7. Stormy
Stormy
Two days.
That is how long I sit with it, turning it over, waiting for the horror to arrive.
I know what he did. I knew it the moment he came out of that shower with his hands scrubbed to the wrist. I have known men who killed people and I know exactly what the aftermath looks like on a body, and it was all over him, and he did not offer me one syllable of explanation because he had already decided that the cost of it was his to carry alone.
The horror does not come.
I keep checking for it, the way you probe a tooth. I go looking for the part of me that should be running for the gate, the part that knows the difference between a good man and a monster, and what I find instead is this.
Somewhere out there in the dark there were two men carrying a printed photograph of my face, and there was a price on it, and they were going to keep going house to house in this county until they found me.
And now they never will. That is the entire truth of it.
He walked out into an alley in the middle of a Thursday afternoon and he ended the search, and then he came inside and washed his hands and ate the dinner I put in front of him and slept on the concrete floor nine feet away from a heater he gave me.
Every man in the last eleven weeks used his hands on me to take something.
This one uses his to take things away from the world before they can reach me. And then he sleeps on the floor.
On the second night I lie awake in the dark and I listen to him breathing and I understand what has actually happened to me, and it is so much bigger than gratitude that I have to sit up.
They took my body. That is the flat fact of it, and I have been walking around inside it since like a house after a fire, checking which rooms still hold weight.
And in every version of the future I let myself imagine, I never wanted anyone in it again.
That felt like the terms of the deal. You get to live, you get to be safe, and the rest is burned.
I do not want those terms.
I want my hands back. I want my skin back.
I want to know what it is like to be touched by somebody because I said so, because I walked across a room in the dark and chose it with my whole intact mind, and I want it to be him, and I do not care one single bit that his hands have blood in the creases.
I want it to be him because his hands have blood in the creases.
I get up.
The concrete is cold under my bare feet. Nine steps. I count them.
He is awake before I have taken three. I hear the change in his breathing.
"Stormy."
"Don't."
"You're on the floor with me."
"I know where I am."
I kneel down beside him. My eyes have adjusted enough to find the shape of him, the huge dark bulk of his shoulder, the pale glint where he is looking up at me.
He has gone completely rigid, and I have learned this man well enough now to know that it is the same stillness he used the first night, the deliberate kind, the kind that costs him.
I put my hand on his sternum.
The sound he makes is barely a sound at all.
"Stop," he says.
"No."
"Stormy." His hand comes up and closes around my wrist and it is so gentle it makes my eyes burn.
"You don't owe me this. There is no version of this where you owe me this.
You put your hand there because I did something in an alley and now your head is telling you that's how you square it, and I will get up and walk into the snow before I let you square anything with me. "
"Is that what you think this is."
"I think you've been in a locked building with the only man who's been kind to you in three months. That's a chemistry problem. It isn't a choice."
"You want to talk to me about choices?" I lean down over him.
"You gave me a bolt on the inside of a door the first night.
You gave me a phone with your number in it.
You gave me a key to your own building. You have never once touched me without saying out loud exactly where your hands were going to go, and you have never once looked at me longer than two seconds because you decided I couldn't afford it.
" My hand is shaking on him and I do not care.
"You have spent a month building a room I can choose things in.
So don't you dare lie there and tell me I can't choose. "
He does not answer.
"I'm choosing," I say. "Say no if it's a no. But do not say it for me."
He sits up.
He does it slowly, and it brings his face six inches from mine, and for the first time since the night in the snow he looks at me and does not stop looking.
Full weight. All of it. I have been on the receiving end of every ugly kind of male attention there is, and this is nothing like any of them, and my whole body understands it before my brain does.
"If we do this," he says, low, and the rasp of it goes down my spine, "you understand what you're taking on. I'm not a good man. I don't get better. What I did Thursday I'll do again on Friday and twice on Saturday and I won't lose an hour of sleep."
"I know."
"And if you ever want out, you get out. Gate opens. I put you in a car myself."
"I know that too."
"Say it back to me."
"The gate opens." My hands find his shoulders. "It's the only reason I'm here."
