CHAPTER 13 #2
"You with me?" he said suddenly, pulling back, and I realized I'd gone silent. His thumb stroked my hip. "Sloane. Color. Where are you."
"Green," I gasped. "I'm here. I'm green. Don't you dare stop."
"Bossy," he said, delighted, and obeyed.
It built in me like a case closing, like all the disparate pieces locking into a single inevitable conclusion, and when it broke I laughed, loud where I'd gone silent under Grant.
I came apart laughing and gasping his name, my thighs clamped around his head, my back arching off nothing, and he held me through it, his arm a band across my hips, humming, talking me down, look at you, look at you, I've got you, I've got you.
I was still shaking when he gathered me off the bench.
"Floor," he said, breathless, grinning. "The bench is murder on a man's knees and I have plans."
He shrugged out of his leather cut in one motion and laid it on the concrete, the worn leather giving soft under my back when he set me down on it, the Chrome Sanctuary patch face-up under my shoulder blades.
The cold of the floor came up through it and his heat poured down over me from above and the fog leaned white and blind on the windows two stories up.
"Still green?" he said, over me now, shedding his shirt, and I got my hands on the warm whip-muscled length of him, the road-rash silvering on his right hip under my palm, and pulled.
"Still green," I said. "And I'm directing this part."
"Yes ma'am," he said, with feeling. "God, say more lawyer things."
I laughed, and pulled him down, and we figured out the floor together.
He let me set it, the pace, the angle, my heel in the small of his back when I wanted him deeper, my hand flat on his chest when I wanted him to slow and watch my face, and he watched my face like it was the only map he'd ever needed.
He talked through all of it, filthy and reverent and somehow funny, narrating his own undoing, you're gonna ruin me, you know that, I'm not gonna recover from this, I'm gonna be useless, Grant's gonna ask me to read a map and I'm just gonna cry, until I was laughing again even as it climbed in me again.
"Tell me yes one more time," he said, ragged, close, his forehead against mine. "I need to hear it."
"Yes," I said, against his mouth. "Yes. Omar. Now."
He came with my name in his teeth and his hand fisted in his own leather cut beside my head, careful even then, claws kept, strength leashed, and I went over a half-beat after, and the fog held its white silence against the glass while two people who should have known better forgot, for exactly long enough, that anyone was watching the fence.
After, he left the door to itself.
That was the difference. Grant had wrapped me and gone still and watched the exits all night like a man who'd learned that the cost of love is vigilance.
Omar pulled me down onto his chest there on the floor, the leather cut still under us both, and sang some road song under his breath, badly, tracing shapes on my bare shoulder with one grease-stained finger, and was, for once, entirely unafraid.
"You're freezing," he said eventually. "I can feel your skin temping out.
That's the human curse. I run hot, you run normal, and normal in a hangar in October is a problem I refuse to allow.
" He sat us up, draped his shirt over my shoulders, and grinned.
"Stay right where you are and don't you dare litigate anything while I'm gone. I'm gonna feed you."
"Omar, it's the middle of the day, there's a witch at the fence, we should be planning."
"We're gonna do both," he said, already up and stepping into his jeans as he crossed to the galley stairs. "I'm an excellent multitasker, trouble. I told you. Multitudes."
He came back with bread and cold chicken and two apples and the percolator's last cup of burnt coffee and his folded paper map under his arm, and he spread the map out on the concrete between us, creases furred white, smelling of his jacket and of the road he carried on his skin, and we ate sitting on his leather cut with the fog blanking out the windows and the chrome glowing in the work-lights, and he laid out the whole route that would carry me back.
"Border's here," he said, mouth full, tapping.
"Sister club's hangar's about there. Ledger's wherever the Ashwells keep their nasty bookkeeping, which Julian'll know.
Roads are flooded, so we fly, which means we need a window, which means we wait for this.
" He waved a hand at the white windows. "Ink and folded paper, trouble.
No tower to jam, no battery to die. The grid can go down, the coven can buy the dark, and this old thing will still know every back road on the corridor. This is how I get you home."
"You keep saying home like it's mine."
He looked at me. The grin gentled into the true thing.
"It is if you want it," he said simply, and went back to the map, and let me sit with that.
And I sat with it. I sat there on a werewolf's leather cut on a cold concrete floor in a hangar at the end of the world, eating chicken with my fingers, sore and laughing-spent and warm, and I made myself say the thing in my head plainly, the way I'd make a client say the ugly part out loud before we negotiated it.
I let Grant have me last night and I let Omar have me an hour ago and I am not sorry and I am not choosing and I do not want to choose. I want all of them. Whatever that makes me.
Ruth's voice came, the way it always came, with her old warning dressed up in legal clothes. Don't sign what you can't survive, baby. Wanting is just a clause they hold against you later.
I waited for the shame. I'd built a whole career on it, on arranging to be the one person in any room who needed nothing from anybody, who would die before she let a soul carry her through a door. I waited for it to arrive and take this away.
The shame stayed gone, leaving the air clean.
What came instead, watching Omar trace the line home with one finger and hum and reach over without looking to tuck the shirt back up onto my shoulder where it had slipped, was something quieter and far more dangerous.
I don't care what it makes me. For the first time in my whole armored life, I do not care. Bill me later. I'll pay it twice.
"You went somewhere," Omar said.
"I went somewhere," I agreed.
"Good somewhere or lawyer somewhere?"
"Good somewhere. " I looked down at the map and the corridor inked across it, at the careful furred creases of a thing he refused to digitize because paper had never let him down and people were the variable.
"Omar. Earlier. You said you'd explain why it wasn't a problem.
About Grant. About not being jealous. " I picked up my grandmother's pen from where he'd set it in the light, mine, safe, here, and I clicked it once, deciding something true.
"I'm ready for the whole conversation now. "
He went still in a way I'd never seen on Grant, the stillness of a man standing at a threshold he'd wanted me to reach for years and dreaded all the same.
"What's a 'shared anchor,' Omar?"
His face changed. The grin slid off it, taking the joke and the easy unbothered air he wore like a second cut, and what was left of him looked tender and terrified, ten years old underneath it all, praying he wouldn't turn out to be too much to keep.
"Ask Julian," he said. "It's his to explain. It always was."