36. Tiernan
TIERNAN
We did not talk about the war that night. Not one word of it, and that was the whole strange gift of the evening, a house with no eye in the wall and nothing left to perform for, four people just sitting in a room being people for the first time since I could remember.
We’d earned one night. Sienna said it at the dinner table and she was right, and I’m the one in this family who’s never once been ashamed of taking a good thing the moment it’s offered, because I learned young that the good things don’t wait and the war always will.
So when the plates were cleared and the fire was banked low and the others had stopped looking over their shoulders out of years of habit, I was the one who reached for her first. I’m always the one who reaches first. That’s my whole job in this strange family we built, to be the one who says out loud, with my hands, the thing the other two are too busy carrying or too busy guarding to say.
To break the ice so the cold men can come in out of it.
I kissed her slow, because for once there was no clock on it.
No wire in the wall counting the seconds, no performance waiting on the other side of the door, no reason on God’s earth to hurry a good thing.
That was the part that undid me, more than the taste of her, more than the way she softened under my mouth and made that small sound in the back of her throat.
It was the quiet. The first quiet in this house that wasn’t a held breath.
I could want her out loud now. So I did.
“There she is,” I said against her mouth, my hands framing her face, and I felt her smile against my lips before she chased them back. “You’re allowed to have this, you know. You keep forgetting the part where you’re allowed.”
“Remind me, then,” she said, and there was heat under it and a dare under the heat, and my girl has never once in her life backed down from a dare.
So I reminded her. I got her out of my lap and onto the low wide sofa in front of the fire, and I took my time with her mouth and her throat and the buttons of the shirt she’d stolen off me weeks ago, and I felt her go from tired to something else entirely under my hands.
And I felt the moment Ronan crossed the room and knelt at the other end of her, because I clocked it in her face first, the way her eyes lifted past me and went soft and startled all at once.
He wasn’t performing now. That was the thing.
For three weeks I’d watched him do the arrangement, the dutiful heir, the man honoring a handshake in front of the world.
This wasn’t that. This was Ronan with the weight off him for the first time in his life, reaching for her because he wanted to and for no other reason under heaven, and he put his hand on her ankle and ran it up the length of her leg slow, watching her face the whole way, asking without asking.
She answered by reaching for him. And I made room, because making room is the whole point of me, and I have never once come away from this woman poorer for the sharing of her.
And Cormac stood where Cormac always stands. The edge of the warmth, the doorway, in but not in, the planner who watches the room so the rest of us can stop watching it.
But not as far back as before.
That’s the thing I clocked, the thing that made my chest do something, because reading the half-second before a man moves is my whole trade and Cormac is the hardest read alive and even I could see it.
He’d come closer this time. A foot inside the doorway he used to hold.
Then a hand’s width more. The door he keeps between himself and the rest of us, the one he’s held at a crack the whole long way through this, was open wider tonight than I’d ever seen it with the lamps still lit, and he was letting it be open, on purpose, watching her with the eyes that finish her sentences and a stillness that wasn’t absence, that was the opposite of absence, a man holding so much so still that the holding was the whole of him.
I caught his eye over her. I didn’t grin.
You don’t grin at Cormac, it sends him back behind the wall.
I just held his look for half a breath and let it say the thing, the only thing, the thing this family runs on.
There’s room. There’s always been room. Come as far in as you can stand to, and not one inch further than you choose, and nobody at this table will ever take your place in it while you decide.
He came closer.
Not all the way. That’s not who he is and it’s not his moment yet, and we all knew it, her most of all.
But he crossed the floor he doesn’t cross, and he came to where she was, and he put one hand in her hair, slow, careful, the way he measures everything, and he stayed there at the edge of it with his hand in her hair and his voice low and certain in the warm dark, present, involved, holding his own line by his fingernails because holding the line is the truest thing he has to give and he was giving it to her by choosing, every second, exactly how far to come.
The slow burn caught. It didn’t break. It just burned hotter and closer than it ever had, a man with his hand in her hair and the wall down to a crack and the last step still his to take on a morning he hadn’t reached yet.
So we had her between us in the firelight, Ronan and me, and Cormac at the edge of it with his hand in her hair, and none of us was in any hurry at all.
I got the last of the shirt off her and put my mouth on her breast, drawing her nipple between my lips until she arched up with a gasp, and Ronan took the other one in his hand, rolling it slow between his fingers while his mouth worked the inside of her thigh.
She had a fistful of my hair in one hand and was reaching for him with the other, and up above her Cormac stayed where he’d chosen to stay, his thumb moving slow at her temple, his voice low and certain in her ear, telling her the true things the two of us were too busy to say.
That she was safe. That the house was ours.
That there wasn’t one soul left in the world she had to hold herself together for tonight, so she could let go, all of it, every last piece.
“Cormac,” she breathed, tipping her head back into his hand.
“I’m here,” he said. Just that. He didn’t cross his line and none of us asked him to.
His hand in her hair and his voice in her ear was the whole of what he’d chosen to give tonight, and it was enough, and it was everything, and she leaned back into it like an anchor while Ronan and I took our time with the rest of her.
I went down her body first, because I’m always first, and I kissed my way up the inside of her thigh until she was squirming before I’d even properly started, which is half the fun of it.
