33. Margot #2
When I could not wait any longer, when the wanting had stopped being a decision and turned into something closer to gravity, I climbed back up the length of him and settled astride his hips, and I took him in my hand and guided the blunt heat of him to exactly where I needed him, and I held us both there at the very edge of it for one unbearable moment, watching his jaw lock and his eyes go black with the effort of not moving.
Then I took his good hand and laced my fingers through his and pressed it into the pillow beside his head, holding him down, and I lowered myself onto him slowly, taking him into me one impossible inch at a time, watching his face the entire way down, because for once in this thing between us I wanted to be the one who saw everything.
The stretch and the fullness of it pulled the breath clean out of me, and his own breath came apart on my name, and a low broken curse escaped him when I had finally seated all of him deep inside me.
For a moment after that I did not move at all.
I stayed there with the whole of him buried in me and my palms flat on his chest, both of us shaking on the knife's edge of it, his heart slamming up into my hands, and I made myself feel every inch of what I had chosen, no glass between us, nothing hidden, nothing watched from any safe remove.
He looked up at me as though I were the only real thing that had ever happened to him.
Then I set the pace. Slow first, and then not slow at all.
I decided when he was allowed to lift his hips to meet me and when he had to lie still and simply take what I chose to give him, and he obeyed me with a helpless devotion that loosened the last hard knot the folder had tied in me.
I found the rhythm that undid us both and I kept it, rising and falling over him in the low gold light, and every time I felt him gather to take control the way instinct and a whole lifetime had trained him to, he remembered his promise and gave it back to me, gave himself back to me, and I have never in my life held anything the way I held that.
His hand gripped mine hard enough to leave marks I would find in the morning and be glad of.
Sweat gleamed on the hard planes of him.
I bent and kissed him slow and filthy without once losing the rhythm, and I felt him strain up into me, chasing, obeying, wrecked, and I let him have a little more, and then a little more, spending the pleasure out between us like a woman who at long last held all of it in her own grip.
He was forty-one and lethal and had built an entire life on being the most controlled man in any room, and he was coming apart underneath me only because I let him, at the speed I chose to let him, and I have never once in my life felt so completely myself.
This was the inversion of all of it. He had watched me from behind glass, and now he watched me from beneath, unable to look away and no longer wanting to.
I moved over him through his unraveling and my own, and when it finally took me it took me like something breaking open into light, and I said his name like it was both an accusation and a blessing, and he went over the edge right after me with my name in his mouth as though it were the last word he had left in any language.
He turned his head into my hair and I felt him shaking, faintly, in a way that had nothing left to do with the wound in his shoulder.
"You have no idea," he said, ruined, and the thing was, this time I did.
This time I knew exactly. It was the same sentence he had breathed to me on the first of the two nights, in what feels now like another person's life, before I understood a single thing about him.
Only it had turned all the way over in the meantime.
Then it had been a warning I was too happy to hear.
Now it was the sound of a man surrendering the last thing he had kept back.
Afterward I lay against his good side, both of us wrecked and grinning at the ceiling like a pair of fools, his heart still slamming under my ear, and for a while neither of us said anything clever, because there was nothing clever left in either of us to say.
It was the most honest quiet of my life.
"We can never tell a living soul how we met," I said into his chest.
"No," he agreed.
"I keep trying to draft it. In my head. The clean version, the one you hand to strangers at parties. Every single one is unpublishable."
"Tell me the worst one."
"He broke into my shop to install surveillance, then watched me through a window for eight months, until a man he used to work for tried to have me murdered over my dead grandmother's paperwork.
" I felt him laugh, a real one, rare as a comet and twice as bright, moving the whole bed with it.
"You see the problem. My own editor would send that back with a note.
Too grim for the cozy readers, too idiotic for the thriller ones. "
"Say that I was a locksmith," he offered. "It is technically true. I did excellent work on your locks."
"'He fixed my locks' is somehow the single most sinister version available, and I hate that you are right about it." I propped myself up on his good arm to look at him. "There is no shelf for us in any store. We are unpublishable. We are a market of two."
And for one long, unreasonable stretch of that night, that was allowed to be enough.
A borrowed room, a healing man, a market of two, and nobody at all trying to shoot us.
I had spent my whole writing life inventing peace for imaginary people and never once managing to believe in it for myself, and there it was anyway, cheap and total and real, lying in a puddle of terrible lamplight with its arm thrown over me.
A rare pocket of peace, then his phone lights up. The Pakhan wants to see him. Alone. No way to know if it's a reckoning or a trap.