25. Naveed #2
Run the sweep. The habit comes up out of reflex and finds nothing to do.
Locks engaged. Film on the glass. Cameras green on my phone, all four angles, nobody on the fire escape, nobody in the stairwell, no vehicle on the block that has been there more than twenty minutes.
I ran all of it forty minutes ago. The building is as secure as any structure in this borough that is not a bank.
Which means there is nothing left in this room to manage.
My hands do not know that. They keep looking for a task, the way they have looked for a task every hour since the article went live. I put one flat on the counter to make it stop.
Kat is standing three feet away with her hip against the cabinet and her arms crossed loose, watching me the way she watches a source who has stopped talking.
"You okay?"
Two words. She has learned to hand them back to me.
"Yes."
"You look like someone unplugged you."
That is not far off. Every system I own runs on a threat. Take the threat away and the machinery keeps turning with nothing in the gears, and what comes up through the empty space is the thing I have been holding underneath all of it.
Wanting her.
Not the sharp kind that arrives after gunfire, when a body needs proof it is still alive.
Not the kind I can call a panic response and step away from, because she named that one and she was right.
This is quieter and it has been running the entire time, a low hum under every sweep and every count, and with nothing louder on top of it, it is all I can hear.
My teeth ache. I have been clenching them against the urge to close three feet.
She sees something on my face. She always does.
"What."
"Nothing's chasing us."
Kat goes very still. Then her arms come uncrossed.
"No."
"There's nothing to do."
"I know." A breath goes out of her, shaky at the end. "It's awful. I don't know where to put my hands."
Neither do I.
The lamp behind her throws a long shape across the floorboards and does not reach the corners. Somewhere down the block a car door shuts and I do not turn my head, and I notice that I did not turn my head, and I let that be true.
"Kat."
"Yeah."
"Come here."
She crosses the three feet. She does not hurry, and I understand for the first time that there is no reason to.
She stops close enough that I can feel the heat coming off her. Not touching. Waiting.
I lift my hand and set it against her jaw. Skin, warm, the small muscle jumping under my thumb where she is holding something back.
"Take your hair down."
The words come out quiet. An order all the same.
Her eyes flare. She reaches back, works the tie loose, and it falls, dark and heavy, over her shoulders. My chest does something it has no permission to do.
Ten years of discipline. Gone in one look.
"Better?" Her voice is not steady.
"Yes."
I kiss her.
Slow. That is the decision I make, standing in her kitchen with cold lamb going gray in two bowls: slow.
Because every other time we have done this there has been something behind us, a gun or a fight or a grave, and this time there is nothing at all, and I want to know what my hands do when they are not running from something.
She makes a sound against my mouth and her fingers close in my shirt.
Perimeter secure. Four cameras. Two exits, one primary, one f—
The count starts on habit and I do not finish it.
I let it drop.
That has never happened. Not in eight years of service, not in eight years since. The count is the floor under my feet and I take my foot off it on purpose and the room does not fall.
Kat pulls back an inch. Reads my face.
"Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere."
"You went somewhere."
"I came back." My hand slides into her hair, gathers it, tips her head. "Bedroom."
"Is that a command?"
"Yes."
Her smile is crooked and dazed. "Okay."
She turns and I follow her, I don't check the window on the way past. I register that I did not check the window and something in my chest loosens like a fist opening after a long night.
Her bedroom is warm, half-dark, one lamp on the far side, the bed unmade because she never makes it, I stopped fixing it three weeks ago. She stops at the foot and turns.
I take my time. The buttons on her shirt, one at a time.
My restraint frays one thread at a time.
"Naveed."
"Wait."
I pull the shirt over her shoulders, the bra goes next, she arches to help me, I put my mouth on the curve of her shoulder, she shudders. Her hands come up into my hair.
"You're torturing me on purpose."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I can."
Her breath catches, her hands move to my belt, quick and impatient.
My shirt goes over the back of the chair, her jeans end up on the floor. When I place her on the bed she lifts on her elbows watching me, her hair spread everywhere, and everything in me stops working right.
I kneel over her. Put one hand flat on her chest, her heart going too fast under my palm, the rhythm ragged.
