CHAPTER 15
Mara
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She walked the corridor to his door with the Seiko warm against her wrist and every step measured for what it was, not what it counted.
The hall lights were down to the low amber the compound used after ten.
Somewhere below, the diesel generator turned over once and settled again.
Cold air pushed against the west windows and rolled off them without getting in. The east wing was warm.
She had stood at her own window for a long time before she came.
She had watched the frost gather on the outer pane and the wind push the pines against each other on the north slope.
She had run through, once, what she was going to say when he opened the door, and then she had stopped and set the sentences down because she wanted to arrive without a script.
She was a woman who used scripts when she was afraid.
She was not afraid tonight. She was clear.
She had spent the last three days walking around inside the fact of what she wanted from him, and the fact had not changed shape when she looked at it directly. That was how she knew.
She had put on the plain dark clothes she was wearing without any thought about what they said, because she trusted him not to read her clothes for a message.
He had never read her clothes for a message.
He read her hands and her breath and the small distances she kept from a wall and a door, and he had never made her account for any of it aloud.
She lifted her hand to knock and the door opened before she touched it.
Elias stood on the other side, still in the dark shirt he had worn at dinner, sleeves pushed to his forearms, hair damp at the temples from the shower he had taken while she was standing at her own window trying to decide.
He had turned off every light in the room but the one lamp behind him.
She saw the low outline of the bed past his shoulder, made up and turned back one corner, and she understood that he had turned it back for her before he even knew she was coming.
“I heard you coming down the corridor,” he said.
She did not have anything ready to say. She looked at him and felt the shape of what she had come to say arrive on its own, without her having to lift it.
“Come in and close the door behind you,” he said, and she did.
The lock slid home with a small metal sound. He did not touch her. He stood a step away with his hands at his sides and looked at her mouth and then at her eyes.
“Are you sure,” he said, before he touched her. “Not because I’m being polite. Because I need to hear you say it.”
She heard him ask it clean, no weight put on the word polite, no leverage in his voice, and it steadied her.
She unbuckled the Seiko from her left wrist and set it face-up on the bedside table beside the lamp before she answered him, because she wanted her hands free and she wanted Nathan out of the space between them for what she was about to say.
She was not putting her brother away. She was setting him down carefully.
There was a difference she could feel in her fingers.
“I’m sure. I want you inside me tonight.”
He let out a breath he had been holding since he opened the door. He did not smile. He did not make her carry it alone. He took one step closer, and his hand came up slow enough for her to have stopped it, and she did not stop it.
“May I take this off,” he said, with his hand at her collar.
“Yes.”
He undid the top button of her shirt with two fingers, the way he did everything he did well — no wasted motion, no drama, no display of the doing. He was not performing patience. He was patient.
“I’m going to unpin your braid now,” he said.
She turned her head a little for him and felt him find the pins and lift them one at a time and set them on the bedside table beside the Seiko.
When the braid came apart in his hand he let the length of it fall against her shoulder blades and stood there a beat, just looking, and she felt the looking on her skin.
“I want to see the line of your throat,” he said, and he undid the next button, and the next, and by the third she felt the cool air of the room against her collarbones and the warmth of his hand hovering a breath above her skin without landing.
He waited every time. He waited until she leaned into the next inch before he took it.
“Lift your arms if you want this off,” he said.
She lifted her arms. He drew the shirt over her head and folded it once and set it on the chair by the window without looking away from her face.
She had put on a plain black bralette; he unhooked it between her shoulder blades and let it come loose forward, and she caught it before it fell and set it on the folded shirt.
“Turn a little, and I’ll reach the last button,” he said, at her hip.
She turned. He undid the jeans at her waist and pushed them down her hips slowly enough that she was aware of the whole shape of him behind her, the width of him, the height of him at her shoulder, the way he moved without hurry.
She stepped out of the jeans. He picked them up and folded them and set them on the chair with the shirt, and the folding was part of what he was giving her.
She did not think that was performance either.
She thought he did not know how to do a task in halves.
She had never met a man before whose care looked like tidying a shirt.
When she turned back to face him he had not undressed at all.
“Color?” he said.
“Green.”
“Say green for me one more time if it stays green,” he said, hand at the back of her neck, palm warm and steady across the bone.
She waited a beat, listening to her body the way she would listen to a station reading, honest. The pulse in her wrist was quick and even. Her breath was even. The place low in her belly where she had been carrying want for days had gone open and warm.
“It stayed green.”
He nodded once and touched the corner of her mouth with his thumb and did not kiss her mouth. He kissed her jaw instead, once, slow. His mouth was warm. He was patient enough that she had to keep her breath even on purpose, and even then it broke a little at the top of her chest.
She reached up with both hands and pulled his shirt out of his belt and lifted it, and he raised his arms for her, and she pulled it off him.
She had seen him in less than this, in the shower two nights ago, but she had not touched him then, and she touched him now — the width of his shoulders, the long slope of his back she read like terrain, the healed shrapnel scar low on his right side under his ribs.
She put her palm across the scar once and left it there.
He did not flinch. He let her have the shape of it.
She unbuckled him. He let her. He kicked off his boots and let her push the trousers down and step in against him where the room was warmest, skin to skin from her collarbone to her hip.
“Tell me if I go too fast,” he said, at her ear.
“You aren’t going too fast.”
He walked her back the two steps to the bed and lowered her down with a hand at the small of her back so that the mattress caught her instead of the fall.
He did not follow her down at once. He knelt at the foot of the bed and put his hands on her ankles and pushed them a little wider with a pressure so gentle it was almost a question.
“I want my mouth on you now,” he said.
She said his name once. That was all.
He put his mouth on her wet and open and on her clit and stayed there for a long time.
He was patient there the way he was patient everywhere.
Her hands went into his hair and stayed there.
She was quiet at first, and then not quiet, and then she made one long low sound she did not measure or shape or name.
He read her by the pulse of her hip against his palm and the way her fingers tightened at the root of his hair.
He answered every small movement she made with a steadier one, and every time her breath climbed he held the pace and let her climb further.
He did not chase anything. He waited for her to arrive, and when she began to arrive he did not speed.
He did not stop until she had to reach for him and pull him up.
He came up over her slow, weight braced on his forearms, the length of him warm along the length of her, his mouth wet at the corner and unashamed of it.
“May I push in now, slow and careful,” he said.
“Yes, I want that.”
He pushed in slow. She was ready and he was careful and it was still a thing to breathe through, and she breathed.
He was inside her by degrees, and by the time he was all the way in she had a hand at the back of his neck and her other palm flat between his shoulder blades.
She felt the size of him settle in her body and did not reach for any number for it, because there was no number in her that fit.
He held there. He did not move. He looked down at her face with the whole of his attention.
“Tell me if anything hurts,” he said.
“Nothing hurts at all.”
He began to move.
She had thought she would think about it and she did not.
The shape of him was inside her and there was no measurement for it.
There was only spread and inside and hard and the honest word for how much of him she wanted, which was all of him.
She kept her palm at the back of his neck and let herself feel the pull of him leaving her a little and coming back and leaving her a little and coming back.
He moved slow. He was watching her face. She had one hand at his jaw and the other on his back and she had stopped tracking anything, which she did not usually do, and did not notice she had stopped.
Halfway through — she did not know the minute — she put her palm flat on his chest.
He stopped at once. He held above her, not out, not away, present. His breath was quicker than his mouth let on. Under her palm his heart was fast.