Chapter 21 #2
They made camp that night in the lee of a great overhang of stone, half a day’s climb up the glowing road, high enough that the dead settlement had shrunk to a smudge far below and the cold came down hard and clean with the dark.
He built a fire from the emergency block in his pack and she cooked.
She’d stopped letting him cook the actual food after the second time he’d charred something to carbon and offered it to her with grave pride.
They ate the meal she’d made instead, huddled together under a shared thermal wrap with their backs to the warm rock.
The bright thread of the map still glowed faintly overhead, threading away up the mountain where his blood had woken it. Neither of them spoke of what waited at the end of it. There’d be time for that tomorrow.
Tonight there was only the fire, and the cold at their backs held off by warm stone, and the way he kept looking at her.
“You’ve got that look,” she said, licking the last of the meal off her thumb.
“What look?”
“The four-words-of-feelings look. It’s very intense. It makes people nervous.”
“You’re not nervous.”
“No.” She turned to face him, and the firelight moved across all that fierce battered beauty, and her heart did the thing it had started doing lately, the swooping helpless thing she was still learning to live with. “I’m not.”
He reached over and pulled her, wrap and all, straight into his lap, one huge arm scooping her up like she weighed nothing, and she yelped and then laughed, sprawled across three hundred pounds of warrior with her hands braced on his chest and her hair coming loose around them both.
“That’s cheating,” she informed him. “You can’t win an argument by just picking me up.”
“I won.”
“You did not—” But he’d found the sensitive spot under her jaw with his mouth, and whatever she’d been about to say dissolved into a shiver. The rare, quiet curve of his smile pressed against her skin, and she gave up on winning anything at all.
It was different up here than it had been on the ship.
On the ship there’d been the weight of the search hanging over them, the not-knowing.
Tonight, at the mouth of the very thing he’d hunted his whole life, there was a kind of lightness.
It was as if, having finally found the road, he could set the whole crushing burden of the search down for one night and simply be.
He laughed—actually laughed, low and rough and rare—when she squirmed to get her cold hands under his shirt and he flinched at the temperature.
He tossed her down onto the padded bedroll and pinned her wrists in one enormous hand and looked down at her with his silver eyes bright and playful and hungry, and she arched up and bit his lip, and the playfulness caught fire between them the way it always did.
He undressed her slowly, careful of the cold, tucking the thermal wrap around them both so the only cold she felt was the first shock of night air on her skin before his heat swallowed it.
His hands moved over her, huge and reverent, mapping her the way he’d mapped her many times now and still seemed to marvel at, as if he couldn’t believe she was real, couldn’t believe she was his, and couldn’t believe the road had led him here.
She laughed against his mouth, and gasped into his shoulder, and dug her fingers into the vast muscles of his back and pulled him down.
He came to her with all that terrible strength gentled down to nothing, moving slow and deep and shaking, watching her face the whole time in the firelight as if it were the only map he cared about reading.
And somewhere in the middle of it—somewhere between his name torn from her lips and the low rumble of her own that answered from deep in his chest—the thought arrived, whole and quiet and undeniable, the way the truest things always arrived.
I love him.
Not I want him, which she’d known for weeks.
Not I need him, which frightened her too much to look at straight.
I love him. This enormous, silent, dangerous, gentle male who caught her when she jumped and stood between her and every shadow and cooked terribly and said everything with four words and his hands.
She loved him with a completeness that should have terrified her and instead felt like the ground under her feet.
She almost said it.
It rose right up to her lips, there in the dark with him moving inside her and the firelight gilding them both—I love you—and she caught it, and held it, and let it dissolve unspoken into a cry against his throat instead.
Not because it wasn’t true. Because it was.
But because tomorrow they’d walk up that glowing road towards a whole hidden world of his own people.
A road that might lead towards his mother and the answer to the oldest question of his life, and towards the very real possibility that at the end of it he would find somewhere he finally, fully belonged.
And she wanted him to walk that road freely.
She wanted him free to choose, free of any weight she’d hung around his neck or any guilt about the human woman waiting for him back at the fire.
He’d spent his whole life having other people decide who he was.
She knew exactly what that theft felt like.
She would not commit it against the person she loved.
So she’d carry the love for now, silently, the way he carried so much.
She’d hold it and keep it and let him make his own choice at the end of the road with clean hands and an open heart, and if he chose her after all, then she’d say it, and mean it, and know it was true because he’d been free when he chose.
Afterwards he gathered her against his chest under the wrap, the fire ticking down to embers, the cold pressing at the edges of their warmth and losing.
He tucked her into the curve of his enormous body the way he did every night now.
She lay with her cheek over his heart and felt it slow, and felt his breath deepen.
And she looked up past his shoulder at the single bright thread of his people’s map still glowing faintly in the dark, running up the mountain towards everything he’d ever wanted.
I love you, she thought again, and pressed the words into his skin with her lips where he’d never feel them.
Whatever you find up there. I love you. Go free.
Then, high in the cold and the dark with the road waiting above them, she slept.