20. Kat #2
The refusal to hand me off. The door instead of the couch. The way he moves food onto a plate without a word. The way he went still when I said Ravelo, not because the name surprised him but because he has been carrying it longer than I have been alive to this version of it.
"He talked about you." My voice comes out too even. "He never used names. He said the boys. He said the boys and then he'd change the subject."
His hands are at his sides and they are not fists. That is somehow worse.
"Am I a guilt project?"
"You are an at-risk principal with a credible…"
"Don't." I turn my head away from him. Away, in my own bedroom, in the one room in the world that has always been mine. "Don't use that voice in here."
The quiet goes on long enough that I hear a truck downshift on the bridge.
"I took the assignment because of his name." His voice has changed. Stripped, low, costing him something. "I stayed at your door because of him. I am still standing in this room because of you."
I do not turn.
"I have known the difference for weeks."
Something in my chest opens and hurts the way a joint hurts going back into place.
"You should have told me."
"Yes."
"Not for me. For you." My eyes are burning and my voice will not rise, and I know exactly how bad that is, because he knows it too, I can feel him reading it off me from six feet away. "You've been in this apartment carrying my dead with you and you let me think you were just... assigned."
"I was not assigned. No one sends me. I chose."
"I know." I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. "That's the part that's going to keep me up."
He does not come toward me. He will not, not now, and I understand him well enough to know that the not-coming is his whole religion, that he has decided he is the last thing I need touching me.
Which is how I know it has to be me.
I stand. Cross the four feet of floorboard between us. He goes rigid the way he does before motion, and I take hold of the front of his shirt with both hands and do not pull, just hold, my knuckles against his sternum, his heart hammering under them like something trying to get out.
"You carried him two hundred and thirty meters."
"Kat."
"Put it down for one minute."
His breath stutters. Not a sigh. Something closer to a structure giving way.
"I don't know how."
"I'll help."
My fingers work the buttons from the top down. He lets me. That is the whole miracle of it: he lets me, hands still at his sides, jaw set, honey-brown eyes locked on my face like he is waiting for the moment I change my mind so he can be ready for it.
I won't.
The shirt comes off his shoulders, I push it down his arms and let it drop on my bedroom floor, and there it is. The one I have traced before without knowing what I was touching. Long, ropey, low along his right ribs, silvered at the edges where it healed badly and then healed again.
Kandahar.
My uncle's last day is written on this man's body and I have had my hands on it for weeks.
I am about to put my mouth on the day my uncle died.
I know exactly what I am doing and I do it anyway, because there is nowhere else on this earth the grief and the wanting are allowed to be the same act, and here, on this ridge of ruined skin, they finally are.
Every other person handed me their sympathy from a safe distance, a casserole, a folded flag, a hand on the shoulder that could not wait to be taken back.
This man wears the wound of it on his own body and has never once asked me to be sorry for him.
I don't want to be gentle with it. I want to claim it.
I want my mouth on the proof that the last thing to happen to Ravelo in this world was a man who refused to leave him behind, and if that is a monstrous thing to want, then I have been in that state for a long time and only tonight found the one place it finally looks like love.
I press my palm flat over it. His stomach jumps under my wrist.
"This one."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"That one is the day I lost him." His voice drops to almost nothing. "That one is the day I carried him."
I lower my head and put my mouth on it.
A growl I have never heard escapes from him, low and broken open. His hand finally moves, finding the back of my head, fingers spreading through my hair, like he needs something to hold or he'll go down.
I kiss the whole length of it, slow, the ridge of scar tissue rough against my lips, salt, warm skin and the faint clean taste underneath. My eyes are wet but I don't care. Grief and want is running together on the same channel, and I have stopped trying to tell them apart.
"Kat." Wrecked. "You don't have to…"
"I want to." I look up at him from under my lashes with my mouth still on his ribs. "That's not the same as have to. Learn the difference."
His fingers curl in my hair.
I straighten, pull my shirt over my head myself, I want his hands free to see what he does with them. His eyes move down my body, slow, all the way down and the heat from that look is so hot I feel the moistness between my thighs.
"Take me to bed," I whisper.
Six foot three of trained violence sitting down on the edge of my bed.
