AVERY
Sleep doesn't come. It keeps drifting in, then pulling back. By four A.M., I've checked Owen's clinic update twice, cleaned dried blood from the strap of my field bag, and laid the Cradle Skerry notes across Mabel's little writing desk in a crooked grid.
I write the last thought down because I'm done protecting impossible things by refusing to name them. The ink sits there, black and blunt. The tourists lied the same way. Below it, I write: Saltline. Then: Dorian knew before anyone told him.
Claustrophobia creeps in as the room shrinks around me. The harbor outside is dark, a thin moon shines over it, and every shadow looks like it has been waiting there for me to find.
I see an orange coal flare and dim. Once. Twice. Patient. A person with a cigarette outside my window. Nobody stands in the cold at this hour unless they're monitoring something or someone. I'm out the door with one boot half on.
Dorian appears on the corner, in from the dark like he has a key to it.
"Call him off," I swing my arm. "The one with the cigarette. And whoever's been sitting on Nora's since yesterday, AND the one I keep half seeing at the clinic door."
"Avery."
"You put people on me?"
"Yes."
"Let me guess. Protection."
"It is."
"It's a cage. You pick what I hear about.
You decide how I research. You are making me feel managed and stupid.
" My voice doesn't shake. I make sure of it.
"You were already there when the tourist boat came in.
You knew where to stand, who to watch, what Owen's camera meant.
Then you let everyone lie while I stood there feeling insane for noticing the pattern. "
"I never called you—"
"You didn't have to. You implied it." I step in. "That's worse."
"Being near me is the most dangerous thing you have done since you got here. The things I can't reveal are too life changing for you."
"Can't, or—"
"My life has rules you can't see. People keep them.
Old, organized, and they do not take kindly to people that know too much.
If you knew what you're standing on, I hand them a reason to take you apart and call it law. The not-knowing is keeping you safe. For now, only for now. The moment you see enough to name it, ignorance stops protecting you and starts making you easier to use.”
"That wall you've built through the middle of me.
You don't get to call that protection and expect me to thank you for it.
The not-knowing is taking me apart." I'm close to see his pulse beat, slow while mine is hammering.
"I was engaged for four years to someone who lived a whole life I never got to see.
Don't do that to me again. I'm not grateful for a closed door with a draft under it because you aren't man enough to be honest."
He looks like the words sting him. "Everyone I've kept close I've outlived, buried, or had taken to make a point to me. I learned to create distance. It's better that way. It's mercy."
"It's a coward's mercy."
"Yes."
That undoes me more than an argument would have. He doesn't defend it. He just sets it down between us, true.
"Go inside," he says. "In the morning this is a night that didn't happen."
"I'm holding the door open for you, why aren't you taking it?"
"I see it, but walk away, Avery."
"No."
I close the space and put my hand flat against his chest, over the slow drum of him. He goes very still under my palm, the stillness of something deciding whether it's allowed.
"Last time," he says, rough.
"I know where the door is."
He kisses me like he's been rationing it.
His hand comes up into my hair, and his fingers thread through carefully, then not.
He tilts my head to a position he wants and the outside cold falls away.
I get my fingers into his collar and pull, and he lets me move him back inside the B&B, into the dark and small heat of the house.
My shoulders find the wall. He braces an arm above me.
The plaster gives a small warning crack under his palm, and he shifts his weight away from me with visible effort, breathing hard enough that I can hear him fighting himself.
I drag his mouth back down. "Don't make this another thing you manage," I say against it. "Be honest with this, at least."
A sound leaves him I haven't heard before, low, almost pained, and his restraint slightly breaks.
His hands map me slow—jaw, throat, the dip of my collarbone—each touch a question I answer by arching into it.
I get his shirt open. The skin unmarked where the knife entered, and I press my mouth there, on the lie of it, and feel his breath go ragged under my lips.
My sweater goes. His hands are cool, thumb tracing the underside of my breast until my head goes back against the plaster.
He follows the line down, mouth to my throat, my sternum.
The pressure comes again now, deeper, behind my eyes, behind memory: a second pulse laid under my own.
I don't understand it. I stop trying. I pull him closer instead, and the echo swells, the strange certainty of being known clean through and not held down by it.
