Chapter Nineteen – Lila126 #3
He moved with the same unhurried quality he brought to all of it, no announcement, no ceremony, just his body alongside mine and his warmth solid against my arm.
His hand was at the back of my neck, his thumb finding the hollow at the base of my skull, and then his mouth was there.
The pressure was light at first, his lips at the back of my neck, and then his teeth closed against my skin with the particular precision of something deliberate, and the sensation came in a single clean wave from the bite outward, copper on the back of my tongue as he bit down, heat flooding down through my shoulders, every nerve in me registering the fact of it before I had finished forming a thought about what it meant.
My fingers found his arm and closed around it.
I was not holding on from alarm. I was holding on because the bite had marked me, made me his, done something to the center of me that needed steadying, a bell struck and still ringing, and I held his arm and breathed.
Rhett moved in behind me.
His hands were gentle at my jaw, turning my face slightly, and I felt his breath at the soft hollow below my jaw before I felt the bite itself.
When it came it was precise, he was precise about things that mattered to him, more precise than his easy manner suggested, and my breath caught in the back of my throat, a short involuntary sound that I felt rather than heard.
His teeth held for a moment before releasing, and the mark he had left was warm and tender immediately, a warmth that radiated out into my jaw and my ear and down through the line of my throat.
His fingers threaded through my hair, gathering it back from my face in the same careful, unhurried way he had moved it back in the heat, and he pressed his lips to the mark without pressure, just there.
I felt the low, settled sound that came out of me somewhere below my ribs.
Wade knelt in front of me.
He moved to the floor without urgency, his knees on the old boards, and he looked up at me with the steady, dark-eyed attention he gave to things he had decided entirely.
His hands were warm at my hips and his head bent toward the curve of my belly, not to Hope directly, but just above, the swell of the upper hip where the skin was tender and close.
He closed his mouth there with the same gentleness that was simply constitutive of him, not chosen for the occasion but native to the man, and the bite when it came sent warmth spiraling down through the curve of my belly in a direction I had not expected, inward, spiraling, reaching.
I was there’s and they were mine. It was how it was meant to be and I’d known it from the first moment I saw them. I just wasn’t ready to admit it. “Your daddy would be happy for us Hope,” I said in my mind.
Hope kicked, almost like she shared my thoughts.
She kicked once, a clear, distinct movement against the inside of Wade’s palm where it had come to rest over the peak of my belly, and I felt the kick and felt his palm receive it and felt something move through me that I did not have a word for and did not try to name.
His eyes came up to mine over the curve of her.
He did not say anything. He pressed his palm more fully against the kick and held it there, and his eyes were warm and quiet and completely certain.
The metallic warmth of all three marks sat on my skin, tender in the way new things were tender, the bruise of them still forming, each one at a different point, back of the neck, below the jaw, upper hip, and together they sat in me the way the sound of a chord sat when all three notes were held at once.
Not painful. Substantial. Real in the way of things that had been decided.
Outside, the horses were restless in the late afternoon way they went restless when the light was going, the low, hollow sound of hooves on packed dirt in the near stall, the soft snort of the mare two doors down, a tail moving against wood.
The sounds came up through the loft floor as vibration as much as sound, the life of the barn below us going about its business, indifferent to what was happening in the warm, hay-smelling air above it.
I could not parse the words, not all of them.
Low voices, one and then another, layered together in the enclosed space, and what I received was not the content of the words but what lived beneath them, the quality of something offered without condition, the particular resonance of a sound made by people who meant it down to the structure of it.
I felt it in my chest below the collarbone.
I felt it in the backs of my hands, in the marks on my skin, in the weight of Hope turning one slow, deliberate circle beneath all of our palms.
I pressed my forehead to Cole’s shoulder.
His arm came around me without a word, and I closed my eyes against the worn cotton of his shirt and felt Rhett’s fingertips trace the line of his mark at my jaw, light, following the edge of it, learning it.
Behind me the warmth of the loft held the bars of late gold light and let them go slowly toward dusk, and Wade bent forward and pressed his lips to the curve of my belly.
A long, still kiss, given to Hope in the same unhurried way all the serious things had been given tonight, fully and without qualification.
Their combined scent was in the air around me, around all of us, wound into the hay and the old wood and the warm skin smell of the afternoon, and I breathed it in and felt the word arrive in me without drama or announcement: pack.
Not something I had chosen the way you chose a word for something.
Something that had already been true and had simply taken its time becoming language.
I held it there in my chest alongside the marks and the warmth of them and the particular, deliberate kick of Hope against all of our hands, and I let it be the whole of what I needed to know right now.
The last of the gold went out of the slats above us.
The barn went blue at its edges the way barns went blue in the January dusk, the cold reasserting itself at the threshold while the warmth stayed, for now, in the enclosed air of the loft.
Cole’s arm tightened slightly. Rhett’s hand settled flat and warm at the back of my neck, and nobody said anything, and the evening came on slowly around all four of us, and I did not move.