4. CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
She woke in the night to the sound of weather and the specific awareness of not being alone.
He was in the chair with his jacket across him, asleep in the way of someone who could sleep anywhere and wake immediately if required.
She had been watched over by practiced sleepers before: field guides, expedition leaders, a medic in BC after the mountain lion who had the same quality of rest-without-absence. She found she was not unnerved by it.
She lay still and listened to the weather and ran a body inventory. Ribs: present, manageable, not escalated. Shoulder: the specific deep ache of properly closed tissue. Left arm: fine. Head: clear.
She had been photographing large predators for six years and this was the second time she had ended the day on a cot in a field shelter with someone's hands having closed what the predator opened.
The first time she had felt humiliated by it.
The smallness of her body against what the mountain had to offer.
She did not feel that now.
She felt his hands on her ribs in the careful pressure sequence. She felt the specific attention with which he had zipped her camera bags. She felt the green of his eyes when they came to her face the way they came to an injury: reading the structure underneath.
She got up slowly. The ribs negotiated. She made it to the camp table.
He was awake.
Not startled, not coming out of sleep. Just: present, his eyes on her.
"Inventory," she said. "Ribs stable. Shoulder ache. Lungs clear."
"Good." He did not move from the chair. He was watching her the way he watched things: not intrusively, attentively. Reading.
She sat down at the table.
"You are uncomfortable," he said.
"I am fine."
"You are uncomfortable with being cared for," he said.
She held the accuracy of that for a moment. "I did not say that."
"You did not have to." He shifted in the chair. "I have been watching you decide what to do with every assessment I have run on you. You accept the information. You resist the care."
She thought about the mountain lion medic in BC, who had been kind and competent and whom she had made herself stop thinking about as soon as she was mobile enough to leave. She thought about the pattern.
"I am going to be mobile tomorrow," she said. "I will walk out and you will go back to your rotation and this will be filed as a backcountry incident."
"Yes," he said. "That is what will happen."
She looked at him.
"You do not want that," she said.
He held her eyes. "No."
She sat with that. She sat with a man who had told the entire truth in one syllable and was not going to do anything about it unless she did.
She crossed the two feet between the table and the chair. She put her hand on his jaw, which was rough with two days of something, and he went entirely still under her hand the way he went still when he was containing something.
"You are injured," he said.
"I know what I am," she said. "I have been inventorying all night."
"Your shoulder."
"Is on the right side of my body from your perspective and you can avoid it."
His hands came up to her hips. Careful. Learning the situation. She moved into the space between the chair's arms and his body and his hands tightened on her hips with that same contained quality, the thing behind the composure that he kept at one remove.
"Wren," he said.
"I know," she said, and kissed him.
He kissed her back with more than she had expected, which recalibrated something.
She had expected careful and gotten thorough: his mouth covering hers with a steadiness that was not restraint but intention, like he had thought about this and was doing it exactly as considered.
His hands moved at her back, pressing her in.
She felt the warmth of his chest through his shirt.
She pulled back a fraction. His eyes on her face, running the assessment.
"Your ribs," he said.
"Are manageable." She put her hands on his chest. Under the shirt. Warm skin, the flat muscle of him. He breathed out. "You are doing the thing where you know what you want and you are waiting for me to confirm it is okay."
"Yes," he said.
"It is okay," she said. "More than okay."
He stood, keeping her against him, and moved them the two steps to the cot with the care of someone who understood the architecture of her injuries and was working around it. He laid her on her right side, her good shoulder down, and stretched out facing her. Not over her. Alongside.
His hands were warm on her face. He kissed her again and took his time about it and she put her hand on his chest and felt his heart, quicker than his composure suggested.
"You are not calm," she said against his mouth.
"No," he said.
He worked her shirt up slowly and his hands spread across the skin of her waist, her stomach, reading what was there the same way he had read her ribs, but this time what he found made his breath change.
He traced the edge of her bra and she unclasped it and he pulled it away and looked at her in the dark and the quality of his attention was the same as it had been on the trail: the thing worth knowing, taken seriously.
He put his mouth on her breast. She arched toward him and gripped his shoulder and heard him make a low sound against her skin. His thumb traced her other nipple and the sensation drew in a straight line downward. He spent time. Patient, exact, learning her responses the way he learned everything.