He lifts me like I weigh nothing and I lock my legs at his waist, and we lose the rest of our clothes between the entrance and my room, slow only because he keeps stopping to look at me, to wait, to make me say it.
"Yes," I tell him. "Stay."
He stops anyway, not because he doubts me, but because some part of him needs the choice given twice. His hands are cradling either side of me, arms locked, shoulders tense.
"Say it again," he requests.
I catch his jaw in my hand and make his eyes meet mine. "I want this. I want you. Not your secrets. Nor your silence. But I want this."
His eyes close, and when they open, whatever is left of distance between us burns down.
He kisses the inside of my knee, then higher, slow making me furious, and ache at the same time.
I shove a hand into his hair and feel him smile against my skin, brief and disbelieving, like the shape has startled him.
Then his mouth turns serious again. Devastatingly serious.
He learns me with the same attention he gives everything else.
I am the thing ruining him, and he makes sure I know it.
Around me narrows to his hands, his mouth, the scrape of my breath, the old bed shifting beneath us.
I try to stay sharp. Angry. In control of every inch I give him.
Then he looks up from between my thighs, his silvered stare brightening and wrecked, waiting again, and the control I have left slips its leash.
"Dorian."
That is enough. His hands tighten on my hips, holding me down, and holding himself steady. The first stroke of his mouth drags a sound out of me I would have swallowed from anyone else. He does it again, slower, and my fingers twist in the sheet.
An electric shock sensation rushes through me that I can't explain and his mouth follows the path his hands made—slow over my ribs, the soft of my stomach, the inside of my wrist where my pulse gives me away.
I learn him back. The cool plane of his shoulders, the muscle that jumps when I drag my nails down it, the pause in his breath when I find the place that makes his careful hands strengthen around.
Each time he pauses, and waits, like he's letting me set a pace.
I put my mouth around his huge penis, and watch his reaction each time I move up and down.
He pushes my head down and eyes me like I'm dangerous.
He eventually grabs a fistful of hair and pulls me back on the bed, climbing over me.
He puts one finger on my clit, and I gasp, my eyes beg him to take me.
I set my hand behind his neck and feel him shudder.
"Take me," I breathe, and the control frays, his forehead drops to mine, and he slides his cock inside me.
He moves with control, restrained even now like he's fearful he will hurt me.
Each press measured against strength he isn't allowing me to feel.
Our breath starts to become one of the same, the sea-sound rising under both our thoughts until I'm not sure whose pulse I'm hearing.
His name leaves me in pieces with each thrust, his hands grip the headboard and the wood groans loudly.
Warmth rushes through me, all of it mine, while his body stays cool against me.
I choose not to examine how badly I want the contradiction.
The pressure behind my eyes gathers again, bright and strange, and for one suspended second I feel the sea under the floorboards, the cove breathing beneath us, his pulse too slow and mine racing hard enough for both of us.
The break in me is coming, I feel it build, and his cock expand inside me. My eyes roll and the pressure explodes out of me, images flash before me as I come like I'm seeing a future that doesn't exist. Exquisite. Mind-blowing.
I begin squirting all over his cock, and he follows with a groan that tears out of him.
The headboard cracks beneath his hands with a sharp wooden snap and my nails dig hard into his skin.
Our bodies shake together and I feel as though I've levitated off the bed and into a another world that can't be real.
I open my eyes, and the broken wood hangs above us in a jagged split.
His hands still there as if trying to hide what I have already noticed.
I say nothing. Not because I missed it. Because if I name one impossible thing, all the others will come with it, and instead I want his weight over me, his breath at my mouth, and the chosen truth of not being afraid.
He moves one hand to my cheekbone and one hand at my hip. He shuffles to one side and his arm stays heavy across me.
"You still won't be honest," I say.
"Not yet."
"Then this didn't fix anything."
"No." His thumb moves on my shoulder, once. "It didn't."
I should hate how little that is. Instead I place my hand flat over his heart, too slow, too even, a rhythm I can't make my own match.
Past the glass, the orange coal is gone.
I close my eyes and choose him anyway, and lie there knowing his secret is warm and enormous in the bed between us, waiting.