I climb over him. Knees on either side of his thighs, hands braced on his shoulders, and settle down until I am flush against him with only his denim and my leggings in the way.
The ridge of him is already hard under me and my whole body clenches around nothing.
"Look at me."
His eyes rise to meet mine, a smirk firmly in place.
"No perimeter," I tell him. "Not tonight. You don't get to guard the room. You just get to be in it."
His hands land on my waist. Big, hot, scarred, shaking. Actually shaking, I feel it against my ribs, and something in my chest cracks wide.
"Okay?" he asks.
"Yes." I lean in until my mouth is against his ear. "Yes, azizam. Yes."
He shudders under me at his own language in my mouth, and then he kisses me.
This is nothing like the first time I kissed him, not even close.
This is a confession. He kisses me like he is reading me, slow drag of lips, the taste, the scrape of stubble under my chin, his hand rides up my back, spreads between my shoulder blades and presses me into him until there is no air between us at all.
I roll my hips. Slow. Grinding down on his hard length through his jeans, and the friction hits my clit exactly right and I gasp into his mouth.
"Do that again," he says against my lips.
I do it again. And again, rocking on him, the ache builds low, heavy, my leggings already soaked through, and I know he can feel the heat of it because his fingers dig into my hip and hold me down harder on the next pass.
"You feel that?" I whisper.
"Yes."
"That's what a month of you sleeping against my door did to me."
He groans against my throat, his mouth opens on the skin under my jaw and he sucks, teeth grazing, my head falls back and I ride him harder, chasing the pressure, the heat sliding out from where we are pressed together, up my belly and down my thighs.
He strips my bra off with one hand, his mouth closes over my nipple, my hips stutter, and I hear myself moan out loud.
"Naveed."
"I've got you."
"I know." I take his face in both hands and pull him up so I can see him, I mean it, I need to see him, I need the eyes and not just the hands. "I know. That's not the problem. You've had me since the first night. I want the rest."
His throat works. And then, God, then he says it, and his voice is nothing but gravel and ruin.
"Then take it."
I get off him long enough to strip out of my leggings and underwear, and he stands to get the belt and the jeans. We do it fast, clumsy and I laugh out loud, wet and shaking, he almost smiles and it wrecks me.
Then he is bare, I am bare, he pulls me down onto the bed on top of him.
I sit up over his hips. His cock is against my thigh, thick, hot, already leaking at the tip, and my whole pussy pulses at the sight of it.
"Tell me what you want," I say. "Out loud. Words, soldier."
His hands slide up my thighs. Thumbs on the crease as if checking my wetness, spreading me open, and watches while he does it.
"I want your mouth. I want you on me. I want to be inside you until neither of us can think about the dead.
" His thumb slides through my slit and finds my clit and circles, slow, my back arches on its own.
"And I want to watch your face when you come, because I have not stopped thinking about it since the night you kissed me to punish me. "
"Fuck." My voice breaks apart.
"Okay?"
"Don't stop talking. Your dirty talk is turning me on more. Did I tell you, you're fucking hot. I love it."
I slide down his body, take hold of his hard angry cock and lick the precum. God this man is beautiful but he is too much to handle. He rises on his elbows to watch me. His every sound, every squirm encourages me to keep going and I do.
I've barely gotten into the rhythm when he drags me up his body.
"When I come tonight sweetheart, I'll be buried deep in your sweet cunt. Not a moment before."
He does not stop talking. He works two fingers into my dripping core, his voice goes low and feral against my ear while he does it, filthy and quiet, telling me how wet I am, how tight I go around him, how he has stood in my kitchen at three in the morning with this exact sound in his head.
I ride his hand shamelessly, both palms flat on his chest, my hair falling forward around us, his scar under my knee.
"Now," I tell him. "Now, I need you now."
I lift up and reach between us and line him up, and I sink down on him one slow inch at a time, and it is so much that my eyes flood.
"Kat."
"I'm okay." My whole body is trembling. He is stretching me open and it burns in the best possible way, I do not stop until I am fully seated on his shaft, hips flush to his. "I'm okay. Look at me. Don't look away."
I start to move. Slow. Deep. Grinding down on every stroke so my clit drags against him, he lets me set the pace, hands on my hips, guiding, his breath ragged.