewhere below us.
She stood with her back to the door of the warm little flat, in the spill of lamplight, looking at me.
Browned butter and sea salt, and under it something deeper and slower that made the animal in me lift its head.
Her eyes were steady the way they're steady when she's decided a menu. God help the menu.
"Rhys," she said. "I'm going to finish that lean on the cliff top that we never quite got to the end of."
A man should say something at a moment like that. Half a lifetime of saved-up words, you'd think one would report for duty. What I managed was to stand very still, the way you stand when a wild thing comes toward you. And to say, on almost no breath at all, "Then finish it."
She crossed the landing and kissed me.
Soft, first. A question with her whole body behind it, her hands coming up to my jaw, and the ten years went off in me like a flare over water.
I made a sound I'd be embarrassed about in any other life.
Low in the chest. The rumble I'd kept down since the chippy.
She pulled back an inch at the sound of it.
Not away. Checking. Her eyes were lit and her breath was quick.
"Alright?" she said.
"Freya." Her name carried everything, the way it always has. "Half my life. I have wanted this for half my life."
"I know." Her thumb moved along my jaw. "I worked it out. I'm slow, but I get there." A breath. "The door's behind me. We can say goodnight here, and that's a good night, no harm done. Or you can come in. I'm asking you in, Rhys. I want to be clear that I'm the one asking."
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure. Are you?"
"I've been sure since I was fifteen," I said, and she laughed against my mouth, and reached behind herself, and the door swung open, true and light.
Inside was lamplight and the nest in its corner with my jumper in the wall of it, and I'd have gone to my knees about that alone if there'd been time.
There wasn't. She drew me in by the front of my shirt and kissed me again.
Deeper now. The question gone out of it.
I got my hands in her hair at last, ten years of wondering what it weighed, and walked her gently back against the closed door, and learned what she tasted like when she stopped being careful.
We took it slow. Not slow from doubt. Slow the way you eat a meal somebody made you.
Buttons one at a time. Her hands at my belt, unhurried and sure.
Every new inch of her mapped and named under the lamp.
The silvered burns on her forearms I kissed one at a time until she stopped breathing.
The dressed wrist handled like the cargo it was.
She pulled my shirt over my head and laid her palms flat on my chest, as though she was checking a hull for soundness.
Whatever she found there made her mouth go soft.
"Tell me what you want," she said. "Out loud. You've gone half your life not saying. Not tonight."
So I told her. The first of it came slow, the way the first plank always does.
"You," I said. "Only ever you. Since school I've known the shape of this and never once let myself want it past dark."
Her breath caught. The scent of her bloomed up between us, rich as a Sunday kitchen.
"More," she said. "All of it. I want every year's worth, Rhys. Don't you dare round it down."
So I gave her the rest, plain, in words I'd kept on the chain my whole life.
"I want my mouth on you. I want to learn what undoes you and then take it apart slow, till there's no careful version of you left in the room.
" Her lips parted. I kept on, because she'd asked, and because I could not have stopped now if the whole flat had been ablaze.
"I want to be inside you with your eyes on mine.
I want to feel you go, and I want my name in your mouth when you do.
" Lower then. The last of it. The thing the alpha had always wanted and the man had never once put air behind.
"And one day. Not tonight. I want to knot you.
I want to be the thing you can't walk out on for an hour, because your own body's gone and kept me.
That's how long I've wanted to belong to you. "
And I watched the scent of her deepen with every one. Browned butter going dark and sweet, slick-warm. The smell of an omega who is wanted, and knows it, and wants right back.
"Bloody hell," she said, unsteady, and pulled me down by the collar. "Come here."
We got to the nest somehow. It took us in like it had been built for exactly this. Maybe some wise sleeping part of her had built it for exactly this. I laid her down in the wall of soft things that smelled of all of us, and her eyes went bright and wet for one second.
"Hey." I stopped everything. "We can stop. Any line you want, we stop at it."
"That's not it." She pulled me back down. "It's that I believe you. That's all. It's new. Keep going."
So I kept going.
I took the rest of her clothes off the way you'd unwrap a thing you'd waited years to be let hold.
No hurry in it. The lamp warm on her, the scars I'd already kissed, the soft of her belly, and lower.
I went down her body with my mouth and meant to take my time, because I had years saved and intended to spend the lot of them right here.
The first touch of my mouth on her pulled a sound out of her I felt in my own spine.
She was slick for me already, the scent of it thick in the warm air, and I learned the taste of her like a thing I'd be tested on later and meant to pass.
I learned what lifted her hips off the bedding.
I learned what dragged the swearing out of her, and what made her hands fist in my hair to hold me exactly where she wanted me kept.
"There. God, Rhys, there, don't you dare stop.
" I'd no intention. I worked her with my mouth, my tongue flat and then pointed on her clit the way her hands in my hair demanded, and then with my fingers too, two of them, slow and then not, curling up to the spot inside her that made her whole body bow.
She was loud, my quiet, careful Freya, once the careful came off.
Loud and bossy and exact, a chef to the bone.
More of that. Slower. There. I followed her instructions like the gospel they were.
I felt her climb, felt the clutch of her go tight and fluttering round my fingers, and when she came apart the first time, under my mouth with her heel pressed hard to my spine, she said my name like a word she'd just that second invented.
"The day I left," she said, in the thick of it, breathless, her hands framing my face, holding me still above her. "At the bus. You carried my bags down and you stood there with a hundred things in your mouth. I watched you not say them for ten minutes. What were they?"
"Freya..."
"Tell me one. You owe me one."
So I paid. "Don't go," I said, into the lamplight, into her eyes, the words ten years late and right on time.
"That was all of them. A hundred ways of don't go.
" My voice came apart on it, just slightly, and her thumb caught the corner of my jaw like she was catching something falling.
"Don't go. Stay where I can mend what breaks on you.
That's the whole speech. It was never any longer than that. "
"Rhys." Her eyes had gone over bright. "I'd have stayed."
"No, you wouldn't. And you'd have been right not to." I kissed her, slow, the truth of it easy now between us. "You had to go and be the whole of you. I had to stay and be the whole of me. The speech was ten years early. It's on time now."
"Then say it now."
"Don't go," I said, against her mouth, and she pulled me down, and for a while there were no words anywhere in the building.
"Now," she said, after, hauling me up the length of her body. "Rhys. Now. I need you in me."
"Look at me, then." I settled between her thighs and took my weight on one arm, pushed the hair off her face with the other hand. The whole night narrowed down to the two of us breathing. "I want your eyes on me, omega, when I do."