Chapter 22 #2
“Is this what you want,” I ask her, rising up, because I have to hear it, because the part of me that has stood at the edge of every room since I was a boy needs the words and not only the body. “Tell me. I won’t move on anything you don’t say out loud.”
“You,” she says, gold-eyed and certain even with the fever rising in her.
“Inside me. Now. Before the tide. While it’s still me asking.
” She pulls me up the length of her, gets her hand around my aching cock—stroking me once, twice, guiding the head through her slick folds—and she says it one more time, clear, choosing even here: “Now, Jonah. I’m asking for you. ”
And I push into her, slow and deep, because slow is who I am.
She is impossibly tight and scorching hot around me, her walls clenching and fluttering as she takes every inch.
A ragged sound leaves her throat as I bottom out, fully seated inside her.
I bury my face in her throat and move—long, deliberate strokes that let me feel every ripple and squeeze of her body around mine.
Her legs wrap around my waist, heels digging into the small of my back, urging me deeper.
She meets every thrust, her hips rolling up to take me, her hands roaming my back, my shoulders, pulling me closer as if she can fuse us together.
There is a kind of touch that asks and a kind that takes, and every place her hands find me, they ask; every place mine find her, I answer.
I keep the rhythm steady, grinding against her with each thrust so her clit gets pressure, learning exactly how she likes to be filled.
She opens to me completely, wet sounds of our joining filling the nest, her slick coating my cock and thighs.
She comes again with me buried deep inside her, clenching rhythmically around my length in strong, milking pulses that drag me over the edge with her.
I spill into her with a groan, pulsing hard as pleasure whites out my vision, her name on my lips and her pulse thundering under my mouth.
I do not have a knot. I am not built for the crest the way her alphas are.
But she does not let me feel the lack of it for one second; she holds me through my own undoing like the undoing of a beta is the rarest weather there is, rocking gently with me as we come down, whispering my name against my skin.
When the moment comes to seal it, the bond that is written in no scent and so can only be written in will, she does not let the heat do it for us.
That is the whole of who she is, laid bare in one breath.
She reaches up and guides my mouth to the place over her pulse where the blood runs loudest, and she says it clear, choosing even here: do it.
Choose me. The way I chose you. Out loud, so it counts.
And I do.
I set the mark there by hand and by want and by the plain unhurried decision of a heart that was never, from the first night she walked in the door, going anywhere else.
Not because a tide pulled me under. Because I picked her, the way she picked me, in the one window where there is no blood to credit it to and no instinct to blame.
She makes a sound when it closes, low and certain, and she sets her own mark on me in the same breath, her mouth at my throat, sealing from her side what I have sealed from mine.
And the bond that rises up between us is the quietest one in that loud sweet house, and the only one in it that no living soul can ever call an accident of the air.
Two people. No fate in the room. Only the choosing, and the choosing held.
It settles into me like a coal banked for the night, low and steady and mine, a warmth in the center of my chest where for one solid year there has been a draft.
I have been cold in a specific place since June, the cold of a man who belongs to a family by paperwork and grief and usefulness and not by anything that could not, in theory, be done without.
That place is warm now. She walked into the coldest room in me and lit the stove, and the strangest part, the part I will turn over for the rest of my life, is that she did it not by needing me but by choosing me, which I am learning are as different as worry and hope, as different as the river and the source.
A chosen bond. The first whole-hearted yes of my entire life, given and received in the one window where it could only be true.
After, with the heat still climbing in her, still coming, the deep tide of it gathering to take her where my brothers and the blood will meet her, she holds my face in both her hands and looks at me, gold-eyed and certain even as the fever rises, and she says, “Stay. Not because I need you to fetch anything. Stay because you’re in the picture now.
You’re not behind the river anymore, Jonah.
You are the river. Same as the rest of them.
Della told you to make sure they let the right one in.
” Her thumb moves over my cheekbone. “She never once said you weren’t allowed to be one of the ones who got let in too. ”
And there it is. The benediction turned around and handed back to me.
A year I have carried Della’s wish that this family let love in, and never once let myself believe the love was allowed to include me, the in-law, the brother by marriage, the keeper of the box.
And the woman Della sent has just told me, in the middle of her own heat, with her hands on my face, that I was always on the list. That I was never the help.
That the river has more than one source and I was always one of them.
The heat takes her then, the way it has to, the deep alpha tide of it rising to crest, and I do not leave.
I do not go back to the foot of the stairs.
I stay in the nest with my chosen bond singing new and quiet under my skin, and I am there, fully there, one of the ones who was let in, when the rest of it begins.
Three of the four are in this room as her heat crests.
The fourth is out in the dark, alone, keeping the wrong promise, and even now, even chosen, even healed, even with her mark on my throat and mine on hers, I cannot stop the part of me that notices a room going cold from noticing the cold place at the edge of all this warmth, the Asa-shaped absence in the middle of her joy, the one source of the river still dammed up out there in the far rows, missing the exact thing his dead wife begged me to make sure he didn’t miss.
I have his answer. I have had it for a year. It is the box, and the words, and the third time up.
But that is tomorrow’s grief, and tonight, for the first time in my whole contingent life, I was chosen first.
Tonight I let myself simply be in the picture.