Where He Lands #3
"How long?" she asked.
He blinked.
"For what?"
"If the northern approach is usable."
Suspicion narrowed his eyes.
"You are being very strange."
"Answer."
Oliver came beside her.
"Five days from Caldris in clean weather. Seven if the winter current is still running south. Possibly longer if the old survey lied about the western shelf."
"Crew?"
"Small. Kraken if Jasper's review clears. Another ship if it doesn't and if he wants the work."
The final condition held Marin's attention. Oliver had not turned Jasper's tribunal into a scheduling inconvenience or assumed that paying the cost gave him the right to decide what Jasper did afterward. The route remained a possibility with another person's choice inside it.
"Your hand?"
He glanced at the bandage.
"Annoyingly relevant."
"So not next week."
Oliver flexed the right hand on instinct. The healing skin pulled before the fingers reached a full fist. His expression soured at being contradicted by his own anatomy.
"You have become oppressive again."
"You cannot close it properly yet."
He raised the left hand and made an immaculate fist. "This one remains magnificent."
Marin looked at him. Oliver exhaled.
"Not next week."
She nodded and returned her attention to the chart. He waited.
"That's all?"
"Were you hoping for a fight?"
"No."
The answer came too quickly. Marin turned.
Oliver looked almost embarrassed by being understood.
The hesitation was older than fear of being forbidden.
It carried the expectation that loving a place long enough would eventually require him to become smaller inside it. Marin touched the payroll ledger.
"You brought this upstairs."
He looked down.
"Apparently."
"You marked three routes on the chart and spent the afternoon paying people whose ship cannot currently move."
"A compelling portrait of instability."
"You remembered the dockhand's daughter."
His humor faded. Marin did not finish the argument for him. She slid the ledger farther onto the chart until it covered the island chain entirely. Oliver stared. Then she lifted the book, moved it to the other side of the desk, and uncovered the route again.
"Both fit."
He went very still. The silence between them contained more vulnerability than a prettier sentence would have survived. Oliver looked at the chart. Then at her.
"Marin."
She touched two fingers to his mouth.
"Don't make it beautiful."
His eyes warmed.
"You wound me."
"Frequently."
She removed her fingers.
"Sit."
Oliver's gaze changed. The word had not been loud. It did not need to be. Marin pointed to the straight-backed chair near the window rather than the bed. His eyebrows rose.
"Here?"
"Yes."
"You have a bed."
Marin looked at the mattress, then back at him, giving the obvious suggestion precisely the amount of respect it deserved. Oliver's smile sharpened when he understood that the chair was intentional.
"Observant."
"I spent years in school."
Marin rested one hand on the chair back. "Sit."
He did. Oliver chose the chair without surprise or injury forcing the movement, settled back carefully because his ribs still disliked sudden angles, and looked up at her with unmistakable interest. Bhodi gathered beneath it.
Marin saw. So did Oliver. She went to the wardrobe and removed a narrow strip of dark silk from the drawer where she kept scarves.
Oliver watched the fabric unfold between her hands. His breathing changed.
"No rope?"
"Not tonight."
"A tragedy."
"Bhodi isn't invited either."
The humor left his face. The shadow darkened once. Oliver looked down. Something passed through his expression. Attention turning inward. Listening without surrendering the rest of himself to it.
"Stay," he said quietly.
Bhodi pressed close to the chair legs. Did not climb. Marin waited. Oliver raised his eyes again.
"That is as much agreement as I know how to obtain from it."
"Then it gets nothing else."
"Understood."
She came to stand behind him. The silk touched his cheek.
Oliver could have reached up. His hands remained resting on his thighs.
Marin tied the blindfold behind his head without tightening it enough to pull his hair.
Darkness took his eyes from her. The change was immediate.
Oliver's attention usually entered a room before the rest of him.
Without sight, the force of it turned inward and became visible in smaller things: the line of his throat, the way his fingers separated against dark cloth, the breath he took when Marin moved away and gave him no clue which direction.
"Color?" she asked.
"Green."
Marin checked the right hand herself without touching it, watching whether the fingers guarded the palm when he shifted. They did not. His breathing remained even.
"Pain?"