He makes a sound down in his sternum like something structural giving way, and then his hand comes up and cradles my jaw, and his thumb strokes once across my cheekbone, and I lean into it so hard I might be trying to get through it.
"Bed," he says. "Concrete's forty degrees and I'm not doing this to you on a shop floor."
"Then move."
He stands up with me in his arms like I weigh nothing, and I put my mouth against the ink on his throat because I have wanted to for two weeks, and the noise he makes then is not quiet at all.
He lays me down on the cot and comes over me on one elbow, and it should be frightening, all that weight above me in the dark, and instead something in my ribs unlocks.
He kisses me for what feels like an hour before he does anything else.
Just that, one hand in my hair, the other braced beside my head, and he kisses me like he has been rationing himself for a month and the ration ended.
His beard scratches. He tastes like coffee and cold air.
Every time I make a sound he answers it low in his throat.
"Tell me where," he says against my mouth. "Every time. I'll ask every time until you tell me to stop asking."
"Everywhere. I want everywhere."
He takes my shirt off slowly, and there is a moment when the cold hits my skin and my hands go up on instinct to cover the bruises I still have, the yellow-green ghosts of them across my ribs and hips.
He catches my wrists. He moves them apart, gentle, and holds them down on the mattress on either side of my head, and he looks at every mark on me one at a time.
Then he starts putting his mouth on them.
Each one. The ribs, the hip, the inside of the elbow where the needle went in the second week, the wide bands on my wrists that will scar.
He works down my body with his mouth and his beard and his ruined enormous hands and he does not skip a single one, and by the time he reaches the last of them I am shaking so hard the cot frame is knocking against the wall and I have both hands fisted in the back of his neck.
"You're not damaged goods," he says against my hipbone. "You hear me. You're the only clean thing that's ever been in this building."
I try to say his name and it comes out as nothing.
He strips my sweats off and pushes my knees wide with both hands and puts his mouth on my clit, and I nearly come off the cot.
He pins my hips with one forearm and holds me there and takes his time about it, and it is thorough and unhurried and absolutely filthy, and he keeps making that low sound against me that I can feel all the way up through my stomach.
I get a fistful of the blanket. I get my heel against his shoulder.
When it hits me it hits like the building coming down, and I am loud, and I have not been loud in three months, and he holds me through all of it and does not stop until I push at his head.
Then he comes up over me and kisses me with my own taste in his mouth, and I get my hands under his shirt and drag it off him and there is so much of him, scarred and hot and solid, and I run my palms up over all of it and he shudders like a struck engine.
"Now," I tell him.
"You're sure."
"Claw."
"Say it once more."
"I want your cock in me. I'm choosing it. Right now."
He gets a hand under my thigh and hitches it up around his hip and works his cock into me slow, so slow, reading my face the entire time and stopping twice when my breath catches, and when he is all the way in he holds still and puts his forehead down against mine and neither of us moves for ten whole seconds.
"Okay?"
"Move."
He moves.
It is not gentle after that and I do not want it to be.
He gets an arm under my back and hauls me up into him and sets a rhythm that drives the air out of me, and his hand comes up and closes around the back of my neck, holding me exactly where he wants me, and the possessiveness of it should light every alarm I own.
It lights something else entirely. He says my name into my hair like a man swearing an oath.
He tells me I am his. He tells me nothing in this world is ever getting near me again, that they would have to come through him and there is no through him, and I believe every word because I have seen the proof of it hosed off gravel behind this building.
I come again with my nails down his back and his hand spanning my throat with no pressure in it at all, just there, just holding, and that is what does it, the sheer restraint of all that strength deciding to be careful.
He follows me over a moment later with a groan torn out of somewhere deep, and he holds himself off me on one shaking arm even then, even wrecked, so his weight will not land wrong.
Afterward he pulls the blanket up over both of us and puts his shoulders into the corner with me between him and the door, and he keeps one hand splayed across my stomach.
"You're not sleeping on the floor anymore," I tell him.
His breath moves my hair.
"No," he says. "I don't guess I am."