"Okay?"
"Yes." She says it fast. "Yes, God, yes."
"Say it again."
"I want this. I want you. Naveed…"
"That's enough."
My mouth finds her throat first, the hollow at the base of it, her breath jumps. Then lower, taking my time mapping her body. Her ribs. The soft under her breast. Her nipple against my tongue, the sound she makes going straight to my already engorged shaft.
I kiss down her stomach, her hands find my head. She is soaked. Fuck. At the first touch of my tongue, her hips lift off the bed.
"Oh…"
I hold her down with a forearm across her hips and work her with my mouth, she swears at me, gasps, says my name in a sing song between breaths. Her thighs shake against my shoulders as I feast on her sweet cunt.
"Naveed, I need…"
I lift my head. "Eyes on me."
She drags her head up, hair stuck to her cheek, wrecked. Looks at me.
I put two fingers into her, slow, curl them, her face comes apart as an orgasm hits and she comes hard. Grabbing my wrist, holding me there while she pulses around my fingers, her mouth open with a broken sound, her eyes still on mine as she comes undone.
The orgasm in my chest tears loose. I have no word for it and no place to file it.
I move up over her body, she is still shaking.
"Now," she says. "Now, please…"
"I've got you."
I push into her in one fast motion until I'm buried deep.
Slow. That was the plan that lasts all of two seconds, before she wraps her legs around me, lifts and takes me all the way in. My forehead drops to her shoulder and a groan slams out of me.
Assess. Regulate. Breathe on a four count.
Nothing. The system is dark. There is no count, no perimeter, no exit, no assessment running underneath, no part of me standing at the wall watching the room. For the first time since I was eighteen years old there is no one on post.
There is only her, hot and tight, shaking around me, her nails dragging down my back, her mouth at my ear.
"Look at me."
She lifts her head. Her hands frame my face and hold it there.
"Baby, I want you to grab my throat while you feed me your cock."
I move in her. Deep, unhurried, then not unhurried at all, because control is a thing I put down, I cannot find it again. Her breath breaks on every stroke. The headboard knocks the brick.
"That's it," she breathes through the clamp of my hand. "That's it, don't stop…"
"Katarina."
Her whole body clenches at her name.
"Yes…yes…yes… Oh God."
"Katarina." Rougher. My hand slides under her, tilts her hips, she cries out. "Azizam."
Fuuck… this woman is going to be the death of me.
She asked me to put my hand on her throat, and fuck me, I did it without a sliver of hesitation.
These hands have closed on throats before.
They know to the ounce how little it takes, know the give of a windpipe, know the exact second a man stops being able to decide anything ever again.
That knowledge lives in my palm and I will not be free of it for as long as I breathe.
She has no idea what she asks of me, she looks at the hands that carry it and said, put them on me, trusted me to hold the border between the pleasure and pain. This is a first for me. I have never in my life been so careful with anything, or so completely wrecked by being trusted to be.
Her eyes go glassy, her hands grip harder.
She comes around me a second time, dragging me with her, no warning, no control. My back locks, I throw my head back and hold myself deep, everything in me spilling into her.
I fall on her, forearms braced, breathing like I ran ten miles. Her fingers move slow through the hair at the back of my neck.
Neither of us says anything for a long time.
I roll, taking her with me, and she settles against my chest with her leg over mine. I look at the ceiling in her half-dark bedroom and try to find the machinery.
It comes back online slowly, the way a limb wakes up. Her breathing: evening out. Mine: not yet.
Her hand flattens over my heart. "Your pulse is insane."
"Yes."
"Is that normal for you?"
"No."
She laughs, low and sleepy, into my shoulder. "Good."
I lie there and let the count run at half speed, her weight a comfort on my chest, and my eyes travel the room out of nothing but habit. Door. Window. Chair. Desk. The stack of her notebooks on the desk, spines out, numbered in her handwriting.
Nine, ten, eleven. Thirteen. Fourteen.
I stop, back up.
Nine, ten, eleven, thirteen, fourteen.
"Kat."
Something in my voice changes. She lifts her head immediately.
"What."
"Where's twelve?"