36. Kat
thirty-six
Kat
The loft still smells like her: coffee gone cold, the candle she never lights, old paper and ink. After the fire, the clean air of this place hits me like a hand pressed hard.
We stand in the doorway a second too long, both of us reluctant to disturb it. Naveed does the sweep without seeming to know he is doing it, eyes moving to the windows, the corners, the locks he installed himself. Some habits are permanent. I used to hate that. Now I catch myself waiting for it.
The city glows through the big black windows. The ones that scared me. The ones that used to be ways in.
He is filthy. So am I. Soot in the creases of his knuckles, blood dried dark down the back of his jacket where the ceiling came apart on him. His hair is dusted gray with ash and there is a cut over his eyebrow he has not mentioned once.
My whole body aches. My lungs feel scraped raw. My hands will not stop trembling, but this time it's not from the fire. It is him, my man, standing in the middle of my loft, alive, choosing to be here.
I want him with a ferocity that scares me. Not the desperate reach we grabbed for in the boxing gym, that was the fear talking. This is quieter and worse. This is my body understanding, finally, that it does not have to let go.
Heat moves through me slow as warmed honey, low and heavy, I am too tired to be embarrassed by it. Too tired to pretend I am not looking at the line of his shoulders and cataloging every place I want my hands.
"Sit," I tell him.
He does not sit. Of course he does not.
"Naveed. Sit down before you fall down."
His mouth twitches, the ghost of the almost-smile his brothers talk about. He lowers himself onto the arm of my sofa, and even that costs him. A muscle ticks in his jaw. The only crack in his composure.
I cross to him. My knees protest. I do not care.
"Let me see your shoulder."
"It's nothing."
"You dropped through a stairwell so I wouldn't. It is not nothing." I reach for his jacket, fingers finding the zipper, my hands steadier now that they have a job to do. "You do not get to bleed all over my floor and call it nothing."
He goes still under my touch. Not the frozen stillness from before, the one that meant retreat. This is different. This is a man letting himself be reached.
"I did not ask whether you needed tending," I say, echoing the night this all started, the graze along his ribs, the seventeen scars.
His eyes lift to mine. Dark, warm, unguarded in a way they have never quite been.
"No," he says, rough and quiet. "You never do."
I peel the jacket back from his shoulder, and my breath snags at what I find.
A gash runs across the meat of his shoulder, angry and deep, crusted with soot at the edges. It should have been the first thing he said when we walked through the door.
"Naveed." His name comes out sharp. "This needed stitches an hour ago."
"It clotted." Like that settles it.
I get up, cross to the bathroom, come back with the kit I keep under the sink because journalists who chase stories learn to be prepared for anything. My hands know this part. Antiseptic, gauze, the butterfly strips that will have to do until he lets a doctor near him, which is to say never.
He watches me work. His eyes track my face the whole time, catching every wince I try to hide, every place my breath goes shallow.
"You're shaking," he says.
"You're bleeding." I press the gauze to his shoulder. "We all have our problems."
A sound escapes him, low, a laugh. It rearranges something under my ribs.
When I finish, I sit back on my heels. His hand comes up before I can move away. His palm curves along the side of my face, thumb dragging over my cheekbone, and it comes away smudged with ash. He looks at the gray on his thumb like it's evidence of what he almost lost.
Then he touches me for real.
Not the frantic hands from the gym. Not a man patting me down for broken places.
His fingers move slow along my jaw, down the line of my throat, over my collarbone where my shirt is torn.
He is not checking me for damage. He is proving I am here.
That I made it out. That the warm skin under his hands is still alive and breathing.
The difference undoes me. I know exactly what it feels like to be a problem someone is solving. This is a man learning me by touch because I've walked in his shoes, I know that for one hour on that pier and in that fire, he thought he'd never get to again.
There is a strange terror being loved by a person who knows how a body feels when the breath leaves their body on its final exhale, knows the second they stop being able to decide anything.
Now, those same hands move over me slow and reverent, cataloguing every place I am still warm, still breathing, still his, and I understand that this is gentleness made entirely out of it what he is. A man who did not know the true weight of a life could never hold mine this carefully.
I lean up into them, I would rather be held by a man who knows exactly what I cost than adored by one who never learned there was a price.
Heat and pressure build hard and fast in the pit of my stomach. My thighs press together on their own, useless against the ache. My heart relocates to my throat and hammers there.
"Naveed." His name is a wreck in my mouth.
What I want to say is a specific arrangement of three words I have spent my whole life deciding were a luxury for people who could afford to lose.
I cannot make my mouth shape them yet. So, I say the outline of them instead, the only way I know how.
"When you dropped through that stairwell.
When I could not see you in the smoke." My voice cracks straight down the middle.
"There is no version of my life anymore where you do not make it out of the building.
I built the whole thing so there would never be a person like that in it.
And now there is you, and I cannot go back to before you.
That is the thing I am telling you. That is the thing I do not have the word for yet. "
"I know." His forehead drops to mine. Ash and smoke and the salt from him. "I know."
"I know." His forehead drops to mine. Ash and smoke and the salt from him. "I know."
I turn my face and catch his palm with my lips. Kiss the center of it, where the calluses are. His breath turns ragged, that one system he can never override.
