21. Chapter Twenty-One #2
And it wasn't the name he gave me that second day, half a warning and half a joke, a thing to hold a stranger at arm's length with.
He wore it down over a month into something gentler without either of us noticing.
When he said it now, low, with his forehead coming down to rest against mine and his breath unsteady between us, it wasn't the name of a wary armed stranger anymore.
It was mine. It was every word he didn't have and couldn't say, folded down small enough to fit in one syllable he could.
"Say it again," I said.
He did. Against my mouth this time. And then there was no more room in me for words, his or mine, because his mouth was on mine and it was nothing like the careful, doomed thing in the workshop.
This was the man who already threw me away once and came back up a mountain alive rather than lose the chance to be wrong about it.
He kissed me like that, like a decision already made, both hands in my too-short hair, and I got my fists into the front of his coat and pulled him down and stopped holding still at last, stopped waiting for the thing to come to me, and met it.
He pulled back just far enough to find my eyes. Asking. Always, this man, asking.
"Yes," I said. "Beckett. Yes."
I didn’t wait for him to ask again. I pulled him back down by the front of his coat and crashed my mouth into his, open and hungry, teeth catching his lower lip.
He made a low sound against me—half growl, half surrender—and then he was moving, walking me backward until my spine hit the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of me.
His hands left my hair. One braced beside my head.
The other shoved under the hem of my shirt, rough palm skating up my ribs, finding the underside of my breast and squeezing like he meant to leave fingerprints.
I arched into it, hips already rolling against the thick press of him through his clothes.
“Fuck,” he muttered against my mouth. “Trigger—”
“Don’t stop.” The words came out ragged. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He didn’t. He kissed me like he was starving for the taste of the yes I already gave him, tongue sliding deep, claiming.
His thigh shoved between mine, and I ground down on it without shame, chasing the friction.
The wall was cold at my back. His body was heat and weight and the sharp scent of snow still clinging to his coat.
He broke the kiss only long enough to yank my shirt up and over my head.
It hit the floor somewhere. His mouth dropped to my throat, teeth scraping, then lower—biting the soft place above my collarbone while his hands worked the clasp of my bra.
Cool air hit my skin a second before his mouth did.
He took one nipple between his teeth and sucked hard enough that my head thudded back against the wall and a broken sound ripped out of me.
“Beckett—”
He answered by switching to the other breast, rough and thorough, while his free hand dropped to the button of my pants.
He popped it open, dragged the zipper down, and shoved the fabric past my hips.
I kicked them the rest of the way off, boots and all, until I was naked and shaking against the wall.
He didn’t undress himself. He just opened his own fly with one impatient hand, freed his cock, and looked at me—eyes dark, jaw tight, waiting one last time even now.
I reached between us and wrapped my fingers around him. He was thick and already leaking. I stroked once, slowly, and his forehead dropped to mine on a harsh breath.
“Yes,” I said again, because he needed to hear it. “Now.”
He hooked one of my legs up around his hip, lined himself up, and drove into me in one long, rough thrust that stole every word I had left.
The stretch was sharp, perfect, and I cried out against his mouth as he bottomed out.
He didn’t give me time to adjust. He pulled back and slammed home again, harder, the wall at my back the only thing keeping me upright.
I dug my nails into his shoulders through the coat he never took off.
Every thrust was deep and punishing, the kind that edged on too much and somehow still wasn’t enough.
He fucked me like he was trying to rewrite every time he built a wall between us, every time I let him.
The wet sound of it filled the map-room.
My bare skin scraped the wall. His belt buckle dug into my thigh.
I didn’t care. I met every stroke, rolling my hips down to take him deeper, chasing the burn and the fullness and the way his breath kept catching like he was the one coming undone.
When my legs started to shake he growled low in his throat, pulled out of me, and spun me around.
My palms slapped the table. He kicked my feet wider, one hand between my shoulder blades pressing me down until my cheek was against the cool wood and my ass was in the air.
Then he was back inside me in a single brutal thrust that forced a moan out of me loud enough to echo.
“Jesus—Trigger—”
He gripped my hips hard enough to bruise and started fucking me in earnest, deep and relentless, the table creaking under us.
I could feel every inch of him, every snap of his hips.
One of his hands slid around to find my clit and rubbed in rough, perfect circles while he pounded into me.
The dual sensation was almost too much. My fingers curled against the tabletop.
My eyes burned. I pushed back onto him anyway, greedy for more, for all of it.
“Come on,” he rasped behind me. “Give it to me. I’ve got you.”
The orgasm hit like a wave breaking. I came hard around him, clenching, shaking, a broken sound torn from my throat as pleasure ripped through me.
He didn’t slow down. He fucked me through it, chasing his own release, and when he came it was with a low, guttural groan and a final deep thrust that seated him as far as he could go.
I felt the hot pulse of him inside me, the way his hands tightened on my hips like he was afraid I’d disappear if he let go.
For a long moment the only sound was our breathing, harsh and uneven. He stayed buried in me, forehead resting between my shoulder blades, one hand still splayed over my hip as if he needed the contact. I could feel his heartbeat against my back.
When he finally eased out, it was careful. He turned me around again, gentler this time, and cupped my face with both hands. His thumbs brushed under my eyes. There was something raw and open in his expression that matched the ache still humming through my body.
I didn’t look away.
Neither did he.
We went the long way down, keeping to the passages nobody used past midnight, ducking into the shadow of a doorway once when footsteps passed too close.
I bit back a laugh against his shoulder, and he pressed a finger to my lips, grinning like a man half his age, like we were two kids sneaking past a curfew instead of two grown adults who answered to no one.
His door was the plainest one in the corridor, unmarked, easy to miss unless you already knew—and I realized I never knew which one was his until that night.
He kept that as hidden as everything else.
We lay tangled in the narrow dark of his room, and for a long while neither of us said anything at all. His heart was slowing under my ear. One of his hands moved in my hair, slowly, like he was learning it, like a man who couldn’t quite credit that the thing was real and had to keep checking.
"I meant to be better at this," he said finally, into the dark. "Whatever this is. I forgot how it's done. If I ever knew."
"You came up a mountain alive because I told you to." I felt him go still. "You're doing fine."
His arm tightened around me. Out past the walls, past the sealed doors and the carried-down stores and the eleven sleeping children, the mountain stood in the winter dark.
Its flood was grinding up the low road toward us, days out and closing.
There was every chance in the world that this was the only night we were ever going to get.
I spent five years believing the far side of things was a lie people told themselves.
Lying there in the dark with his heartbeat under my cheek and his hand in my hair, I let myself do a reckless thing, the most reckless thing I’ve done in all those years of careful surviving.
I let myself want the far side of it anyway.
"We'll get to your last piece," I said, quiet, into his chest. "The part you couldn't. Not tonight. But we'll get to it."
A long breath went out of him, warm against the top of my head.
"After," he said.
"After," I agreed. And for the first time in five years, I let the word mean something.