Chapter 5 Kane
I have been awake in the dark for an hour with one arm flung over my eyes when the sound comes through the wall, and even before I work out what it is I know I have no business hearing it.
It's a run of small moans she didn't catch in time, the last one breaking at the back of her throat and carrying through the boards of an old mountain house and the rooms between us.
I sit up before I can think about whether I should.
I know which room it came from. I know what sound that was. I know it because half of me has been waiting for it without admitting it since the first day she slept under my roof.
The other half is hard against the front of my shorts.
Fuck.
I lie back down. Eyes on the ceiling. The fan I never turn on in spring is now set at max speed. I count beams but I lose count at three.
Her mouth. The lower lip she licked clean of apple at my kitchen table earlier tonight, the line of her teeth behind it, the corner where her lip meets the start of her smile.
I want it open under mine. I want to see how she looks with my cock between those lips and her tongue working the underside of it, slow, with the same patience she brings to everything else she does in this house.
Christ.
Her hand. I have watched her wrap it around a coffee mug every morning, careful, almost afraid of pressing too hard. I want it on me. I want her to wrap it around me with that same care, harder once she figures out what I want, mine over hers if she needs the lesson.
Jesus.
How she would feel inside. Tight. The resistance of her body the first time I press in, then the slow give of it.
Her hips under my hands. The sound she would make on the first push and the deeper one on the second.
I can hear how she'd sound coming around me because I just heard how she sounds coming alone, and both of them have me by the throat.
I run the three rules.
One. She is Danny's sister. The kid from a school portrait in his pocket, grown.
Two. She is twenty-two. She is clean of everything I have done since I was younger than her, and the only thing standing between her and a man with my history tonight is the discipline I have spent a lifetime building in this body.
Three. Danny died on an order Colonel Thorne shouldn't have given me. I followed it and came home alive. Her brother didn't. I don't get to put my hands on her.
The hand I have on my own thigh under the blanket isn't moving, but it's about to.
I close my fist around myself before I've decided to.
The first stroke is involuntary. The second one isn't. I close my eyes and I let her in: her mouth, her hand, the give of her hips under mine, the face she would make when I'm halfway in.
The sound she made through the wall fifteen minutes ago plays back behind my eyes at half speed until the real one comes through the wall again in my memory all at once.
I come hard with one knuckle between my teeth so I don't make a sound, even though every part of me wants her to hear it, wants her to know I'm coming for her, wants to hear what that does to her on the other side of the wall.
The shame is on me before the rest of me is finished.
I lie there with my pulse coming down and the back of my hand against my own mouth.
I haven't come thinking of a real woman since I came back from over there.
Whatever else I did for my own relief was mechanics, hands, pressure, and a finish line.
Tonight was for her, and that's a different thing entirely.
I have done it for the wrong woman. I have done it for the only one I want.
***
I get off the bed and move to the kitchen. I sit at the table with the small lamp on and I work the knife on a fresh piece of pine. The pine shavings come off slow. I'm letting my hands do the work my head can't be trusted with tonight.
What comes out of the wood isn't a thing I can name. A curve, then another. A shape that doesn't add up to anything I have a word for. I work it down until the pine shavings are a pile on the table and my hands know they are done.
The light through the kitchen window goes from black to grey to the first cold blue of a Montana morning. At six forty-five I make coffee, put a second mug on the counter beside mine, take the cream out of the fridge, and move the bowl of fruit closer to the toaster.
I do all of it because I'm not capable of changing the pattern this morning. It is the only thing holding the rest of me together.
She comes in at six fifty-three. Her hair is twisted up off the back of her neck. The sweatshirt is the one she had on yesterday. Her eyes go to the table and take it in.
"Couldn't sleep?" she asks.
"No."
She doesn't push, just takes her mug and a banana off the counter beside mine and drinks looking at the window over the sink instead of at me.
I see the muscle in her jaw work once and let go, then the change in her shoulders.
She doesn't say good morning. I don't either. Every move is part of the same routine I've done every other morning, but the evidence of my sleepless night is on the table between us, and we are both going to spend the day pretending it isn't.
She finishes her coffee, rinses her mug, and stops within a foot of me on her way past the table.
Her hand finds my shoulder for a half second, the first time she has touched me in four days.
The neckline of her sweatshirt has slipped enough to show me the line of her collarbone, and she doesn't seem willing to fix it.
"I'm going to study at the creek today," she tells me. Her voice is the same it has been for four mornings. The look she gives me with it is not.
"All right."
"I'll be back by six."
"All right."
She picks up the wax-paper bag from last night, folds it twice, drops it in the bin, and goes down the hall to her room.
I sit at the table with the shavings and the unfinished piece in front of me, the mug she drank her coffee out of still warm across the counter.
I don't move until I hear the back door close behind her.
I sit there with the thought I've been holding back since she walked in. She knows I heard her last night. The touch on my shoulder, the neckline she didn't fix, the look she gave me when she walked past. She came in here knowing what I heard, and she made sure I knew she knew.
I sweep the shavings into my hand and drop them in the bin. I put the piece of pine in my pocket where I keep the folding knife, and I go to work.
I have no idea how I'm supposed to hold the line. She's already under my skin, all the way through.