38. Tasha #2
"I need you exactly like this." I pulled him down by the shoulders, arching up to meet him, done with careful. "I've had three days of slow. I don't want careful tonight. I want you certain."
He gave me certain. His hands moved over me like he was reading something he'd been afraid he might never get to finish, patient and thorough and utterly without hesitation, and every place he touched he answered with his mouth a moment later until I was shaking under him again and past the point of pretending I could hold still through it.
I reached down between us and found him hard and full against my palm, and the low, wrecked sound he made at that, right against my throat, was the first sound I'd ever heard him make that wasn't managed at all.
He reached between us in turn, and found me warm and soft and completely ready for him, and I felt his breath catch hard against my ear at the discovery, whatever control he had left fraying under my hands.
He circled his fingers there once, patient despite how undone his own voice already sounded, testing, until my hips rose to chase the feeling and I heard myself say his name low, half a warning that I wouldn't survive much more waiting.
He guided himself to my entrance instead, deliberate, watching my face the whole way like he needed to see every second of it land, and when the blunt, aching pressure of him finally started to fill me, I gasped, my whole body arching up to meet it even as it stretched me open inch by unhurried inch.
He stopped there, buried just partway inside me, giving me a moment to adjust, his jaw tight with the visible effort of holding still when I could feel exactly how much it cost him to wait.
"Look at me," he said, low, and I did, and something passed between us in that look that felt more intimate than anything his body had done yet.
Then he pushed the rest of the way home, slow and deliberate, until there was nothing left between us at all, and I felt the exact moment his control finally gave out entirely, a low sound breaking out of him that he didn't try to catch.
I was slick and impossibly full around him, and for a moment neither of us moved, just breathed, foreheads together, both of us letting the fact of it settle before either one of us tried to survive what came next.
"I love you," he said against my mouth, low and unsteady, "with the whole of it. Not the careful piece I used to be willing to risk."
"I know." I drew him down to me, my legs coming up around his hips, done with every last inch of space between us. "Show me instead of telling me. We're good at telling each other things in doorways. I want the rest of it now."
He began to move, slow, both of us breathing hard already, his forehead dropping to mine, his whole body finally unclenched from eight years of bracing for a loss he'd already survived once.
We moved together gently at first, learning each other new again after three days that had felt like a season, and somewhere blocks away a siren rose and faded without either of us flinching, without either of us even noticing until much later that neither had gone rigid the way we once might have.
It built slow and then it didn't, urgency taking the place of patience the way it always eventually did between us, his hips finding a rhythm that pulled a sound out of me I didn't try to muffle, his mouth catching every one of them against my throat like he meant to keep them.
I wrapped my legs tighter around him and met him movement for movement, both of us chasing the same building ache now instead of managing it politely, his hand sliding beneath me to angle my hips into his and pull a sound out of me sharper than the last, and I stopped being able to tell where the wanting ended and the having began.
"Grisha." His name broke out of me as I felt myself go tight around him, the whole slow build of the night finally cresting in one long, shuddering wave that took my breath with it, and he followed me over a breath later with my name rough and broken in his mouth, his whole weight shaking against me, both of us finally, fully undone in the same unguarded moment instead of managing it separately the way we'd managed everything else.
Afterward we lay tangled together in sheets that smelled like Frankie's fabric softener instead of the compound's, my head on his chest, his fingers moving slow and idle through my hair.
The streetlight through the thin curtains threw long stripes across the ceiling, and somewhere below us the city kept making its ordinary noise, cars and a distant siren and once, faintly, someone laughing on the sidewalk, and none of it felt like danger anymore.
It just felt like the world going on around two people who had finally stopped fighting each other long enough to let it.
"We should talk about the gala," I said eventually, tracing a loose line along the ridge of scar on his ribs, no longer flinching from what it meant.
"I thought the gala wasn't allowed in this room tonight."
"I changed my mind. I want to talk about it now, like this, as equals, instead of you deciding what I get to know in a war room while I catch up later.
" I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him properly.
"No more you handling the danger and me finding out about it afterward.
We plan this together, start to finish, or I'm not doing it at all. "
"Together." He said it like he was testing the shape of the word in his mouth, and something in his face settled, certain, the way it hadn't been able to settle in eight years of carrying everything alone.
"Hollis wants you in the private viewing room.
I want a clean line of sight from the surveillance van the second you're through that door, not after. "
"Then that's the first change. I'm not going in blind, and I'm not going in without knowing exactly where you'll be standing.
" I laced my fingers through his, testing the plan out loud the way I tested everything, turning it over until I found its weak points.
"I want the earpiece Pavel's been using for the perimeter team, not a separate one Hollis controls.
If something changes in that room, I want to hear it from you first."
"Done." He brought my hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to my knuckles. "I want a second exit mapped from the viewing room that isn't the one Kessler will be watching. Sasha's seen the blueprints. He'll know one."
"And I want to be the one who decides when the conversation with Kessler actually starts.
Not Hollis's timeline. Mine." I felt the plan solidify as I said it, felt myself become something more than the person the room got built around.
"I've spent this whole case being protected through it.
I want to walk into that room as the person who ends it. "
"Then that's what we build." He pulled me back down against his chest, and I felt him breathing easier than I'd heard him breathe in weeks, both of us finally working from the same side of the same board instead of two separate ones stitched together after the fact.
"One more thing. When you're in that room with him, you don't wait for a signal from me to end it.
You'll know before I will. I trust that now. "
"That might be the most terrifying sentence you've ever said to me." I laughed, surprised into it, and felt the sound settle something loose in my chest that had been tight since the doorway. "You realize you just handed me the whole plan."
"I handed you your half of it. You already had the other half.
You've had it since the ledger." He tipped my chin up with two fingers despite everything we'd just done, and kissed me slow and certain, like a period at the end of a sentence neither of us had managed to finish honestly until tonight. "Partners. All the way through it."
"Partners," I said, and meant it as a promise instead of a hope, and lay there listening to his heart settle into something steady under my ear while outside the window Brooklyn kept turning over into whatever the night still owed it, neither of us flinching once at any of the ordinary, distant noise of the world we'd finally agreed to face together.