Chapter 6
Corbin
I heard her through the wall before I understood I was already moving.
My room at the compound shared a wall with hers — not by accident; I'd arranged it that way, told myself it was for security, the same lie I'd been telling myself about a lot of things.
I sleep light. I've slept light my whole life, the group home and then the work training it so deep into me that real rest is a country I visit rarely and never stay long.
So when the sound came through the wall — not a scream, she didn't scream, it was worse than a scream, it was the strangled, fighting sound a person makes when the nightmare has them by the throat and the body's trying to wake and can't — I was up and across the hall and at her door with my hand on the knob before my conscious mind had filed a report.
I stopped there. Hand on the knob. Because the one thing I would not do, ever, was be a man who came through a woman's door in the dark uninvited, especially this woman, especially her.
So I knocked, low and steady, and I said her name through the wood.
"Stella. It's Corbin. You're dreaming. You're at the compound. You're safe. Can I come in?"
A long ragged breath on the other side. Then, hoarse: "Yes."
She was sitting up in the bed when I came in, the blankets twisted around her, her hair loose and wild and her chest heaving like she'd run a long way.
The room was dark but the marina lights came through the window enough to see by, silver across her face, and what I saw there stopped me in the doorway.
She wasn't crying. That was the thing. A different woman, a woman who hadn't lived what she'd lived, would have been crying, and crying would have been easier to see.
Stella was past crying about Marcus. She'd cried all those tears years ago, on his schedule, and what was left now was just the raw aftermath of the fear with nowhere left to go, the body shaking off a terror the heart had already exhausted.
"Bad one," she said. Not a question. An apology, almost.
"Yeah." I came in slow and sat on the edge of the bed, careful, leaving space, the way you approach anything that's been hurt. "You don't have to tell me."
"It's always the same." Her voice was steadier than her hands.
Her hands were never steady after; I was learning her.
"It's not even him doing anything. That's the thing people don't get.
In the dream he's just — there. In the doorway.
Not moving. Just standing there in the doorway of wherever I am, and I know I can't get past him, and I know there's no point trying, and I just — wait.
I wait for him to decide what happens. That's the whole nightmare.
Waiting in a room I can't leave for a man to decide.
" She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
"Eleven years and the worst thing isn't anything he did.
It's that he taught my own body how to wait. "
I understood that to the marrow. The waiting.
I'd done my own waiting, in my own kind of rooms, the particular helplessness of a child in a place with no lock on the door, learning the footsteps in the hall.
I knew exactly the shape of the thing she was describing, and I knew there was nothing to say to it, because words don't reach it, words have never once reached it, it lives underneath where words go.
So I didn't reach for words. I said, "Stay" — and then heard myself, and almost laughed, because it was backwards, it was her line from a different night, and I corrected it: "I mean — do you want me to stay. In here. I'll take the chair. You shouldn't be alone in the dark right after."
She looked at me for a long moment in the silver light. And then she said, "Stay," and she meant it the right way round, and she moved over in the bed, and she said, "Not the chair."
"Stella."
"I'm not — " She stopped. Started over, the way she does, the way I'd come to love, the careful relaying of a true thing.
"I know what I'm asking and it's not that.
I don't want — that. Not tonight. I just don't want to be in this bed alone with that man still in the doorway of my head.
I want — " her voice cracked, just slightly, the only crack she'd allow herself — "I want to find out what it's like to be in a bed with someone and not be afraid.
I've never had that. Not once in my whole life.
Every bed I've ever shared was a bed I was managing.
I just want to know what the other thing feels like. Will you let me find out?"
So I stayed. I lay down on top of the blankets, still in my clothes, and I opened my arm, and she came against my chest, and I held her.
That's all. I held her, and I felt the fight slowly go out of her body, the shaking ebbing, the heaving breath going long and slow and even, and at some point — I don't know when, I was tracking it the way I track everything, and even I lost the moment — she fell asleep.
Against my chest. With her hand fisted loose in my shirt and her face gone soft and unguarded in a way I'd never seen it, the careful okayness-smile finally, fully off.
I didn't sleep. I lay awake the whole night with her weight on my arm gone numb and her breath warm through my shirt and the marina lights crawling slow across the ceiling, and I thought about trust. About what it had cost her to fall asleep against a man — any man, but especially one built like me, especially one she knew had darkness in him.
About the fact that the most profound thing that had ever happened between us had just happened, and nothing physical had occurred at all.
She'd handed me her unconscious body, her defenselessness, the thing that monster had taught her to never surrender, and she'd handed it to me on purpose, as a gift and a test and an act of staggering courage, and I had held it, and held it gently, and given it back at dawn unharmed.
There is no act of love I have ever heard of that's bigger than that.
I'd kill for her. That's easy; killing's always been easy for me.
But to be trusted by her — to be the safe place where she finally learned what a fearless bed felt like — that was something I'd done nothing in my life to deserve and would now spend the rest of it trying to.
That was two nights before the kitchen.
I tell you about the night first because you can't understand the kitchen without it.
What happened in the bakery kitchen at four in the morning two days later wasn't the start of anything.
It was the trust from that held night finding its body.
It was her deciding, in her own time, on her own terms, that she was ready to want the thing she'd told me she didn't want yet — and the yet had been the most important word in the sentence, and I'd heard it, and I'd waited.
We were doing the late prep. Both of us, by then — I'd become something like her apprentice on the slow nights, useless but willing, allowed to do the simple things while she did the alchemy.
