Chapter 5 #2
"Inside," he says. His voice is rough. "Not out here."
"Inside."
We move. The walk down the ridge to the workshop is about thirty seconds.
He doesn't let go of my hand. I don't let go of his.
The workshop door isn't locked. He pushes it open with his shoulder and pulls me through after him, and then he kicks it closed and presses me back against the inside of the door and kisses me again — different this time. Less careful.
I get my hands under his shirt.
His skin is unbelievable. The unburned half is hot in a normal way, the way a man's chest is hot under your palms. The burned half is hotter.
It's a different texture entirely, ridged and tight and lit from underneath, and when I run my palm down it slowly he makes a sound against my mouth that I haven't heard another person make.
Not pain. Something else. The sound a man makes when he's been alone for a long time and the loneliness is the thing breaking open.
"Tell me," I say. Against his mouth. "Tell me what's okay."
"All of it."
"You're sure."
"All of it. Anything. Whatever you—"
I pull his shirt off over his head. He has to duck.
I get my hands on him in earnest, on the scars and the smooth skin and the place at his collarbone where the burn line crosses and the texture changes, and he makes that sound again and I press myself flat against him because I can't get close enough.
He undoes the buttons of my flannel one at a time.
He goes slowly. His hands shake a little.
I don't think he means them to shake, and the small tremor of them goes straight through me — the fact that I am undoing this man, that whatever wall he's been carrying for eight years is being taken apart by my mouth on his mouth, breaks something open in me too.
I haven't been undone in years either. I haven't been held.
The body forgets, or pretends to forget, and then the body remembers all at once.
The flannel comes off. He pushes the strap of my undershirt off my shoulder with the back of his hand and I'm aware that he's still being careful — the back of the hand, not the palm, not the heat of the palm — and I take his hand and turn it and press the palm flat to my collarbone myself.
"Don't be careful," I say. "Not with this. Not now."
His exhale shudders.
He picks me up.
He just does it — one arm under my knees, one around my back, and he turns and walks me across the workshop.
I wrap my legs around him. The workbench is closest but it's covered in our work, our case files, our evidence; he doesn't put me there.
He walks me to the wall between the back shelving and the door, the only clear wall in the room, and he sets my back against it and lets the wall hold me.
The wall is rough plywood. I feel it through my undershirt against my spine. His chest, against my front, is furnace-warm. The contrast is the most alive I've felt in two years.
"Look at me," he says.
I look at him.
His amber eyes are close. The unburned half of his face and the burned half. The whole landscape of him. He's looking at me like he's still afraid I'm going to change my mind.
"I'm here," I say. "I'm not going anywhere."
"I know."
"Then stop asking."
He kisses me again.
We undress each other slowly — slow because we have to be, in places, around the scar tissue that pulls when he moves, slow because the slower we go the more of him I get to map.
I trace the burn line down his neck with my mouth.
I trace it across his shoulder. I trace it down his sternum to where it crosses his ribs.
He makes the sound again, and again, and the workshop is full of the sound of his breathing and the rustle of clothes and the distant crackle of the fire pit outside.
He's warm everywhere. That's what I keep coming back to.
Even where the scars are, especially where the scars are, his body radiates heat through my hands.
It's not unpleasant. It's the opposite of unpleasant.
I've been cold for two years. I've been cold in a way I didn't have a name for and didn't think could be answered.
He's the answer I didn't ask for and didn't expect and he's pressed against me in a workshop on a Tuesday night with his hands on my bare skin and his mouth at the place where my pulse beats in the side of my neck.
I get him out of his jeans. He gets me out of mine.
We are both standing in nothing but skin in the lamp-glow of the workshop, with the heat of him in the four inches of air between us, and he looks at me for a second — the whole of me, in nothing — and I let him look.
I have had men flinch at the burn scar on my hand.
I let him look because I already know he won't.
He doesn't.
He gets his mouth on me. My throat first, then the line of my collarbone, then lower.
He puts his mouth on my breast and I make a sound I haven't made in years, and his answering sound — vibrated low against my skin, where his teeth are holding me open — is the sound of a man who has been alone for eight years finding out he doesn't have to be.
