Chapter 12 #2
By dark neither of us is pretending.
She comes up the stair ahead of me and turns at the top with the lamp behind her, and there’s no chatter in her face for once, only the same thing that’s been building in mine, and she puts her hand flat on my chest to stop me on the last step so we’re of a height for a breath, her on the stair-top, me below.
“Same rule as the shed,” she says, low. “Don’t be careful with the wanting part. Be careful with the rest of me, you great enormous man, I’m made of sticks and you’re made of oak. But not with the wanting. I’ve had a lifetime of careful wanting and it kept me nowhere.”
“I can do both,” I tell her. The words come out with a burr on them. “Careful with the woman. Not careful with the want. I’ve held a lot of things I could’ve crushed and never once did. I know the difference in my own hands.”
“Then show me.”
So I do.
I take her face first, both hands, and I kiss her without a scrap of the holding-back I gave her in the shed, and she makes that sound again, low, the one that landed in my chest more than my ears the first time, and it goes straight down through me and lands somewhere it means to live now.
She’s got my shirt up and off before I’ve thought to help her, her palms flat on my chest, over the old ridged scars her fingers have learned in the dark these three nights, and she’s not gentle about it and I don’t want her gentle.
It’s her hands that shake. Not mine. Mine have never been steadier, because there’s a thing here I mean to do right, and doing a thing right is the one prayer I’ve ever known how to say.
The sound she makes when I get her own shirt over her head is one I take in my chest more than my ears, and it settles somewhere it means to stay.
She’s small, standing there in the lamp with her hair a wreck and her chin up and no flinch in her at the size of me, none, the same fearless tip of her head she gave me the first night in the yard, except there’s nothing between us now but want and a foot of warm dark air.
I look at her a long moment. I’ve spent a life finding the fault in everything I looked at.
There’s none in her. There never was. I stop looking for it and I let myself only look.
I lift her. It’s nothing, her weight, and it undoes her a little, the ease of it, her breath catching when I set her on the bed like she’s the only thing in the world worth setting down soft.
I follow her down and I keep my weight up on one forearm braced beside her head, all of it, so not an ounce of me is on her ribs, because I clocked the bad set of that left side her first week here and I’ve not forgotten it and I never will.
“You’re holding yourself up,” she says, half a laugh, half something else, her hand finding the strain in my braced arm.
“Aye.”
“Your arm’s going to give out.”
“It won’t. I’ve held worse for longer.” I set my mouth to the side of her throat and feel her pulse go wild under it. “You’ll not take my weight tonight, or any night. That’s not up for debate either.”
“You and your rules.” But she tips her head back to give me the line of her throat, and there’s nothing in her but yes.
I take my time. I’ve got a lifetime of it saved up and nowhere better to spend it.
I learn her slow, with my whole attention, and it’s only the finding of what makes her breath change and what makes her hands fist and what pulls that helpless sound up out of her again.
My mouth at her throat, her collarbone, lower, and every place I find she goes taut and then liquid under me, and tells me so, because she can’t not tell me things, even now, even wordless she’s the loudest honest thing I’ve ever held.
I put my mouth and my hands everywhere the careful’s allowed to go and I take my time getting there, and she’s writhing under me and swearing at me for the slowness of it and I don’t hurry for the swearing, because the swearing means she’s mine to take slow.
When I finally settle my hand low between her legs she’s already slick and open and past pretending, and the sound she makes when I find the right of it near ends me on the spot.
I do it again. I do it until she’s arched clean off the bed with a fistful of my hair, until I’ve read every last honest thing her body will tell me about what it wants, and only then, when she’s begging plain, do I give her the first of it.
“Madoc.” My name, broken clean in half. Her hips chase my hand. “Madoc, I want, I want—”
“I know.” I do know. I’ve been reading her an hour. “You’ll have it. Let me get you there first. You’re small and I’m not, and I’ll not hurt you rushing a thing we’ve got the whole night for.”
She comes apart on my hand with my name in her mouth and her nails in my shoulder, and I hold her through the whole of it, watching, because I built a life on watching for the moment a thing gives way and I have never once in that life seen anything I wanted to watch like this, a woman I can’t find the fault in coming undone under my hand and trusting me the whole way down.
When I come over her at last I do it slow.
I keep the weight off. I mind the size of it, of me, easing in by inches, stopping each time her breath changes, reading her close, patient with a thing I mean to last, and she’s tight and hot around me and her hands are hauling me down and her mouth’s at my ear telling me she’s fine, she’s better than fine, don’t you dare stop being not-careful now, and I laugh, low and wrecked, into her hair, because only Carys would argue me through her own undoing.
“You feel that,” I get out, when I’m seated full in her and holding still to let her have the size of it. “That’s not the god. That’s not the working. That’s just you and me, and it’s the realest thing I’ve touched in five years, and I’d have it if there were no god at all.”
“I know,” she breathes, and there are tears at the corners of her eyes and none of them are sad. “That’s the part that scares me. It’s real with nothing owed on it. Now move, you enormous soft-hearted man, before I lose my nerve about how much I mean that.”
So I move.
I don’t rush even then. It builds slow and it builds true, her legs come up around me, my forehead drops to hers, my head canted so the tusks ride clear of her cheek, without either of us breaking rhythm, and it’s not stars and it’s not fire, it’s plainer and it’s better than either, it’s her breath and my breath in the same broken time and her hands spread flat on my back holding on and the old bed I built too big finally holding exactly what I built it too big to hold.
When she goes over the second time she takes me with her, and I press my face into the crook of her neck and I make a sound I’ve never made in front of another soul, and she holds my head there with both hands and says my name soft into the dark like it’s a thing worth saying.
After, I don’t roll off her onto the cold side. I gather her up onto my chest instead, her ear over my heart, and I pull the blanket over the both of us, and I keep one hand spread warm on the small of her back and the other in her ruined hair, and neither of us says a word for a long while.
The anchor stands half-cut in the shed. The god waits in the trees.
The high bloom comes on in three days, and I’ve a working to finish and a thing to build that has to hold off the end of the world, and I lie in the dark with a sleeping beekeeper on my chest and understand, plain and cold and certain, that the Keeper was right about all three pieces.
The song is hers. The anchor’s mine. And the third thing, the binding, the two who choose each other and say so out loud, that one’s sitting right here on my chest breathing slow, real with nothing owed on it, and neither of us has said the words yet, and both of us know we have to, and both of us know it might be the thing that gets one of us killed.
I hold her while she sleeps. I don’t build tonight. Tomorrow I’ll cut the great root-joint that has to take the pull from below, and I’ll get it right, because getting a thing right is the only prayer I know.
Tonight I only hold the thing I mean to keep, and let myself, for once, not look for where it breaks.