15. Grisha #3
I let my hand travel the long, easy line of her, over her ribs, the soft give of her stomach, lower, until I found exactly how much all of this had already undone her, warm and slick and ready against my fingers, and the sound she made when I touched her there, sharp and helpless, nearly finished me before we'd even started.
I worked her slow at first, learning the pace that made her hips stutter and her breath catch high in her throat, and when I felt her start to shake under my hand I eased back, unwilling to let this end before I'd had her fully.
"Please," she said finally, low and unsteady, her hips lifting to follow where my hand had just been, and the word landed in me with more weight than I had ever once heard it carry before.
I paused above her, my forehead resting against hers, both of us breathing hard already, and asked her with my eyes the only question that still needed asking.
She answered by pulling me down to her, both arms locking around my shoulders, her whole body arching up into mine with a certainty that erased whatever was left of my restraint.
I reached down and guided myself to her entrance, notching against her, feeling how ready she was against the head of me, and held there one beat longer just to watch her face, flushed and open and waiting.
Then I pushed into her, slow, deliberate, giving her every moment she needed to take the length and the fullness of me, and she gasped my name against my throat like it was the only word she had left, her body drawing tight around mine, hot and slick and impossibly close, until I was seated fully inside her and neither of us moved for a long moment, just breathing, just feeling the exact shape of how completely we now fit.
What followed was slow at first, gentle, both of us learning the give and pull of each other with the same care we'd have given anything worth doing right, my hips rocking into hers in a rhythm I felt in my teeth, my jaw, the base of my spine.
She met every movement with one of her own, her nails dragging light down my back, her breath breaking into small sounds against my ear that I would have paid any price to keep hearing, and when she urged me deeper with the pull of her hands at the small of my back I gave her exactly that, watching her face the whole time, memorizing the way her eyes went unfocused and her mouth fell open on a sound that had no words left in it at all.
It built slow and then it didn't, urgency taking over the way the tide had taken the sand earlier that night, steady and then sudden and then complete.
I felt her go tight and trembling around me, heard her cry out something that might have been my name and might have been nothing at all, and the sound of it, raw and unguarded and entirely mine to hear, was what finally broke the last of my own control.
I followed her over with her name in my mouth and her heartbeat slamming under my palm, giving her everything I had spent twenty years learning to hold back, all of it, until neither of us had breath left for anything but each other, our bodies still joined and shaking, the lamp burning low and steady over two people who had just set down every careful thing they'd been carrying.
Afterward we lay tangled in the plain gray blanket, her head on my chest, her fingers tracing slow idle circles over my heart like she could feel it settling back into its normal rhythm and wanted to help it along.
I ran my hand down the length of her spine, unhurried now, memorizing this too, the shape of her weight against me in a bed that had not held anyone else since Elena.
"Stay," I said, before I could talk myself into the careful version of the request.
"I wasn't planning on leaving." She tipped her face up and pressed a soft kiss to the underside of my jaw, right over the scar, the same spot her fingers had traced earlier in the middle of everything else. "You'd have to carry me out, and even you're not that strong."
"I'm exactly that strong."
She laughed, quiet and drowsy, and within a few minutes her breathing evened out into sleep, her hand still resting flat over my heart like she meant to keep track of it even unconscious.
I lay awake a long while after, the lamp still burning low because neither of us had thought to reach for it, watching the rise and fall of her shoulder in the gold light, her hair spilled bright against the gray blanket in a room built, until tonight, for exactly one person.
I thought about the grave that morning, and the ferry schedule I'd looked up on a whim and never told anyone about until tonight, and a boy on a beach who'd once wanted to be more than a shield, and I understood, lying there with her weight warm and trusting against my side, that every wall I had spent eight years building had come down anyway, brick by brick, without my permission and entirely with my consent.
I was terrified. Lying there in the dark with her heartbeat steady under my palm, I let myself admit it plainly, silently, the way I never let myself admit anything that mattered. I was terrified, and for the first time in eight years, I found that I did not care anymore.