25. Gideon
GIDEON
For a long while she just holds me, and I let her, and neither of us moves to make it into anything else.
That's the part I'll keep, whatever happens after.
Not what comes next. This. A woman in my lap with her arms around a man who'd forgotten he was allowed to be held, and no clock on it, no price, no next thing she's waiting for me to do.
The leather roll's still open on the table, twenty-two years of proof spread out in the lamplight, and she's seen all of it, and she's holding me anyway.
People who see what I am usually file me under useful or dangerous.
She's done neither. She's just here, breathing slow against my neck, deciding something.
When she pulls back enough to look at me, I know what she's decided before she says it, because I've learned her face the way she learns a room.
"I came to all of them," she says. Quiet.
Not an apology, never that, just the truth laid flat between us the way I laid mine.
"Rhys. Knox. Cass is his own thing, I haven't worked him out yet.
But I came to each of them when I was ready, on a day I picked.
" Her thumb moves over the white scarring on my wrist, slow, like she's still reading it.
"I'm telling you that so you know this isn't the heat deciding for me, and it isn't me being kind to the wounded one.
I don't do kind. I came to you because I wanted to come to you.
Because you walked into the woods for two days rather than hand me a thing you weren't ready to give, and then you came back and offered to take the cedar out of the house before you'd told me a single thing about yourself.
" She holds my eyes. "That's the man I want.
Not the medic. Not the alpha they built.
That one. Do you understand the difference, because it matters that you do. "
I understand the difference. I've spent my whole life being the medic and the thing they built, and exactly no time being a man someone crossed a room for on purpose.
"Say it again," I tell her, and my voice isn't steady, and for once I don't care. "The part where you wanted to."
"I wanted to." She almost smiles. "I'm going to keep wanting to. You're going to have to get used to it."
Then she kisses me, and I don't know what to do with my hands.
That's the truth of it, the thing twenty-two years did to me.
Every other man in this house knows how to take a thing he wants.
I know how to stitch a wound and set a bone and keep a calm face while the worst happens, and I do not know, have genuinely forgotten, how to let myself be wanted without it being a transaction or a threat.
So I sit there with this woman in my lap and her mouth on mine and my hands hovering like a man afraid to touch something that might break or might break him.
She feels it. Of course she does. She pulls back and looks at me, close, reading me the way she reads a room by scent.
"You don't have to do anything," she says. "That's the whole point. For once in your life, you don't have to do a single thing. Let me."
And she slides off my lap and draws me down with her, onto the floor, onto the worn boards in front of the cold stove, and she lays me back like I'm the one who needs handling for once, and something in my chest cracks clean down the middle.
She undresses me slow. Not the way you undress someone you're in a hurry for.
The way you'd unwrap something that got broken a long time ago and put back together wrong.
She gets my shirt open and her hands move over the scars, all of them, the wrists and the ones on my chest and the backwards-C burn on my calf, and she doesn't ask about a single one, she just touches each like she's acknowledging it, I see this, I'm not going to pretend it isn't here, I'm also not going to make you talk about it.
The clove and iron of me goes thick in the small space.
My hands finally find her, her hips, her waist, and I hold on like a man holds a rail.
"There you go," she murmurs. "I've got you."
I've said those words to her. Through a door.
In a truck, secondhand. Nobody's ever said them to me.
I'm forty years old in everything but the parts the program froze at five, and nobody has ever once said I've got you to me and meant it as the whole of the thing instead of the front end of a price.
She takes me in hand, strokes me slow against the slick heat of her, and I make a sound I don't recognize.
She gets the rest of our clothes out of the way unhurried, and then she rises over me, careful of the bad leg, and sinks down onto my cock slow, and we both go still at the joining of it, her braced over me with her hands flat on my chest, me looking up at her with my whole carefully-kept face coming apart.
"Fuck." It leaves me in one breath, the first profanity I've spent in years, and she smiles down at me like I've handed her something rarer than anything in the leather roll. "There he is," she says.
She sets the pace and it's not fast. That's the mercy of it.
She rolls her hips slow and deep and watches my face the whole time, reading me, adjusting, taking care of me the way I've spent my whole life taking care of everyone else and never once being on the receiving end of.
I get my hands on her thighs, her hips, helping her move, and the heat builds between us low and steady and warm in a way I didn't know it could be, no urgency in it, no taking, just her and me and the cold stove and the gray light and twenty-two years of held breath finally going out of me.
"Let go," she says. "I'm right here. Let go, Gideon."
And I do. For the first time in my life I let go of the careful, and I let her have me, and when it takes me it's not a breaking, it's an unclenching, a thing I've been holding since I was five years old on a table finally setting itself down.
She follows me, her head dropping, her body shuddering over mine, and she stays there after, folded down onto my chest, her ear over my heart, neither of us in any hurry to move.
I don't knot her. I hold back from it the way the others did, give her what we agreed, and she presses a kiss to my sternum like she knows what the restraint costs and is thanking me for it.
We're lying there on the floor in the wreck of our clothes, her heartbeat slowing against mine, when the back door opens.
Cass.
He comes in on the cold air and takes in the two of us on the floor in one unhurried sweep, and his face does the nothing it always does.
He doesn't comment. He doesn't leave embarrassed.
He just crosses the kitchen, steps over my outstretched arm like we're a piece of furniture that's always been there, takes one of the cleaned rifles off the table where Ember left them oiled and ready, checks the action with two hands, and turns to go back out the way he came.
At the door he pauses. Doesn't turn around.
"Ember," he says.
She lifts her head off my chest. "I know," she says.
And the screen door claps shut behind him, and he's gone back out into the gray to walk the lines, carrying the rifle she cleaned, leaving the two of us on the floor with the thing that just passed between all three of us unspoken and completely understood.
He knows. He's not the last because he wasn't chosen.
He's the last because he's the one she's saving.
And he just stepped over us to go stand watch so that the saving has time to happen.