Chapter 6 #4
I move. Slowly. Carefully. The way I have done everything tonight.
Each long deliberate stroke is the full length of me — pulling almost all the way out, then sliding back in slowly to the hilt, the slow deep press that ends with my hips against her hips and her breath catching against my throat.
She rises up to meet me. Her heels press at the small of my back, asking.
I give her what she's asking for. I find the angle — slightly higher, the long base of me dragging against the small swollen knot at the top of her with every stroke — and her hand on my shoulder digs in and her breath goes high.
Her face is wet but it is not — it is not a sad wet.
It is the wet of a woman whose body has remembered something her mind had given up on.
I kiss her tears as I move. I kiss the corner of her eye.
I kiss her temple. I kiss her mouth and she opens for me and her tongue meets mine and I do not stop, I do not stop, the rhythm steady, the depth long, my hand sliding under her lower back to lift her hips into mine because that is what her body has told me she wants.
The wolf in me is on a mountainside howling.
The wolf in me is doing what wolves do when they have come home after a long absence.
Inside the man holding the woman, the wolf is finally letting himself sing.
She tightens.
I feel it start — the small rhythmic flutter of her around me, the way her breath catches and starts coming in short shallow pulls, the way her thighs go rigid on either side of me.
I keep the rhythm. I keep the angle. I bring my hand down between us and I find the swollen knot at the top of her with my thumb and I press there, in time with the long deep strokes, and she — she breaks.
She breaks against me, around me, her body clenching down on me in long slow waves I can feel along the entire length of me, and she cries out into the side of my neck and her teeth catch the muscle there and she does not bite down but the threat of teeth is in her mouth and the wolf in me makes a sound that is not a human sound.
I follow her over.
I follow her over with my face pressed into her hair and my hips driving deep one last time and the long held thing in me finally — finally — letting itself go.
I spill into her. I spill into her with my whole body shaking and my arms locked around her and a sound in my throat I have not made in seventeen years, and she holds me through it, her arms wrapped around my back, her mouth against my throat, the long slow aftershocks of her body still pulling at me as I empty myself the rest of the way.
I do not — I am embarrassed to say. I do not weep. But my face is wet against her hair and I do not know when that happened and she does not say a word about it and I think we are even now, on the matter of being wet at the wrong times, on the matter of being undone by each other in the dark.
I lie on top of her for a minute before I can get the strength back into my arms. She does not push me off.
She holds me there. Her hand is on the back of my head.
Her other arm is around my back. She is — she is holding me.
She is just holding me. The way she held me in the kitchen four nights ago and the way she has held me in a hundred small ways every day since, and the woman has been holding me for a long time, I am only just realizing it.
I roll off her. I gather her against me. She turns and tucks her head under my chin and presses her hand flat against my chest, and I wrap my arms around her, and we lie there in the dark.
After a while she says, very softly:
"Ronan was my husband and I loved him. And you killed him and I love you anyway. I don't know how to hold both of those things."
I close my eyes.
I say, "You don't have to figure it out tonight."
"What about tomorrow."
"We'll figure it out tomorrow too."
She presses her face into my neck.
The wolf in me lies down beside her wolf-mind in whatever room they have made for themselves and they go to sleep together.
I follow them down.
Outside, the moon is over the eastern ridge.
Inside, Callum will be home in an hour and we will get up before he gets here and Willa will put her hair up and I will button my flannel and we will pretend, just to spare him, that nothing has happened tonight that has not happened every other night.
But it has happened. It is going to keep happening.
Something has been put down tonight that I have carried for seventeen years and something has been picked up that I am going to carry the rest of my life, and the trade is — the trade is exactly fair.
I sleep.
She sleeps against me.
The cabin is quiet. The mountain holds. The wolf in me, on the other side of sleep, lays his head down on the stones beside my brother and tells him — quietly, with the dignity of an animal saying what it has come to say — she's not cold anymore. She's not cold anymore, Ronan. I did what you asked.
Somewhere in the dark, the brother answers.
I do not catch the words. I do not need to.
I sleep.