33. Zoe
ZOE
The power gave out a little after dark, the way it always does up here once the wind turns serious, with a small electrical sigh and then a silence so total you could hear the storm take a breath before it came back harder.
One second we had lamps and the radio and the ordinary hum of a house that runs.
The next we had a candle, a banked fire, and a blizzard throwing itself at the boards Jamie had screwed over the windows as though the whole thing had become personal.
Asher greeted the apocalypse the way he greets everything, which is as a gift made specifically for him.
No power meant no bedtime anyone could prove.
Candles meant his face lit dramatically from below for maximum monologue.
And a storm trying to eat the building meant that he was, in his own telling, the only thing standing between us and certain doom.
“If the roof comes off,” he announced from inside a blanket, like a tiny deranged senator, “I know how to make a new one. You need sticks. And a tarp. And probably a dog.”
“Why a dog?” I asked, because you have to.
“For warm,” he said, as if I had asked him something genuinely stupid.
He ran on storm adrenaline for another hour, narrating the weather, assigning the rest of us survival jobs none of us were qualified for, feeding the dogs crackers under the table where he was certain we could not see.
Bandit and Biscuit, lately allies, had formed a joint task force devoted entirely to the crackers.
The candle threw everything gold and huge and shaking on the walls, and for a while the four of us and two dogs were the only warm lit thing in a hundred miles of screaming white.
It was, and I am not ashamed to say it, one of the happiest nights of my life, and it had not even started yet.
And then, the way a storm of his own kind always ends, he was simply gone.
One minute he was litigating whether dogs are allowed to vote, and the next he was a dead weight against Jamie’s chest, out cold, mid-sentence, the snow day finally winning.
Jamie carried him to bed with the particular care of a man who has learned how to set down something precious without waking it, tucked the blanket to his chin, and stood in the doorway a moment, counting breaths, the way he does, before he came back to me.
And then it was only us, and the candle, and the storm, and all the air in the room rearranging itself into the shape of a question neither of us had said out loud yet.
For a moment we only looked at each other across the small gold room, the storm doing its worst at the boarded windows and neither of us in any hurry to close the last few feet of floor between us.
There is a particular sweetness in the second before a thing like this, when the wanting is still all promise and nothing has been spent yet, when you can still stand at the very edge of it and feel the whole bright drop waiting below.
He looked at me the way he has looked at me since the beginning, like a man taking in a thing he cannot quite believe he is allowed to have, and I looked back at him without any of the armor I used to wear, and the look held, and stretched, and turned into its own kind of touching across the distance.
I have spent a good many nights this winter learning that look, and I have decided, privately and completely, that it is mine.
There had been a whole winter of this. A whole winter of wanting him across rooms full of other people, of his hand at the small of my back saying things his mouth would not, of lying beside him at night with a careful inch of cold sheet between us because the boy might wake and because some wants are too large to let all the way out in a house with thin walls.
The storm had taken the walls down to nothing.
It had shrunk the entire world to one candlelit room, and there was no one left to be careful for, and when he crossed to me and put his hands in my hair and kissed me, it was not the rationed, careful kind we had been making do with.
It was the other kind. It was every held breath of a whole winter let go at once.
He kissed me like a man who had finally stopped arguing with himself.
There was nothing slow in it tonight, none of the stunned disbelief of the first time, none of the careful tenderness of the second.
This was hunger with the manners worn off it, his mouth hard and sure on mine, his hands already moving, already greedy, learning me through my clothes as if he could not get to the skin underneath fast enough.
He walked me backward toward the bed and I went, pulling him after me by the front of his shirt, and somewhere in the dark I dragged it up over his head and laid my hands flat against the warm broad plane of his chest and felt his heart slamming as hard and as fast as my own.
He made a low sound against my throat when I touched him, and I have thought about that sound a great deal since.
It was the sound of a careful man losing the argument for good.
He took the rest of it away between us, his clothes and then mine, patient with the buttons and then not patient at all, and when there was finally nothing left in the way, when it was only my bare skin against the whole long warm length of his in the candlelight, the breath went out of me in a rush.
He held himself over me a moment and only looked, the way he looks at every good thing he is afraid to want, his eyes moving down me slow as hands.
Then he lowered himself onto me, skin to skin from mouth to knee, and the heat of him after a whole winter of holding back was almost more than I could stand.
I arched up into it. I wanted no space anywhere between us. He gave me none.
His mouth went where his hands had been and then kept going, down and down, slow and thorough and without an ounce of mercy in it, until I had lost the thread of everything in the world that was not his mouth on me.
He took his time. He had always taken his time, but tonight there was a boldness in it that was new, a man who had decided at last that he was allowed, and he spent that permission on me without hurry and without pity until I was nothing but a held breath and a fistful of his hair, my hips lifting after a thing he kept just barely out of reach because he wanted to feel how badly I wanted it.
When he finally gave it to me I came apart against his mouth with a cry I had to swallow down for the boy asleep on the other side of the wall, shaking, wrecked, and he stayed with me the whole way through it before he began to work his way back up my body, and I could feel him smiling against my skin.
I would not let him have it all his own way.
I pushed him over onto his back, which startled a breath out of him, and I took my own slow revenge with my hands and my mouth, working him until the careful one was the one who had forgotten how to breathe, until he was the one with a fist knotted in the sheets, saying my name like it was the only word he had left in him.
There is a particular power in undoing a person who has spent his whole life refusing to be undone, and I was in no hurry at all about it, and I felt him let me, which was its own kind of surrender, and maybe the larger one.
And then he had had enough of being taken apart, and he pulled me up the length of him and rolled me under him in a single motion, and I let him, because I could not wait another second and I told him so with the whole of my body.
He settled between my thighs and braced above me on his forearms and went still, the way he always does, his eyes finding mine in the low gold light, asking the question he asks without a word, the one that is really are you sure, the one that is really a careful man still asking for permission to be handed a good thing.
I answered it with my hands at the small of his back and my hips tilting up to him and the whole of me opening, drawing him down, telling him yes in every language a body has.
And then he pushed into me, slow after all that hurry, and I felt the whole of it, the first blunt press of him and then the give and then the long deliberate slide as he sank into me by degrees, filling me so completely that the sound it dragged out of me was one the storm was kind enough to cover.
He did not rush it. He worked himself into me slow and steady, watching my face the entire way down, until he was seated all the way in, as deep as he could go, and then he stopped there, buried to the root, the two of us not breathing, his forehead dropped to mine.
For a moment neither of us moved at all.
We only stayed like that, joined, stretched wide around him and aching with the fullness of him, both of us feeling the enormous plain fact of it, that after a whole winter of careful inches there was finally nothing left anywhere between us, no clothes and no walls and no fear and no distance, nothing at all but him inside me and me wrapped around him and the storm howling its blessing at the boards.
It very nearly ended the great romance in a literal fire.
We had begun to move, slow and then less slow, when my flailing hand knocked the candle off the edge of the nightstand and sent it tipping, and Jamie’s arm shot out, quick as the day he hauled a dog out of a river, and caught it an inch above the quilt, wax flying, the flame ducking low and then steadying.
We both froze, half-laughing, hearts slamming for a brand-new reason.
“You almost killed us,” he said against my mouth, still inside me, still moving in the smallest, slyest way that took the laugh right back out of my throat.
“You saved us. Don’t stop.”
He did not stop.