His hand went to the waistband of her pants. He looked at her.
"Tell me if anything hurts," he said.
"Anything that hurts, I will tell you," she said. "Everything else, keep going."
He got her pants off, working around the cracked rib with a care that was also, she discovered, arousing.
The attention. The methodical reading of what her body could take.
He ran his hand up the inside of her thigh and she opened for him and his fingers found her wet and ready and the sound that came out of him was fractured and real.
"Wren."
She reached for him. Got his shirt off. Put her hands on his chest, his stomach, his belt, working it open. He watched her do it, his jaw tight.
"You are sure," he said.
She wrapped her hand around his cock. He went very still, the full contained quality of him suspended. "I am very sure," she said.
He put his hand on her hip, his palm warm through the fabric. She pushed into it.
"Your ribs," he said again, but it was less a concern and more a reminder that he had noted the situation.
"Boone," she said. "My ribs have been noted. You may move on."
He moved on.
His mouth was on her throat and she felt him work his way down with the same attention he gave everything, unhurried, thorough.
He got her shirt off over the good shoulder and then the injured one, carefully, and when she was bare from the waist up he leaned back and looked at her in the shelter's thin light with the same quality of assessment he had given the corridor photographs: something worth knowing, taken seriously.
He covered her breast with his mouth and his tongue moved over her nipple and she arched into him and said something that was not a complete word.
His hand slid to her other breast and his thumb circled her nipple and she felt the current of it run through her center.
He did not rush. He was building something and he was going to build it at his own pace.
She got her hands in his hair.
He kissed down her ribs, working around the third one with a precision that was its own form of intimacy, and got her pants off and then her underwear, and she was bare on the cot in the dark and he was looking at her again with that full inventory quality and she did not cover herself. She let him look. She watched him look.
He put his mouth on her pussy.
The sound she made was not organized. He found her clit with the directness of someone who was going to be specific about this, and his tongue moved in slow circles that built the sensation rather than chased it.
She gripped the edge of the cot. She felt the warmth of his hands at her hips, steadying her, keeping her where he wanted her.
He slid two fingers inside her. Found the place on the first try. She cried out and her whole body tightened and he kept his mouth working her clit while his fingers curled inside her and she was shaking and saying things she was not monitoring.
"Boone. Boone."
He did not change the rhythm. He held the pressure exactly where it was working and she felt the orgasm build from the base of her spine upward, tightening, and when it hit she said his name clearly and her thighs clenched around him and he rode it out until she pulled him up by the shoulders.
He came up her body. She got his pants open. She wrapped her hand around his cock and he shuddered, his forehead dropping to her shoulder. She stroked him and felt his breath go ragged.
"Wren." Her name, completely undone.
He pushed into her slowly and she took him and pulled him deeper. He held himself still above her until she breathed out and her hips lifted. Then he moved.
His thumb found her clit again while he was inside her and she felt the compound sensation draw every nerve together. He worked her steadily, watching her face in the dark, and she kept her eyes on his and showed him everything.
She came a second time, harder, her whole body wrung out, and he followed: his rhythm breaking, the shudder of him, a low sound pressed against her throat.
He moved off her carefully, to the side. His arm went around her waist from behind, her good side. His hand spread warm and flat on her stomach.
She listened to the weather. She listened to his breathing slow.
"Your ribs," he said.
"Present," she said. "Acceptable."
His thumb moved in a small circle on her hip.
"Boone," she said.
"Here," he said.
She thought about rooms. She thought about reliability. She thought about a man who had gone to look at the bears and noted the radio collar coordination gap and packed her camera bags correctly in the dark.
She sat with the quiet of the shelter. She thought about the station three and a half hours away.
She thought about the team he had described: Colt who had built it from a gap he refused to accept, Sawyer who read the range by feel, Knox and his Malinois, Reid who kept coming back.
She thought about what a team like that said about the person who had assembled it and maintained it and called it we when describing the thing he had clearly been central to building.
She thought about we as a concept. She thought about how long it had been since she had used it.
The light shifted and she picked up the camera and shot the shift and did not think about it anymore.
She let his arm be warm around her and listened to the weather. She had twelve years of practice at not looking away. She did not look away.