CHAPTER 9 #2
His hands stayed at my waist, patient, while his mouth did unhurried work, and I made a sound I would have denied under oath.
"Mm," he murmured against my throat. "Found you.
You smell like you finally stopped doing the math.
You know that? I can smell it on you. The numbers went quiet.
" He drew back just enough to look at me, his hair fallen forward, the chipped front tooth showing when his mouth curved.
"First time since you walked in here that you smell like a person and not a brief. Color?"
"Green," I managed.
"Yeah you are. " He kissed me then, finally, properly, slow and deep and filthy-sweet, and I got both hands in his sweater and held on.
He kissed like he talked, generous and unhurried and absolutely present, and when his hand finally moved, it moved up, sliding under the hem of my shirt and flat onto the bare skin of my ribs, and the heat of his palm against me made me gasp into his mouth.
"Easy," he breathed. "Easy, sweetheart, I've got you.
We've got all night and nowhere to be and I'm gonna take my time, because you've spent your whole life being efficient and I want to ruin that for you.
" His hand climbed, deliberate, until it covered my breast over the thin cotton of my bra, his thumb finding my nipple through the fabric and circling once, and my hips bucked forward against nothing.
"Oh. There. You like that. Let me. " He rolled it, slow, watching my face the whole time, reading every flicker of it, and dropped his mouth back to my throat. "Look how good you are at this. Look how good you are at letting go."
"I'm not letting go," I said, which was a lie, and he knew it was a lie, and he laughed against my collarbone.
"Whatever you say, trouble. " He pushed the cotton up out of his way and got his mouth on me, and the wet heat of it closed over my nipple and his tongue did something unhurried and devastating and the laugh went straight out of me.
I grabbed the edge of the counter behind me with both hands because my knees had stopped being load-bearing.
He worked me with his mouth and his hand, switching, learning me, while the storm screamed and his too-warm body kept the cold at bay, and the heat in me built and built with nowhere to break.
"Omar. " My voice had gone thin. "I'm not, you're not even, this is going to."
"I know. " He came back up to my mouth, both hands sliding around to splay across the bare skin of my back, holding me against him, and he ground his hips into me, the hard line of his cock against my belly through both our clothes, and I made a wrecked sound into his mouth.
"I know. That's the whole idea. I'm gonna get you there just like this. Clothed, my hands, my mouth, nothing else, nothing below that waistband, I'm not even gonna ask for that tonight. Just this. Just you, falling, and me catching. " His mouth at my ear. "Can I? Tell me yes."
"Yes. " It came out broken. "Yes, God, yes."
"That's my girl. " He moved against me, slow and deep and relentless, one hand at my breast and the other low on my spine pulling me into the rhythm of it, his mouth finding the spot at my throat that made my whole body light up, and he talked me through it the whole time, low and warm and reverent.
"Just like that. Look at you, look how high you climb when you let somebody help. You don't have to do this part alone, you don't have to do anything alone, that's the secret nobody told you. Let me. Let me have it. Come on, sweetheart, give it to me."
I came against him with my face in his neck and his name in my mouth, clothed, shaking, both his arms locked around me while it tore through me in long pulls that left me gasping. I came like something had finally been allowed to break. And he held all of it, and didn't ask for one thing back.
For a long moment I could only breathe against his collarbone and shake.
"I've got you," he said, soft now, all the heat gone tender. "I've got you. You're okay. That's it. Breathe. There's no rush, no court date, there's just this. " He stroked my back, slow, and pressed his lips to my temple. "Color?"
"I don't," I started, and stopped, and tried again. "I'm fine. I'm green. I'm extremely green."
His chest moved with a quiet laugh. "Yeah you are.
" He eased me back against the counter and held my shoulders until he was sure I'd hold, then reached past me, ran the tap, filled a chipped enamel cup and folded my fingers around it because they weren't quite working.
"Drink. All of it, sweetheart, don't argue.
Hydration is the one negotiation you lose tonight. "
I drank. He watched me with an expression of such uncomplicated satisfaction that I had to look away.
He refilled the cup, made me drink again, then pulled the wool blanket off the nearest chair and settled it around my shoulders and rubbed my arms through it until the shaking stopped, all of it matter-of-fact, like he'd done it a thousand times.
"You're not going to make this weird," I said. It wasn't quite a question.
"I'm going to make it eggs, in about five hours," he said.
"That's the only thing I'm going to make it.
" He tucked the blanket tighter, and that small efficient gesture, the same one he'd used yesterday morning, the inch he never crossed and the wall he never built, hit me somewhere I keep armored.
"Hey. Look at me. That, what just happened, you handed me something.
I know what it cost you, I can smell exactly what it cost you.
I'm not gonna treat it cheap and I'm not gonna treat it like a bill that came due.
It was a gift. I'm keeping it. That's all.
" His thumb brushed my cheekbone. "Go to sleep, trouble.
The percolator forgives you. I'll make a fresh pot when the sun comes up and we'll pretend tonight was about coffee. "
He walked me to the stairs with a hand light at the small of my back, present without taking any of my weight, leaving me to carry myself the way I clearly needed to.
At the bottom step he kissed my forehead once, dry and warm, and let me go up alone, which was its own kind of mercy, the way he stayed put at the foot of the stairs and trusted me to climb.
I lay in the bunk with the runway string bleeding amber across the ceiling and my pulse finally slowing to match the storm, and I made myself do what I always do. I ran the numbers.
And the numbers had gone strange.
Whatever this was, it had stopped being containable to a single man.
I'd climbed up here telling myself a tidy story about one complicated, grumpy man who smelled like gun oil and cedar, a single anomaly I could quarantine and study at my leisure.
But Grant had kissed me like a confession, and Omar had just taken me apart like an act of mercy, and somewhere behind a pane of glass there was a third one who watched me like a sum he kept declining to collect.
The thing I'd been keeping out of every ledger I drew was simpler and worse than I wanted to admit.
I didn't want to choose. I wanted all of it, all three of them, and there was no precedent for that anywhere, no template, no form Ruth could have filed, no clause in any contract I'd ever read to tell a woman what she was supposed to do when three impossible men looked at her like she was the corridor home instead of something to be hauled along it.
I didn't have a clause for that. For the first time in my life I was standing in front of a deal I wanted and couldn't paper.
The pot below had finally gone silent, all its heat surrendered, done counting down.
The storm held. Somewhere down there a man who had never in his life been the one taken care of was folding his map along its furred white creases, and I lay there turning over what he'd actually given me.
He gave me a word. A single word, the kind of thing nobody could draft around or restructure out from under me later, worth more than any promise or clause he could have signed.
"Red," I said, testing it in the dark after he'd gone, just to feel the shape of it on my own tongue with no one around to hear.
One syllable that meant stop, and meant it without argument, and meant that for once in my life somebody had hung a door and set the latch so it only ever opened from my side.
The first safe thing anyone ever handed me, I thought, and I didn't even have to sign for it.