31. The Other Fire #3
The frogs saw away. The fire ticks.
His weight is a warm certainty holding me to the earth, and I take stock of myself the way I take stock of a room — honestly, for once, without the management running interference.
"I don't know," I tell him. It's the truest thing I've said all night. "I've spent five years not finding out. Nobody's ever—" I stop. Start over. "I bend for everyone. I've never once wanted to bend for somebody. There's a difference. You said it yourself."
Sawyer goes still above me.
Then something in his face shifts, softens at the edges without losing an ounce of its certainty, and he lowers his forehead to mine for a second, just breathing, letting the magnolia and the iris tangle up in the smoke.
"That," he says quietly, "is the most honest thing you've handed me since I drove into this town. All right." He straightens.
The grin comes back, but it's got something underneath it now, something I could get badly used to.
"We'll find out together. Slow. I'm good at slow.
" His thumb strokes once over the inside of my wrist, right where the pulse hammers.
"You'll tell me the second it stops being something you want.
That's the only rule I've got. You know how to hand a man an exit…
you hand yourself one, any moment, and I'll take it the same second. Understood?"
My throat's gone tight.
Nobody hands me the exit.
I'm the one who hands them out.
"Understood."
"Good." He sits back on his heels, releasing my wrists, and looks around the dark yard like he's appraising a venue.
The fire. The tree line. The wide black stretch of grass sloping down toward the marsh where the frogs are keeping their racket.
His nostrils flare, taking in the whole of it — pinewood smoke, brine off the water, cut grass, the green sap-and-flower smell that's been rising off me for the last ten minutes and getting harder to ignore.
Then he looks back down at me, slow, and that crooked grin tips into something with a real edge on it.
"You like it outdoors?" he asks.
The question lands low in my belly and stays there.
Above us, the sky's gone the deep blue-black it only reaches this far from town, the kind of dark that makes the stars look overcrowded.
There's a whole rambling house full of empty beds forty feet up the hill, and every reasonable, managing, courthouse bone in my body says the house, take him to the house, be sensible.
I have been sensible for five years.
Sensible built me a quiet life, a locked shop door, and a rose I never let anybody finish.
Sensible can sit this one out.
"Yeah," I hear myself say. My hand finds the front of his shirt again, that same fistful of warm flannel, but I'm not hauling him down this time. I'm holding on. "I do."
"That so." Sawyer's voice has dropped into a register I feel more than hear.
Take the leap.
I've watched Amber do it all week. I've watched Beckett do it tonight, on his knees in front of a woman he swore he'd never bend for. I'm the one who smooths the road so everyone else can leap.
Just once, I'd like to find out what the air feels like on the way down.
"Cool," I tell him, and the recklessness of it tastes like the first free breath I've drawn in years. "Take the lead, Alpha."
Something flares hot in his scent — the pepper sharpening, the bourbon going dark and rich — and for the first time since he swaggered into our lives, Sawyer Devereaux looks like a man who's been handed the exact thing he was hoping for and can't quite believe his luck.
He leans down over me. His mouth brushes the shell of my ear, slow enough that I feel every word land.
"You'd best be sure about that," he murmurs. "I've been patient with you on account of the courthouse and Amber’s blessings."
His teeth catch my earlobe, just barely, and my whole body arches up into him without asking my opinion.
"You hand a man like me the lead, I take all of it. So don't go whining when you can't handle me, Bellamy."
The old August would smooth it.
Would make a joke, would deflect, would hand him a graceful little exit and file the whole thing under things that almost happened.
I feel that reflex rise up out of five years of habit — and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I set it down in the grass beside us and leave it there.
I fist his collar and pull him down until his forehead's on mine, and there's no exit left for either of us to take.
"I can," I tell him.
His whole scent changes on the words — the pepper flaring bright, the bourbon going warm and dark and pleased, the magnolia opening up until it's the only thing left in the whole black yard I can smell.
His hand slides back into my hair. His grin drops close enough to share breath.
Whatever the courthouse used to say about nights like this one, the session's adjourned, and I'm the one who banged the gavel.
Sawyer laughs, low and dark and thrilled, the magnolia blooming so thick between us it drowns out the smoke and the marsh and the whole rest of the world.
"We'll see about that."