CHAPTER 11 #2
His hands flew to my hips and then stopped. Hovered. He didn't grip. He laid them flat against my thighs, palms up almost, surrendered, and his eyes went wide and wet and his careful, rationed, walled-off control just shattered.
"Sloane," he said, and it was a wreck of a word.
"I've got it," I told him, rocking down, finding the angle, my hands braced on his scarred chest. "I've got us. You can stop steering. You're allowed."
"I can't lose this. " His thumbs stroked my thighs, the only motion he'd allow himself, everything else given over to me.
"I can't. I lose what I love. I had her hand and then I had a glove, and I can't, Sloane, I can't do it again, and I'm doing it anyway, I'm doing it right now, I'm letting you in and I will never get you back out, do you understand what I'm telling you. "
"Tell me. " I didn't slow. I gave him the rhythm and made him talk over it, made him confess into the gold-lit dark while I held the wheel. "Say the thing, Grant. On the record."
"I will always have you. " His voice broke clean in half. "Whatever it costs. Whatever I have to burn. I will always, always have you. That's not a promise. It's already true. It was true in the parking structure. It's been true since you told me you'd bill me hourly for saving your life."
And that was it, that was the clause that ended the negotiation, and I felt myself go, clenching around him, my forehead dropping to his, our breath fogging between us one more time, gold and frantic, and he let go because I'd let go first, because I'd given him permission by losing control in front of him, and he came with a sound I'd never heard a man make, half growl half sob, his hands finally closing on my hips but gentle even then, gentle in the middle of being destroyed, pulsing into me while he said my name like a man saying a prayer he'd given up on.
We stayed like that. Folded together, breathing.
The cold pressed at the edges of the blanket and couldn't get in.
Above us the runway string burned its single amber line and my breath and his rose into it and mixed and vanished, over and over, the only warm thing in the building, the thing we kept making on purpose.
After a while he lifted me off him so carefully I felt cherished and outraged in equal measure. He cleaned me up with the soft inside of his shirt, checking my face the whole time. "You good? Anything hurt? The clavicle?"
"The clavicle is fine. The clavicle has never been better. Stop fussing."
"Not stopping. " He pulled the blanket tight around me, then his own arm over that, wrapping me into the heat of him, building a second smaller shelter inside the failed one.
He found a half-bottle of water on the crate and made me drink.
He pulled my shirt back over my head when I started to shiver, dressed me like I was something precious and fragile, which I am not, which I have spent a lifetime refusing to let anyone believe I am, and I let him.
That was the part that wrecked me later. I let him.
"Sleep," he said. "I've got the door."
"There's no one out there. The storm's still on. Nothing's flying in this."
"I've got the door anyway."
And he meant it, because he didn't sleep at all.
I felt the difference between a body asleep and a body on watch, the way his breathing stayed measured, the way his eyes never quite closed, the way his head turned a degree every few minutes toward the dark stretch of hangar and the great sealed door and the runway beyond.
He'd given me the wheel for an hour and now he'd taken up his post, and I understood that this was his love language, the only dialect he had: I will stand between you and the dark all night and I will not tell you because I don't want you to feel watched, I want you to feel safe, and there is a difference and he knows it.
I, who never let anyone, had let him. I lay in the heat of a man who would die before he let the cold reach me, and I watched our shared breath fog gold in the runway light through the high window, and I did not run the math, because for once the math was simple, and it came out to yes.
Toward dawn the storm thinned to a steady hiss and the light through the high window went from amber to the first pewter gray, and I woke without meaning to, my back to his chest, his arm a warm weight across me, his hand spread open over my sternum where the growl had first lived.
I lay still and listened to him breathe, and then I felt it, a small wet warmth against the back of my neck, and another, and I realized that Grant Holloway, who had pulled a man out of a vehicle fire and carried the round meant for himself and not cried in front of a living soul in seven years, was crying.
Silent. Helpless. The way men cry when they've finally been allowed to put something down and discovered they've been holding it so long their hands forgot how to open.
I didn't move. I didn't say I see you or it's okay or any of the things that would have made him stop, made him rebuild the wall, made him reach for the brass round on the crate to remind himself that a weapon was all he was allowed to be. I let him have it.
It was the only thing I had to give that cost me nothing and meant everything: I let him think I was asleep, and I let him cry into my hair, and I lay there in the gray dawn and made the cold-blooded, clear-eyed, terrified decision to stay.
He guards the door like I'm something worth dying for, and I'm going to have to tell him I'm not. But it can wait until he's stepped back out of the word yes.