"Hand two. Ribs one unless you intend violence."
"Noted."
His mouth curved beneath the silk. "Disappointing."
Marin let him wait. Harbor wind moved the curtain beside him.
A carriage rolled somewhere below, its wheels crossing wet cobbles before fading toward the quay.
Oliver's head turned slightly toward the sound.
Marin crossed behind the chair and stopped at his other shoulder.
He let the sound leave without trying to follow it.
She had spent days watching him make impossible decisions because nobody else had the right to choose them for him.
He had entered Anchor House with an open door behind him, refused extraction and the R2 cutter, chosen the third exclusion, and ordered Hunger away from what was not offered.
Now his hands were free. Marin wanted neither helplessness nor restraint disguised as trust. Nothing prevented him from reaching for her except the decision he had already made.
She touched his hair at the temple. Oliver exhaled.
Her fingers moved behind his ear, down the side of his neck, then stopped before his collar.
He waited. Marin walked around the chair. His mouth curved.
"You are enjoying this."
"Yes."
"Cruel."
His head turned toward her voice and stopped a few degrees short. Marin watched him correct the instinct to track her and let the uncertainty remain.
"You remain free to complain."
"I assumed complaining was part of the service."
Marin leaned close enough that her breath touched his mouth. Did not kiss him. Oliver's smile faded. He moved forward perhaps half an inch, then stopped himself. Marin felt the movement like heat.
"Hands on the chair arms," she said.
He placed them there. Open. The right palm stayed relaxed against the wood. His left fingers curled once and released. Marin touched his lower lip with her thumb.
"I want ten minutes."
Oliver's breath caught.
"Of?"
"You not solving anything."
His mouth almost answered with wit. She waited until it died on its own.
"Do not predict what I want or decide where this should go. Do not improve the room. And do not turn surrender into another performance you're good at."
The silk hid his eyes, but Marin saw the change in his jaw.
"And if I decide I hate that?"
"Tell me."
"If I reach for you?"
"I'll know you changed your mind."
There was no punishment or accusation in the answer, only information Oliver could use. He sat with it. Marin could almost hear all the doors he normally opened before anyone else noticed them. Then his shoulders lowered.
"Ten minutes," he said.
"Yes."
"Take them."
The words moved through Marin lower than she expected.
She kissed him. She began somewhere he had not anticipated, at the corner of his jaw and then the pulse below his ear.
Oliver's fingers tightened against the chair arms and stayed there.
Marin moved away before his body could settle into the pattern. She opened the top button of his shirt.
Then the second. Waited. Oliver's breathing made a quiet betrayal of him.
"You could ask," he said.
"I could."
"You won't."
"Not about that."
She kissed the exposed place at the base of his throat.
His head tipped back. The blindfold made the surrender visible in a way rope would have hidden.
Nothing held him. Every muscle capable of changing the scene remained available.
He chose stillness anyway. Marin unfastened another button.
Her hand slid beneath the fabric to warm skin.
Oliver breathed in through his nose. Bhodi deepened beneath the chair. Marin stopped touching him. Oliver noticed immediately.
"It moved."
"Yes."
His chin lowered toward the shadow he could not see.
"Stay."
The darkness held. Marin waited another breath. Then resumed. Human skin and a human pulse, with nothing borrowed moving through her hand. She traced the uninjured line beside Oliver's ribs and felt his abdomen tighten. Moved upward instead of following the reaction. He made a dissatisfied sound.
"Complaint?"
"Observation."
"Denied."
He laughed. The sound loosened something in Marin that had remained tight since Saint Orra.
She kissed him properly then. Oliver answered without taking the pace.
His mouth opened under hers. His left hand flexed once against the chair arm when Marin caught his lower lip lightly between her teeth.
The right stayed flat because pain made gripping stupid and Oliver, tonight, had apparently decided to respect at least one medical recommendation.
Marin drew back. His breathing followed her.
"Still green?"
"Offensively."
"Want anything changed?"
He took time.
"No."
"Want anything?"
The question changed him. Oliver's smile did not return.
"To follow."
Marin went still. He had given the answer without flourish or seduction hidden inside it. He meant it. She touched his throat with the backs of her fingers.
"Then follow."