Then I put my mouth on her and made a proper meal of her, slow, my hands holding her open, my tongue soft and unhurried where she wanted it sharp until she was cursing me, then giving her exactly what she wanted the second she’d given up asking for it.
I found the rhythm that pulled the best sounds out of her and stayed right there, humming against her because I know what the sound of it does to her.
Ronan came up and took her mouth with his, swallowing every noise she made, one big hand wrapped loose around her throat just to feel her pulse hammer under it, and when I worked two fingers up into her with my lips sealed around her clit she came apart between us, shaking, her heels digging into my shoulders, my name and Ronan’s tangled together in her mouth.
I didn’t stop. I kept my mouth on her and worked her right through it and up the other side, and when she was slick and swollen and gasping my name I climbed up her body and lined my cock up and pushed into her slow, seating myself deep while she was still trembling.
“Oh,” she said, just that, her eyes going wide, and Ronan gathered her hands up over her head and pinned them there in one of his while I started to move.
I fucked her slow and greedy, the way you take a thing you finally have all the time in the world for, watching her come undone under me.
Ronan reached down between us and found her clit and pressed it steady in time with my strokes, and Cormac held her head in his hands and talked her low and steady through every second of it, and she broke apart a second time around my cock so hard it dragged me right to the edge.
I buried myself deep and let go with my face in her neck, spilling into her, wrung out and grinning like a fool.
Then I did the thing this family does. I made room.
I eased out of her and gathered her up against my chest, boneless and flushed and gorgeous, and I passed her the two feet across the firelight into Ronan’s lap, because it was his turn and there wasn’t a grudging bone in my body about it.
That’s the whole thing, isn’t it. Doyle spent fifty years making sure no house could ever hold a thing in common without tearing itself apart over it, and here we were, three men who’d learned somewhere in the wreck of our names how to share the best thing any of us had ever been given and come away full instead of poorer.
Ronan settled her over him, her knees either side of his hips, and he took her face in one hand and made her look at him the way he does.
“You with me,” he said, not a question, the possessive thing gone soft at the edges now that he never has to hide it.
And then he lifted her and lined himself up and brought her down onto his cock slow, filling her by inches, and she sank down the length of him with a broken sound and her forehead dropping to his.
He set the pace from underneath, deep and unhurried, both hands on her hips guiding her down onto him, and I knelt in behind her and put my mouth on the back of her neck and my hands on her breasts, and Cormac shifted with them and kept his hand fisted gentle in her hair, his voice never leaving her ear.
She rode Ronan slow and then not slow, chasing it, and I reached around and found her clit for her since her own hands were busy holding onto him, and worked her there while Ronan drove up into her.
“Eyes on me,” Ronan told her, low, the old demand worn down now to the two words that were left of it.
And she gave them to him, and he watched her the whole way as she came a third time, clenching down around him, and he followed her over with his arms locked around her and his face buried in her chest, spilling up into her while I held her steady from behind and Cormac held her head in his hands and she came apart in the middle of the three of us with nowhere left to fall because we were all of us right there holding her up.
Nobody grabbed. Nobody grudged. Ronan gathered her in when he was spent and I made room and Cormac stayed at the edge of all of it, his hand still in her hair, the last door in the house shut and humming, present for every second of ours and choosing his own, not one inch poorer for the waiting.
After, we were a tangle of limbs and banked firelight and the particular quiet that’s nothing like the bad quiet of a house full of held breath.
The good quiet. The full kind. Sienna in the middle of us, which is where she’s been since the day she walked into our dying house and started bringing it back to life without knowing that’s what she was doing.
I lay there and did the thing I do, the reading, even now, even spent, because it’s the only way I know, it’s how I love people, by watching them.
Ronan, the weight off him, a man who’d carried a family alone for fifteen years lying in a warm room with that family multiplied around him and no arithmetic running behind his eyes for once.
Sienna, home, the word she’d said at dinner like she was trying it on for the first time, fitting now. And Cormac.
Cormac, who hadn’t crossed the line, who’d held it the whole way through by main force and his own fierce choosing, lying close with his hand still loose in her hair and the amber eyes open in the dark, and on his face, if you knew how to read it, if you’d spent half a life learning the hardest face there is, the thing I’d never once seen on it before.
Not peace. Cormac doesn’t get peace. Something better, for him. The look of a man standing at a door he’s finally going to walk through, who’s decided, who’s just waiting now for the morning and the moment to be his and only his, the way everything he does has to be his and only his.
Later, he’d told her, the whole way through this.
I watched him lie there in the warm dark and I knew, the way I know a face before the words come, that later had nearly arrived. That the morning was going to belong to him. That the last door in this whole found family was about to come open, on his own feet, the way he needed.
I didn’t say it. You don’t say a thing like that out loud, not about Cormac, not before he’s ready.
I just lay in the warm and the quiet with my strange family around me, the family no enemy built and no enemy could break, and I thought, the way I think on the rare nights everything’s where it should be, that Lorcan Doyle had spent fifty years making the world lonely and had somehow, by accident, in a dying house on a cold coast, built the four of us instead.
The rest of it could stay out in the cold a while longer.
Tonight, we were home, all of us, finally, at the same time.
It had never once happened before.
I stayed awake a while just to feel it happen.