17. Emilia #2
His hand closes around mine. Engulfs it completely. His throat bobs and he looks out the window at the darkening desert for a long moment and when he looks back his eyes are clear. Certain. The last shadow of doubt burned out of them like fog under direct sun.
He lifts my hand to his mouth. Presses his lips against my knuckles. Holds there.
Darlene brings the food. We eat.
Then we point north again. Toward Colorado. Toward home.
Justice shoulders the door open and the darkness swallows him whole.
I stand on the porch, breathing. The air is so clean it hurts.
So thin and sharp and alive that my lungs ache with the sudden absence of smog and exhaust and the particular staleness of a Beverly Hills mansion sealed airtight against the outside world.
Stars. Thousands of them. Millions. A sky so dense with light it looks like someone punched holes through black fabric and pressed their eye to each one.
I'm home.
The word doesn't catch in my throat anymore. Doesn't feel borrowed or presumptuous or conditional. It sits in my heart like a stone that's been there all along, waiting for me to notice its weight.
Inside, Justice moves through the dark with the ease of a man who knows every square inch of his territory by muscle memory. The scratch of a match. The soft whump of kindling catching. Then the stove door clangs shut and warmth starts bleeding into the room, slow and amber and real.
He finds me still standing on the porch.
"You coming in?"
I look up at the sky one more time. Then I walk inside and close the door behind me.
He's crouched by the stove, feeding it split logs from the iron rack.
Firelight catches the planes of his face, the hard ridge of his brow, the dark hair falling across his forehead.
His jacket is already off. Just a thermal henley stretched across those impossible shoulders, the fabric pulling at the seams every time he reaches for another log.
I cross the room. He hears me. Of course he hears me.
This man can hear a deer step on a twig two hundred yards away in a snowstorm.
He straightens and turns and I walk directly into him.
body to body. My arms around his waist. My face pressed into the hollow of his throat where his pulse beats slow and steady against my lips.
His arms come around me. Not crushing. Not desperate. Just complete. The circle closing.
We stand like that for a long time. The stove ticking as it heats. The cabin walls creaking in the mountain wind. His heartbeat against my cheek.
Then I tip my head back and look up at him, and whatever he sees in my face makes his breath catch.
A small, involuntary hitch in that massive body.
His hand comes up and cups my jaw. Thumb brushing across my cheekbone.
Those blue eyes searching mine with a question he's too stubborn to ask out loud.
I answer it by pulling his mouth down to mine.
This kiss is different from all the others.
No urgency. No fear. No ticking clock or crackling radio or smoke seeping through floorboards.
No adrenaline sharpening every nerve into a blade.
Just his mouth and mine and the quiet, unhurried certainty that we have time.
Oceans of it. An entire mountain's worth of mornings and evenings stretching out ahead of us with nothing to run from.
He lifts me. My legs wrap around his waist. He carries me through the cabin like I'm something sacred, one arm banded beneath me, the other hand still cradling my face.
His lips never leave mine. Not when he turns sideways to fit us both through the bedroom doorway.
Not when his knee hits the mattress. Not when he lowers me down onto sheets that smell like cedar and cold air and him.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. Sprawled in his bed. In his shirt. On his mountain. The firelight from the main room throws long gold shadows through the open doorway and paints stripes across the quilt and across my skin where the flannel has fallen open.
His hands find the buttons. Slow. One at a time.
Each one a deliberate act of reverence, his rough fingers working the small discs through their holes with a patience that would seem impossible in hands that large if I hadn't already seen those same hands sketch a mountain ridge in microscopic detail.
He spreads the flannel open. Presses his palm flat against my sternum. Holds it there, feeling my heart slam against his hand.
"Justice."
His name in my mouth makes his eyes close. Just for a second. A flicker of something so vulnerable it almost doesn't belong on a face that hard. Then they open and they're blazing.
He lowers his head. His mouth finds my collarbone.
The hollow of my throat. The space between my breasts where my heart is loudest. He maps me with his lips the way he maps the mountains with his charcoal.
Every detail cataloged. Every contour committed to memory.
He traces the line of my ribs with his tongue and I arch off the bed and his arm pins me gently back down.
"Slow."
One word. A growl against my skin. A command and a promise wrapped in a single syllable.
I grab the sheets.
He takes his time.
My shirt goes first, peeled off my shoulders with his teeth grazing the curve of one arm.
Then his mouth drops lower. His stubble rasps against the soft skin of my stomach and the sensation is so sharp, so impossibly vivid, that I gasp and his hand spreads wide across my hip to hold me still.
His thumb traces the ridge of my hipbone. His lips follow.
The sweatpants go next. His. Four sizes too large, bunched and rolled, dragged down my legs with both hands while his mouth traces the inside of my knee.
The back of my calf. The arch of my foot.
He presses his lips to my ankle and looks up at me from the foot of the bed, and the sight of this man on his knees, his blue eyes black in the low light, his hands wrapped around my leg like it's the only thing tethering him to the earth, makes something behind my ribs crack open.