The scarred half of his mouth is hotter than the unscarred half.
I can feel the difference on my sternum.
I can feel it on the soft place under my breast. I can feel it everywhere he sets it.
His hand goes down between us. He is hard against my hip and I have my hand on him before I have decided to — flat against the heat of his stomach first, then lower, then closing around him — and the noise he makes into the side of my neck is the same one as before, the breaking-open noise, the answer to eight years of nothing.
He is hot in my hand. He is hot everywhere.
He pushes into my grip once, slow, helpless, and then his hand moves between my thighs and his fingers find me, and I am so slick against him already that the touch is wet, and his breath stutters against my throat.
"Iz."
"Yes."
"Tell me yes."
"Yes."
He works me there. His fingers are slow and careful and impossibly hot. I am rocking against his hand and I have my palms on the burned ridges of his back and my mouth on the burned side of his shoulder, and I am going to come like this if he doesn't move, and I want him to move first.
I tell him so.
He hooks his hands under my thighs. He lifts me — easily, like I weigh nothing, like he's been waiting to lift me — and I wrap my legs around his hips, and my back goes against the rough plywood of the wall, and he holds me there with his forehead pressed to mine for a long second before he pushes into me, slow, slow enough that I feel every inch, slow enough that when he is all the way in I make a sound I haven't made in years either, something small and surprised and unguarded, and his forehead drops to my shoulder and he holds still for a moment, both of us held still, the way you hold still when you've struck a match and you're waiting to see if it catches.
It catches.
He moves. I move. We move together against the rough plywood wall, and the workshop air is full of the warmth of him and the cool of me, and somewhere outside the windbreak the fire pit is settling, and somewhere down the hill the compound is going to sleep, and somewhere in eastern Kentucky a man with a prosthetic hand is planning something big enough to kill us.
None of that exists. The only thing that exists is the place where his scars meet my hands and his mouth meets mine and the small, ragged, hungry sounds of two people who hadn't been touched without flinching in years finding out that the flinch was never necessary.
I press my scarred palm flat to the worst of his scars and I hold him there.
I hold him there.
He says my name into my hair, once, like a word he is finally allowed to say.
I say his back.
We move slowly. We move because slow is what this requires.
He's careful with me in a way that has nothing to do with the burn skin and everything to do with the way he holds the back of my head against the wall to keep me from hitting it, the way his thumb moves across my hipbone in time with the rest of him, the way he stops once to push my hair off my face with the back of his hand and look at me like he's making sure I'm still in the same body.
I'm still here. I tell him so. I tell him with my hands on his face, with my mouth on his mouth, with my legs tight around his hips.
When the wave comes for me it comes slowly.
It builds the way a controlled burn builds — heat banking on heat, oxygen feeding it from underneath — and when it finally takes me I press my open mouth to the burned side of his neck and let it move through me with him still inside me, still pressed against me, still holding the back of my head off the rough wood.
He follows me about a breath later. His whole body shudders against mine. He buries his face in the curve of my neck and makes a sound that is something close to my name and something close to a word in a language I don't know.
We stay there afterward.
Just stay. Pressed together against the wall.
Breathing. His forehead on my shoulder, his arms around my back, my hands still on him.
The temperature of his skin is up half a degree from when we started.
Mine is too. We're slick and warm and slightly steaming, the way two bodies after this kind of work always are, and I run my scarred palm down his scarred side from shoulder to hip and I feel him shiver against me.
He raises his head.
He looks at me. The amber eyes are different now. Looser. Some part of him that I've watched be held tight for three days has finally let go.
"You didn't flinch," he says. Very quietly.
"I never was going to."
He almost smiles. The almost makes it across both halves of his face this time, almost a whole smile, almost a real one.
"Stay," he says.
"I'm here."
"I mean tonight. In the cabin. Stay."
"Yes."
We get dressed slowly. We don't talk much. He takes my hand on the walk down the hill. The night is cool. His hand is hot. The contrast is the most alive thing I've felt since the day I dragged Rodriguez out of the fire, and this time, the heat is something I'm walking toward.
I came here to find a killer.
I found the fire itself, and it doesn't burn.
It warms.