"You came back," I whisper against his hand.
"I stopped standing in front of you." His voice cracks on it. "I'm not making that mistake again."
I climb into his lap, careful of his shoulder, and he lets me, and his arms close around me like he is done pretending he can survive letting go.
His arms tighten and he stands, lifting me with him like the shoulder does not scream when he does it. I wrap my legs around his waist. He carries me toward the bathroom, and neither of us speaks, because there is nothing left to argue.
No brick coming through the window. No source waiting. No fire, no fear, no reason to hurry. Just him and me and the quiet, and for once the quiet is not an enemy.
He sets me down like I might break. I am done being handled with care meant to keep me at a distance.
"Naveed." I pull him down over me. "I chose this. Right now. Nothing made me. Just me."
Something breaks open in his face. He knows exactly what I am saying, because he taught me the difference between being decided for and being asked.
"Then take what you want," he says against my mouth.
I do.
My hands find the hem of his shirt and drag it up, careful of the gauze, and he lets me strip him bare. I map the ridge of his collarbone with my mouth. He shudders, and it is not the fight breaking his control this time. It is choice. He is letting me in on purpose.
He undresses me slow, like there is all the time in the world, because tonight there is. His fingers drift along my jaw, down my throat, and every place he touches wakes at once. Slick heat gathers where I need him most. My whole body hums like a struck tuning fork.
"Look at me," he says.
I do that too.
He lifts and places me on the edge of the bathroom sink, settles between my thighs and fills me in one slow, ruthless stroke, and the sound that tears loose from me is more confession than moan. He holds himself deep and grinds, watching my face, and I come apart at the seams around him.
"That's it," he murmurs. "I've got you."
We move together, and it is not combat and it is not surrender.
It is a decision we keep making, over and over, his hips against mine, his hand splayed at the small of my back, claiming it.
My nails score down his chest and I want the marks to stay.
He swears against my throat when I tighten around him.
Pleasure winds tight beneath my navel until my toes curl. He works me toward the edge with an unhurried patience I want to punish him for, then tips me over it, and my release hits so hard the room whites out at the edges.
He follows me a stroke later, my name breaking out of him like a secret he has finally been allowed to say out loud.
After, we step into the shower, dirt and grime running down the drains. He is tender as he lathers the shampoo into my hair and washes it before moving down my body giving special attention to all my sensitive areas.
And just like that I'm hot and ready for him again.
We towel ourselves off and move to the bed where he starts all over again, him making sweet love to me. I've lost track of how many times I came apart for him while screaming his name or how many times he took me.
I'm almost embarrassed how satiated I am. I'm thoroughly inducted into the horny girls club and I purr like a cat.
We lie tangled in the dark, his heartbeat slowing under my ear. The city glows through the windows that used to scare me. His hand moves in slow circles on my back.
Neither of us reaches for a reason to move.
I wake before he does.
That alone stops me cold. For as long as Naveed has been in my life, I have never once woken to find him still asleep. He wakes in three-hour shifts. He checks the perimeter. He takes the door.
The door.
I turn my head slow, careful not to move too much, and there he is.
Beside me. Bare shoulder rising and falling.
One arm slung heavy across my waist like even in sleep he does not want to let go.
The space against my front door is empty.
No boots squared beside it. No man folded against the wood, guarding it, guarding me, keeping himself one room away.
He stayed.
All night. No perimeter. No sweep at three in the morning. No cold spot beside me where a soldier's habit pulled him back to the threshold. Just him, breathing next to me, close enough that his knee tangles with mine.
An old feeling moves under my ribs. That familiarity that has haunted me since the first night, the one that took me months to name.
Uncle Ravelo took the door in every room he slept in until a war finally took him.
Not because I was in danger. Because he did not know how to stop being a soldier long enough to just be.
And here is his echo, in the form of Naveed breathing beside me with no boots squared at my threshold.
The precise thing that killed the first man who ever guarded me is the thing this one just laid down for me without my having to ask.
I get to keep the version my uncle never lived long enough to become.
It feels less like waking up next to a man than like being handed something, across a grave.
My throat tightens. I press my face into the warm curve of his shoulder, careful of the bandage, and breathe him in. Ash still, faint, under the soap. Alive. Here.
His breathing changes. His arm tightens, and I feel the exact moment he surfaces, the little catch, the awareness sweeping back into a body that has been trained never to fully rest.
But he just pulls me closer.
"You're staring," he says, voice rough with sleep, eyes still shut.
"You stayed."
His eyes open then. Honey-brown, warm, an emotion moves through them when he takes in where he is. The bed. Me. No door between us. I watch him slot it just like I did. I watch it land.
"I did," he says.
That is all. But I know the effect it has on a man like him to sleep with his back to a room. I know what he set down last night without a word.
His hand comes up, fingers drifting along my jaw, tipping my face to his. He looks at me. His cheeks work. The stillness gathers.
He does not say it. He doesn't have to.
"Okay?" he asks.
One word. The tactical word from week one that somewhere along the way became softer, a question that carried everything he could not fit into sentences.
For us, that word is a vow.
I reach up and press my palm flat over his heart, feel it beating, steady, alive and here.
"Getting there," I tell him.