Chapter 30 #2
"After everything they did to you. Everything they took.
" I hold his gaze. "You're still here. And you're…
Rhys. You're still kind. You notice things.
You bring me water and blankets and you make yourself smaller so I won't be afraid of you.
You held Finn's arm on the stairs and I've watched you with this pack and you love them.
" My voice has gone rough somewhere in the middle of that.
"They didn't take that from you. After all of it, they didn't take your ability to love. "
His expression does the thing it does when he's feeling more than he can move through quickly.
I don't know what compels me.
It's not the scent match. I can’t even recognize the match in him.
I've thought about that. How his scent calms me anyway, how his purr reaches parts of me that nothing else can touch.
And I know that's real, but this isn't that.
This is simpler than that. More complete.
This is me looking at a man who threw a fight because he'd stopped wanting to live and somehow made it to a cabin in the woods where someone who was also trying to disappear found him worth looking for.
I reach up and I kiss him.
Full and soft and unhurried, my hand against his jaw, feeling the ridge of scar tissue under my palm and my lips.
He goes still—that familiar pause, his body needing a moment to understand that this is allowed—and then he kisses me back and it's nothing like I expected it to be. It’s not careful or tentative.
It’s deep and real. His hands come up to frame my face like he’s afraid I might disappear.
It turns warm fast.
The warmth turns into want.
I pull back just enough to reach the hem of his shirt and he lets me take it off, lifts slightly to help, and then he's bare from the waist up. I sit back and look at him.
His chest and stomach are a map of what they did to him. The scars on his face continue down. Across his collar, over his ribs, along his side. Some thin and white and old. Some wider, the kind that come from something more deliberate. All of them raised against his skin, pale against the tan.
He watches my face. He’s waiting for the thing that always comes. I can feel him waiting for it, that bracing quality, the expectation of recoil.
I lean down and press my lips to the scar that runs along his collarbone.
He goes absolutely still.
I move to the next one. A wide diagonal across his ribs, and I trace it with my mouth, feel the raised edge of it against my lips. He makes a sound low in his chest—not the purr, something quieter than that. Something that doesn't have a name.
I keep going. Slowly. Every scar I can reach.
The ones on his chest, the ones on his stomach.
I kiss each one like it's something that deserves to be acknowledged rather than hidden, something that's part of him rather than something done to him.
His breath is coming differently now. Uneven.
His hands hover without landing, like he doesn't know what to do with them, and I reach up and take one and press it to my hair and feel him exhale slowly.
"You're beautiful," I say against his skin.
"Vee—"
"You are." I look up at him. His eyes are very dark and very intent and they're unguarded in a way I don't think he lets people see often. "Every part of you. All of it."
He makes a sound that might be my name and pulls me up toward him and then his mouth is on mine again and this time there's nothing tentative in it at all.
We rearrange ourselves. His hands are careful.
Always careful, always precisely aware of the size difference, always making sure I have room to move, to choose, to stop.
I don't want to stop. I tug at the rest of our clothes until there's nothing between us and I feel him against me, warm and present and exactly as significant as the shirts suggested he might be, and I take a moment to appreciate that information.
"Okay?" he asks in a rough voice.
"Very okay," I say.
I rise up over him and he holds my hips, always carefully, as I guide him and sink down slowly. The stretch is significant and I take my time with it, feeling his hands flex against my hips and hearing the breath leave him in a long unsteady exhale.
When I'm fully seated we both stay still.
He looks up at me with an expression I've never seen on him before. Wide open. Unguarded in a way that I think might be entirely new territory for him, like he's never been here—not this exposed or this safe—and his body doesn't have a protocol for it yet.
I lean down and press my forehead to his.
"I've got you," I say.
His face breaks open.
Then I start to move.
His purr starts almost immediately—that stuttering depth that moves through his chest and mine and into the places in me that have been waiting for exactly this.
His hands don't grip, they hold, a distinction I feel completely.
One at my hip and one spread wide against my lower back, steadying without controlling, present without demanding.
I set the pace. Slow at first, learning the feel of him, the particular way we fit together.
He watches me with those dark warm eyes that miss nothing, tracking every shift of expression, and when I find the angle that makes me gasp his hands tighten fractionally and he files it away like everything else he notices.
I move faster.
His purr deepens into something rougher and his hips begin to meet mine and the combination of that and the sound he makes when I lean down to bite his shoulder tips me over an edge I didn't see coming.
I come with my face pressed into his neck and his arms locked around me. His name escapes my mouth.
He follows close behind. His knot swells inside and a low sound tears out of him, his whole body going rigid.
My body opens for it on instinct and when it locks us together the feeling that moves through me isn't just physical.
It's the particular relief of finally. My omega goes absolutely quiet—not suppressed or sedated.
Just satisfied in a way that has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the specific man whose arms are around me.
We're locked together and I don’t want to be anywhere else right now.
He pulls me down against his chest, both arms around me now, his chin on my head. His purr has drifted into something steadier. The broken stutter is still there but it's rhythmic now, like it's found a pattern.
I listen to his heartbeat.
"Rhys," I say.
"Mm."
"Thank you. For telling me."
A pause.
"Thank you," he says. "For asking."
His arms tighten slightly.
Outside the window the last of the light is going. The cabin is quiet. Somewhere downstairs I can hear the low sounds of the pack existing. Finn's voice, a cabinet closing, the particular creak of the third stair that I've memorized without meaning to.
Home, my omega says.
I close my eyes and let it be true.