Chapter 27 - Zara #3
He doesn't change rhythm, doesn't speed up or slow down. Just keeps me balanced on that knife's edge between pleasure and something too vast to name. His free hand strokes my hip, my ribs, the underside of my breast. Grounding touches that say I have you.
I look down at him, his dark lashes fanning against his cheeks, the glisten of my arousal on his lips, and the vines tattooed around his throat that seem to cinch tighter with every breath he takes.
“You're beautiful,” I whisper.
His eyes open to find mine. And in them I see my own reflection—not as I've been, broken and guarded, but as he sees me. Whole and worthy, safe enough to unravel completely.
He pulls back just far enough to speak. “You're everything.”
Then his mouth is on me again, and I shatter.
I come apart like a sigh—gradual and complete—my body surrendering to wave after wave of sensation that radiate from where his tongue still strokes me through it. My fingers fist in his hair. A sob catches in my throat.
He doesn't stop.
He guides me down, gentling his touch until I'm trembling with oversensitivity, and only then does he press one final kiss to my center and climb back up my body.
His face hovers above mine. Lips slick, eyes dark and infinite.
“I love you,” I say, and my voice sounds wrecked in the best way.
He brushes hair from my damp forehead. “And I you.”
Then he's gathering me against his chest, rolling onto his side so we're face to face.
His arms wrap around me—one beneath my head, the other draped over my waist—and I tuck myself into the hollow of his throat.
The vines there press against my cheek. A reminder of everything he's survived. Everything we've survived.
My turn.
I push him back against the pillows, and he lets me.
This man who could overpower anyone in a heartbeat goes willingly, watching me with those dark eyes.
The vines on his neck seem to pulse with his heartbeat.
I trace them with my tongue, and he groans—a broken, desperate sound that I drink down like water.
“You're everything,” I tell him, and I mean it. Every scar, every tattoo, every lethal inch of him. He's my everything.
I hold his erect length in my hand, sinking down onto him slowly. The stretch is exquisite—that first joining that feels like coming home. My body opens to his, and we both freeze for a moment, foreheads pressed together, sharing the same breath.
“Okay?” he asks, and his voice is strangled.
“More than okay.”
I start to move. The rhythm finds us naturally, an unhurried rocking that builds and recedes like a tide. He fills me completely, and each stroke sends sensation radiating outward—through my belly, down my thighs, up my spine. His hands span my waist, not controlling, just holding, anchoring.
“I thought about this,” he says, voice ragged. “Every night, when we were working together. I thought about you like this.”
“Me too.” The confession comes out on a gasp as he shifts his hips, finding a deeper angle. “God, me too.”
The pleasure spirals, layer upon layer, but it's more than physical. Every touch is a promise. Every gasp and moan is a release of all the fear we've been carrying. His name falls from my lips like a chant, and he answers with mine—Zara, Zara, Zara—his voice breaking on the second syllable.
I can feel him starting to unravel beneath me, his grip tightening on my hips, his rhythm faltering.
“Come with me,” I pant.
He nods, eyes locked on mine, and I feel him surrender to it just as I do—the climax rushing through us like a tide that can't be stopped. I clench around him, and he cries out, and for a long, suspended moment there's nothing in the world but the two of us, tangled and shaking and whole.
Afterward, we lie wrapped together in his bed, the sheets kicked somewhere to the floor. My head rests on his chest, and his fingers trace lazy patterns on my shoulder. The ink on his skin rises and falls with his breathing.
“There's still so much to deal with,” I murmur.
“We’ll get to it.”
“We will but—”
His arm tightens around me. “Right now, we're safe. You're safe.” He presses a kiss to the top of my head. “That's all that matters.”
He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and his knuckle grazes my cheekbone. “I know the timing is insane. I know we just survived something that could have killed us. But that's exactly why.”
I close my eyes and let myself believe him. The past three weeks have hollowed us out. But here, skin to skin, in the quiet of this room, we're starting to fill those hollows back in.
Tonight we did not reach for each other across a distance, or burn off tension, or find each other in the dark after something terrible. Tonight is something simpler and heavier.
Two people who have been through an enormous thing together, who have seen each other's worst and most complicated sides, who have broken things between them and rebuilt them, choosing each other with full information.
Choosing is the most intimate thing.
“Zara,” he repeats my name, lost to sleep finally. The way he says it—low, rough, like a prayer he didn't expect to be answered—it settles deep behind my ribs.
The night settles around us, and we are exactly where we are—two people who should not have worked yet have, who were built for collision and have found, somewhere in the wreckage, something that is not wreckage at all.
Lying in the dark with my head against his chest and his heartbeat under my ear, slow and steady, the most reliable sound in the room, I close my eyes.
The investigation is over. The threat is gone. My parents are alive and in a city where I can reach them, and though the fifteen years of absence is a wound that is going to take time and care and the specific, patient work of two people choosing to show up for each other, it’s not impossible.
It is a lot to hold.
But for the first time in as long as I can remember, I am not holding it alone.
This silence is nothing like the stretched-thin quiet of the past three weeks, where every creak of the floorboards meant danger and every shadow could be a threat. This is the silence of a peaceful house finally, mercifully left alone.