Chapter 6
BOULDER
When the sky starts going gray at the window, she wakes.
I hear her shift in the bed, then her voice, rough with sleep. "You didn't sleep at all."
"Slept plenty." A lie so bare it insults us both.
She sits up, looks at my boots planted in the exact spot they've been since midnight, and her face goes hard in a way I haven't seen on her yet. "You've been standing in that doorway all night like I'm a job you can't clock out of."
"That's not what this is."
"Isn't it? Feed her, guard her, don't let anything touch her, pay off whatever you think you owe a dead man." Her voice cracks on dead man and she pushes through it anyway. "I heard you say it. Wade's girl. Your responsibility. Am I a debt, Boulder? Am I a bill you're working off?"
"I never said you were."
"You didn't have to say it." She's out of the bed now, blanket forgotten, standing close enough that I have to look down to hold her eyes.
"I don't even know how to say this right.
" Her chin comes up anyway. "I think you want me.
And I think guarding me is how you get out of looking at that.
So tell me I'm reading it wrong. The blanket last night.
The heater fan nobody asked you to fix. Men don't do that for a bill. "
"You don't know what I want."
"Then tell me." Flat hand comes up against my chest, not pushing, resting there like she's checking for something underneath.
"And stop deciding what I can carry. I buried your brother who was my whole family three weeks ago.
I can carry more than you think, and I'm done being handled like I can't."
"You want the truth; here it is." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "I've spent two days telling myself you're Wade's girl, not mine to want, just mine to keep safe. That's easier to live with than the other thing."
"What's the other thing?"
"If I touch you," I say, low, "it's not because Wade sent you here.
It's not because I owe him. It's because I've wanted to since you called out my name in a room full of my own men and I went stupid standing there.
" The truth of it isn't easy to hand over.
"That scares me worse than the Hounds ever could. "
Neither of us moves for a minute. Behind her, dawn's light through the window.
Her hand doesn't move off my chest. "Good scared or bad scared?"
I don't answer with words. I answer by finally doing the thing I've been standing in this doorway all night talking myself out of.
I kiss her.
The kiss starts careful, restrained, both of us testing whether this is a thing we're actually allowed to want. It doesn't stay careful long. Her hands find the front of my shirt and pull, and I finally let go.
Three steps and the backs of her knees hit the bed. She pulls me down with her, breath coming fast, and I go slow on purpose, one hand at her hip, the other braced by her head, holding my weight off her so she keeps every inch of room to change her mind.
"You with me?" I ask against her jaw. I need to hear it even though her hands haven't stopped pulling me closer.
"Yes." No hesitation in it. "Boulder. God, yes."
So I finally let myself have what I've been rationing since the Hollow. Her mouth, the corner of it, the line of her jaw, the warm place under her ear that makes her breath go ragged, while she says my name like she's testing whether it still means the same thing it did an hour ago.
Her fingers find the top button of her own shirt and work it loose. Braver than I've ever had to be about anything, and that's exactly why my hand closes over hers, stopping it there.
"Not tonight."
Two words, and I barely get them out.
I do the button back up myself. It takes me longer than it should, because my hands have gone about as steady as a first kick on a cold morning. She watches me fumble it and doesn't laugh.
"Say it," she says, reading me right even now. "Whatever's stopping you. Say it."
"You've never done this before." Not a question. Somehow I know. "And I haven't squared what I owe my brother yet. I'm not taking everything from you before I've earned any of it. When it happens, you get all of me. Not half a man still paying his brother back in the dark."
"When," she repeats, quiet. Holding me to the word.
"When."
She doesn't argue past that. She looks at me a long moment, and whatever she finds in my face must square with the word, because the fight goes out of her shoulders.
I take her hands instead, because that's where I started the first night without her knowing it.
I kiss the nicked knuckles. The old burn scar along her thumb.
The calluses Wade's engines built into her palms. She goes still, then soft, and when I glance up her eyes are wet and she's smiling, both at once, and nobody in my life has ever looked at me like that.
"You keep doing that," she whispers, "and I'm going to stop being patient about when."
"That's the risk I'm taking."
I work my boots off one-handed, because letting go of her doesn't seem to be a thing I do anymore, and stretch out on top of the quilt.
She fits herself against my side like she's done it all her life, head on my chest, one knee hooked across mine, her fingers moving slow through my hair like she's got nowhere else on earth to be.
"Boulder's my road name," I say into the quiet, because she's earned the rest of it and I've been a coward about handing it over. "My name's Cole. Wade's the last one who ever used it. Not anybody else left standing. Just him."
She goes still under my hand.
"Cole." She says it careful, then again, easier. "Cole."
I pull her closer, my hand finding hers. For the first time since I walked back onto this land, the house around us doesn't feel like a grave.
Somewhere past sunrise, with her breath gone slow and even against my collarbone, I quit fighting it and let sleep take me too. And strangely, it comes easy.