39. Valentina #2
He came back up the length of me, kissing as he climbed, and I reached for him and pulled him down, needing the weight of him, and he settled over me, careful even now of the place where the baby was, taking his weight onto his forearms. He paused there, right at the edge of it, his forehead dropping to mine, both of us breathing the same warm air, and he looked at me with everything in his face undefended.
“Tell me,” he said, rough. “I need to hear you choose it.”
“I choose you,” I said. “Come home.”
And he pushed into me, slow, so slow, giving me the thick length of him by careful degrees, and we both went utterly still at the fullness of it, at the overwhelming rightness, a low broken sound dragged out of him that he did not bother to hide.
I felt my body stretch and give around him, felt him seat himself as deep as he could go and hold there, shaking with the effort of not moving, and a tear slid sideways into my hair, not from any hurt but from the unbearable tenderness of being filled by a man who kept his eyes on my face the whole way, making certain I was with him.
For a long moment neither of us moved at all.
We only held there, joined, his face dropping into my neck and my legs wrapping high around him, the two of us as close as two people can get and somehow still be two.
Then he began to move, and it was slow, and it was deep, and it was nothing like a collision and everything like a covenant.
Every stroke of him was a sentence in a vow neither of us had the words for out loud.
He set a rhythm almost unbearable in its patience, drawing back and pressing home, watching my face the entire time, reading me the way he reads everything, adjusting to the smallest catch of my breath, until I was strung tight and shaking and saying things I would never afterward remember, his name, yes, please, stay.
He answered every one of them against my mouth, the same words over and over, a vow set to the steady drive of his body in mine.
“I have you,” he breathed. “I have you. Both of you. I am not letting go of either of you, not ever, do you understand me?”
He held that maddening, deliberate pace until I could not bear another moment of it, until I was lifting into every stroke, greedy, chasing, and when I gasped that I needed more he gave it to me, his hips driving deeper and harder, the careful hold he kept on himself finally beginning to slip.
He worked a hand down between us, to the aching swollen place where we were joined, and matched the press of his fingers to the drive of his body, and I felt the second wave begin to gather in me, vast and slow and inevitable, my whole body winding up toward it, my nails dragging down the flexing muscle of his back, his name a broken chant I could not have stopped if the door had come off its hinges.
When it built in me again it built slower and far larger, a tide where before there had been a wave, and he felt it rising in me and let himself follow it at last, the last of his control giving way, his rhythm losing its discipline and turning human and desperate, and we went over the edge of it together, my whole body clenching around him, his face coming apart above mine, his arms crushing me to his chest as he spilled into me with my name torn out of him like a confession.
And in the trembling after, neither of us let go.
He stayed inside me, stayed over me, stayed, his heart slamming against my own, and I held the broad shaking weight of him and felt, for the first time in the whole of my life, completely and unconditionally safe.
We did not really sleep. There was too little of the night left and too much we did not want to lose to being unconscious for it.
He stayed wrapped around me, and his hands kept moving, slow now, building nothing anymore, only learning, the curve of my hip, the line of my spine, the dip at the small of my back, over and over again, and I understood exactly what he was doing, because I was doing the very same thing with my palm flat over his scarred and hammering heart.
We were memorizing each other. Storing it up.
Laying in provisions against whatever tomorrow turned out to be.
The gray came too soon, the way it always does on the mornings you beg it to stay away, creeping in thin and cold along the edge of the curtain I had drawn against the world.
I felt him feel it arrive. I felt the soldier begin, quietly, to move back into his body.
But before he let the day have either of us, he pressed his mouth into my hair and held me hard against him and said the only thing that mattered.
“Whatever happens in that room tomorrow, you walk out of it,” he said. “Both of you. Do you hear me? That is the only version of this I will accept.”
“Both of us,” I said. And I let him believe I meant only myself and the child, because that was the promise his heart needed to hear.
But I meant all three of us. I meant him too.
I was not walking out of any room he did not also walk out of, and tomorrow he was going to learn that about me, the way I had spent these months learning everything about him.
And then there was nothing left of the night, and we rose, and we put on our armor.
Mine was a long column of dark silk and a steady face and a forged ledger memorized down to the cold bone of it.
His was a suit cut to hide what he carried under it, and that terrible flat calm settling back down over him like a visor lowering.
We dressed each other a little, in silence, the way you help someone into something heavy.
At the door, before we opened it and let the war back into our lives, he took my hand and only held it, and neither of us said another word, because everything had already been said in the dark, in the only language that has ever counted, and now it was time to go out and be worthy of it.