The shop was warm and gold against the black window, the radio low, loaves of sourdough proofing in their baskets along the counter, the air thick with yeast and the cold dough under my hands.
She'd been showing me how to shape a boule, her hands over mine on the dough, correcting my clumsy folds, laughing at me — a real laugh, the okayness-smile nowhere in it, just delight — and I'd turned my head and she'd turned hers and we were suddenly very close, her flour-dusted hands still over mine, her face inches away, the laugh dying into something else entirely.
"Corbin," she said. Just my name. But the way she said it was a whole sentence, and the sentence was the yet arriving.
"You're sure," I said. Because I had to. Because of the doorway in her dreams and the eleven years and every bed she'd ever managed. "You can stop this at any point, for any reason or no reason, and I will not — "
"I know," she said. "That's why." And she lifted her flour-dusted hands to my face and she kissed me.
It was nothing like I'd let myself imagine, and I'd let myself imagine more than I should have.
I'd expected something tentative, something fragile, a frightened woman testing whether she could bear to be touched.
What I got was fierce. She kissed me like she'd been holding it back for weeks, which she had, the same as me — kissed me with her whole self, her hands fisting in my shirt the way they had that night in her sleep except awake now and on purpose, pulling me down to her, and a sound came out of her, low and wanting, that I would have walked through fire to hear again.
I'd been so braced for her fear that her hunger nearly undid me on the spot.
I kissed her back. Slow, then not slow, my hands coming up to frame her face, into her hair, careful with my strength the way I'm always careful, but she didn't want careful — she pressed the whole length of herself into me, up onto her toes, her body fitting against mine, and the dead thing in my chest that had been coming back to life for weeks finished the job all at once, came roaring all the way awake, and I lifted her.
I just lifted her — hands spanning her waist, set her up on the cool marble of the prep counter, the flour rising in a soft cloud around us.
She gasped into my mouth and wrapped her legs around me and pulled me in by the hips, hard, until I was standing flush between her thighs and there was no distance left anywhere.
I could feel the heat of her through the thin cotton of her shorts, feel her breath go uneven against my jaw, and I went still for one second — just one — to be sure.
She answered it by reaching down and dragging my shirt up over my head, her hands flat against my bare chest the moment it was gone, palms learning me, and the slow careful man I'd promised her gave way to something we'd both been starving for.
I pulled her t-shirt off the same way, slow over her raised arms, and then it was just skin and flour-dust and the gold light, and I let myself look at her — had to, couldn't not — and what I saw in her face wasn't fear of being seen, it was the opposite, it was a woman letting herself be seen for the first time in her life and finding she liked it.
I put my mouth to the curve of her throat, the line of her collarbone, lower, to the soft swell of her breast, and she arched up off the marble with a sound low in her chest, her fingers fisting in my hair to hold me there, and I learned the taste of her, the catch in her breath when my tongue found her, the way her whole body answered.
"Tell me," I said against her skin, because I would not assume, not with her, not ever. "Tell me what you want. Out loud. I need to hear it."
"You," she breathed. Her fingers tightening in my hair, her heels pressing into the backs of my thighs.
"I want you, Corbin. I'm not afraid — do you understand what that — I'm not afraid.
There's no part of me waiting in a doorway.
Touch me. Please. I want to find out what it's like to want something and just — have it. "
So I touched her. I took my time the way I'd taken my time with everything about her, my hand sliding down the flour-dusted plane of her stomach and beneath the waist of her shorts, slow, watching her face, and when I reached the heat of her she was already wet and ready and gasping my name into the warm dark.
I learned her there too — what made her breath stutter, what made her hips chase my hand, what made that low wanting sound climb and break.
She gripped my shoulders, her forehead dropping to mine, and she came apart against my fingers right there on the marble, shaking, saying my name like it was the only word she had left, and I held her through it and didn't stop until she was boneless and laughing-gasping and pulling at the buttons of my jeans.
Then there was nothing between us at all.
I lifted her to the very edge of the counter, both hands under her, and she guided me to her and locked her ankles at the small of my back, and when I pushed into her — slow, the whole long slow length of it — we both made a sound, hers high and mine torn out of somewhere I'd kept sealed for twenty years.
She was tight and hot and trembling around me and her eyes stayed open on mine the entire time, no doorway in them anywhere, nothing in her face but me.
I set a rhythm, deep and unhurried, the marble cool under my forearms where I'd braced to keep her steady, her arms wound around my neck, her breath breaking against my mouth with every stroke.
The proofing loaves rose in their baskets.
The radio murmured. I felt her tighten and climb a second time, felt it gather in her, and I drove into it, into the sound she was making, until she came apart around me with my name in her mouth — and I followed her over, buried deep and shaking, holding her so close there was no telling where one of us ended.
After — both of us undone, her forehead against mine, our breath the loudest thing in the room — she laughed. Soft and astonished, a sound with tears just behind it but not of the bad kind.
"What," I said.
"There was flour everywhere," she said. "There is flour everywhere.
I'm going to find flour in places — " and then she was laughing properly, against my chest, and I felt it shake through both of us, and I held her on the counter in the warm gold dark with the bread rising around us, the man who carries the darkness and the woman who bakes the light, and I understood that I had not been doing her a kindness all these weeks by protecting her.
She'd been doing me one. She'd been bringing me back from the dead one cinnamon roll at a time, and tonight she'd finished it, and I was, for the first time in my entire life, completely and dangerously alive.