Chapter 19
CINDY
He’s in the car when I come down from the appointment.
I don’t expect him. Roma drove me into the city this morning, so I assumed Roma would drive me home.
But when I cross the plaza on my newly reconstructable knee and the door of the Cullinan opens, it’s Sevastian sitting in the back, watching me through the dark glass like he’s been parked there for hours.
Maybe he has. He doesn’t say a word about the surgeon.
He doesn’t have to. It’s all over his face, the careful nothing he wears when he’s done something enormous and refuses to be caught at it.
I get in. The door seals. Roma pulls us out into traffic, and the silence in the car is so loud I can barely hear the city through it.
He’s in the seat beside me with one hand on his knee, eyes out the window, jacket gone, sleeves still rolled from whatever the day did to him.
Three feet of leather between us, charged like the air before a slot pays out.
I should let it sit. I’m good at letting things sit.
But I just spent an hour learning that this man, this criminal, this captor I keep telling myself I despise, reached into the worst wound I own and tried to heal it without ever wanting me to know.
I cannot let that sit. It’s too big. It’s been getting too big for weeks now, the gift, the rose garden, the desert this morning when I almost kissed him myself, and I’m out of room to put any of it.
“Thank you,” I say. “For the doctor.”
Something moves across his face and shuts down again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t.” My voice comes out shakier than I want. “Don’t do that. I know it was you. There’s nobody else it could be. You found the one man in the country who could fix the thing that broke me, you did it in secret, and you didn’t even want me to say thank you. So I’m saying it anyway. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, flat as the highway, and then ruins his own cover by looking out the window like the view did something to him.
“You’re impossible.”
“It was a referral. Men make referrals.”
“You flew a surgeon across state lines for a woman whose real name you learned from a drunk girl in a dive bar.”
“And I’d send the drunk girl flowers,” he says, quiet, “if I were a man who sent flowers.”
The whole car goes still around that sentence.
I watch him reach for the cold. I’ve seen him do it before, in the count room, in my apartment, the warmth draining out of his face like someone pulled a plug, the flat voice coming down like a shutter.
“It was a practical decision. An asset that can’t run is a liability. Don’t read anything into it.”
“You’re lying.”
“I don’t lie.”
“You’re lying right now. To me, to yourself, because I said thank you and it scared you.
” The words come faster than my fear can catch them, all the careful distance I’ve kept burning off at once.
“You can ice me out all you want. I’ve watched you do it three times now.
The second anything gets real, you go somewhere cold and slam the door.
I’m done pretending I don’t see it. You felt something doing that for me.
I know you did. It terrifies you, and I am so tired of both of us being terrified all the time. ”
For a long moment he doesn’t speak. His face is at war with itself, and I think I’ve lost. I think the shutter’s coming down for good.
Then he leans forward. His voice goes rough. “Roma. Pull off.”
We come off the highway onto a dirt track that runs out into nothing. The city drops away behind us. The Mojave opens up huge and silver under a sky crowded with stars, more stars than I’ve seen since the night this whole impossible thing began.
The day’s heat lifts off the ground like a lid coming off, and the air through the cracked door tastes of dust, creosote, cold. Roma stops the car where the track gives out. He gets out without a word, walks off a distance into the dark to give us the desert, and then it’s just us.
The engine ticking. Forty miles of the same sand where it all started in blood. Somewhere out in the dark, the most dangerous driver in Nevada is standing guard over his boss’s love life with his back turned, and if Roma has opinions, the desert keeps them.
Sevastian looks at me across the back seat. The cold is gone. What’s there instead is raw, undefended, a little desperate, and it undoes the last of me.
We’ve done this twice before and both times he ran the room.
The desert, where he held all the power.
The count room, where it was a transaction we both agreed to call nothing.
Out here there’s no power to hold and no transaction to hide behind.
There’s just a man who flew a surgeon across the country to fix my knee in secret, looking at me like I’m the most frightening thing he’s ever faced, and I think that might be true.
I think I scare him more than the men trying to kill him do.
“I’m not good at this,” he says, low. “Whatever this is. I break what I reach for. You should know that about me first.”
“First before what?”
For one second the old wall tries to come up. I watch it try. I watch him put it down himself, by hand, the hardest work I’ve ever seen a man do while sitting still.
He answers by closing the distance.
This kiss is nothing like the others. There’s no audience to sell it to.
No power in it. No count-room dare, no pretense that it’s bodies and not hearts.
It’s slow. It’s deep. It shakes. I climb across the seat into his lap without one ounce of negotiation left anywhere in me.
His hand comes up to cradle the side of my face like I’m something that could break in his grip, and I make a sound into his mouth that’s half want, half grief, because I have never once been kissed like I matter. I didn’t know how badly I needed to be.
Nobody’s hands shake holding a sure thing. His do, the smallest tremor where his palm frames my face, and that tremor does more to me than any sure touch ever has.
The back seat isn’t enough, so we get out. He lays me back against the hood of the car, still warm from the drive, the metal at my spine, the whole black sky over me, him above me blotting out half the stars. We take each other apart slowly under the open black sky.
He undresses me like he’s unwrapping something fragile.
Nothing tears this time. The count-room hunger has gone patient, his hands moving over me unhurried, learning me again, like everything before was a rough draft and this is the real thing at last. He gets my jeans down my legs, folds them, actually folds them, onto the hood, then hooks two fingers in my underwear and draws it down so slowly I forget how lungs work.
The cold hits me everywhere. His hands follow it, palms dragging heat up my calves, my thighs, my hips, until I’m bare under the whole night sky while he’s still mostly dressed, which should feel unfair and instead feels like being the only thing on the menu.
He kisses down my throat, my collarbone, the swell of each breast, taking his time, like he’s got the whole night and intends to spend every minute of it on me.
When his mouth finds my nipple I arch up off the hood with a gasp that comes out of me raw, and he doesn’t smirk the way he did in the count room.
He makes a low rough sound against my skin, like the wanting is hurting him too.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, to my throat, my hip, the inside of my bad knee, which he kisses slow, twice, deliberately, like it’s owed.
I get his shirt off and put my mouth on the inked stars at his collarbones, on the cathedral down his sternum, on the scar at his side I’ve stopped pretending I don’t wonder about.
He shudders under my lips. Maybe nobody’s touched him gently in years.
Maybe nobody touches a man like this expecting to find something soft underneath.
I’m finding it, and it’s killing both of us.
I keep going down. Belt, zipper, the heat of him heavy in my hand when I free his cock, and the sound he makes when I stroke him, slow, deliberate, the way he polishes the things he loves, is one I plan on keeping forever.
For once I’m the one with the patience. He hits the end of his fast.
“Look at me,” he says when he finally settles between my thighs. So I do. He lines himself up, pushes into me slow, one endless inch at a time, stretching me open around him, watching my face the whole way in like the watching is the point, and it’s so far past the count room that my eyes sting.
He bottoms out, stops, deep, all of him, his breath gone ragged, his forehead coming down to mine, and for one long beat neither of us moves, because moving would end this part, the being-full part, the his part.
There’s nowhere to hide out here. Every prop I’ve ever used is gone, the dark club, the dirty money, the role, and what’s left is me, him, the stars, the unbearable fact of how much this means to both of us.
When I open my eyes the whole Milky Way is dumped across the black above his shoulders, more sky than I’ve ever had over any bed, and he blots out the middle of it like he was put there for scale.
He moves in me slow, deep, ruinous, his forehead dropped against mine, our breath mixing in the cold night air.
Every time it builds too fast he gentles it back down, holding us both at the edge, drawing it out like a man paying a debt with interest, and when I whimper at the pace he smiles against my mouth.