CHAPTER 15 #2
She looked at his face. She had come here to say this, and she had almost let the body of it carry her past. She kept her palm on his chest, over his heart, the same gesture she had used against the wet tile of the shower two nights ago, when he had asked her a smaller question and she had put her hand there and answered.
She took one breath uneven.
“Nathan,” she said. Her voice held. “My brother. Eleven months ago. Nyx buried a warning and the ground moved on him.”
He did not move. He did not pull out. He did not look away. He lowered his forehead to hers and stayed there, one long moment of nothing but their breath sharing the small space between their mouths.
“I heard you. I am not going anywhere,” he said, forehead against hers, still not moving.
She kept her palm on his chest until the heart under it slowed a little, and then she moved her hand up to the back of his neck.
She had not cried. She had thought, all this time, that saying it would take her legs out from under her.
It had not. It had let her breathe further down into her chest than she had breathed in eleven months.
The room was quieter now than it had been before she spoke, and the quiet did not accuse her of anything.
He had taken the weight of the name without making her carry his hearing of it.
That was the piece she had not expected.
She had expected to have to hold his face while he understood; she had not needed to hold anything.
“Keep going,” she said, and her voice was steady. “Please.”
He began to move again, slower than before, no faster than her breath allowed. She had thought naming Nathan aloud would break the thing under them; it did not. It let her open a little wider under him. It let her want him without setting anything down that she did not want set down.
“I’ll go where your breath goes, no faster,” he said, low, at her temple.
She stopped listening for anything but him. He was in her at a pace she could feel down to her hip bones. He was watching her mouth. She had one hand at his jaw, and when the wave came up in her she kept the hand there and did not close her eyes.
“Mara,” he said, low, once, at her ear.
She came quietly, with her hand at his jaw and the flat of her other palm against the back of his neck.
It rolled through her chest and down her thighs and settled at the place where he was inside her, and she held on to his jaw and to the back of his neck and did not look away from his face.
He held inside her while she did, not moving, and let her have it whole.
“Do you want me to come inside you?” he said.
“Yes.”
He moved into her again, and deeper, and stopped and stayed. He kept his weight on his forearms and his face against her hair and did not speak. She felt him let go inside her the way she had felt him hold on, without noise, without ceremony, everything spent into her and nothing performed.
For a long moment there was no sound in the room except their breathing and the low push of the generator two floors below.
He kissed her temple and moved off her carefully, out of her body slow, one hand still at her hip so she could feel him leave without startling. He did not hurry the withdrawal. He did not treat the after like a different scene.
“Drink some water first,” he said, and he turned to the bedside table and set a cool glass in her hand.
She sat up on one elbow and drank. The water was cold, from the pitcher he had refilled while she was standing at her window deciding. He watched her drink and did not say anything until she had put the glass back down.
“Let me bring you a warm towel,” he said, and he was gone from the bed and back inside a minute with a folded washcloth run under warm water.
He cleaned her with the same care he had used to undress her, unhurried, ordinary, not shy, one hand steadying her hip.
He set the washcloth over the back of the chair when he was done. He did not make her thank him.
She lay back. He came around to her side of the bed and pulled the covers up around her shoulders and laid his hand between her shoulder blades and left it there, palm flat, warm through the sheet.
“How are you feeling in your body now, honestly?” he said.
“Yes, I’m all right.”
He nodded once, hand still on her back, and did not move it.
He did not ask her a second question to check the first. He believed her.
He had been trained, she thought, to hear what a person said and to take it as the true thing until it stopped being true, and he had not lost the habit when he came back off the field.
She had been treated by men with fewer scars for the trouble of being trusted.
She reached up and turned the bedside display so the numerals were away from her.
The last thing she saw before she turned it was 12:41 a.m. in small red digits.
She put her cheek against the sheet where he had turned it back for her before she came in, and she felt his hand between her shoulder blades hold there, and she did not add up the minutes since the display and she did not add up the days since Nathan and she did not add up her own breath against his.
The room was warm. The window was closed.
Outside, the cold snap had settled over the ridge for the night; she could hear the small sounds of pine cones falling on the roof of the east terrace and the wind pushing the scrub oak on the fourth approach, and none of it added up to anything she needed to count.
For the first time since Nathan, she slept without counting anything at all.