CHAPTER NINE #4
He was standing just inside the door with the boy's blood on him too, dark down the front of his shirt, his knuckles split again, his face wrecked open in a way she'd never seen it, and they looked at each other across six feet of quiet, and everything that had almost happened tonight stood up in the room between them.
He had almost died in that lot. She had almost died in that car.
Tiny had almost died in that doorway, would have, without her hands and Knox's, and might still — they wouldn't know for hours.
Death had come all the way up to every door tonight and breathed on all of them, and now here they were, both of them, still breathing, alive in a locked room with the other one's blood on their skin.
She crossed the room and kissed him like she was reassuring herself he was solid.
It was nothing like the other times. There was no slow build to it and no argument in it and no tenderness soft enough to call it that — it was fierce and it was frantic and it came straight up out of the animal fact of being alive when they had both come so close to not being.
She got her hands in his ruined shirt and dragged it up and he tore it the rest of the way off, and she put her bloody hands flat on his bare chest just to feel it move, to feel the heart still going under it, hammering, alive, alive, and a sound came out of her that was half a sob and half something with no name.
"You're here," she said against his mouth. "You're still here. I couldn't find you. In the lot I couldn't find you and I thought —"
"I'm here." His hands came up into her hair, gripping, not gentle, holding her head like he had to be sure of it. "I'm here, I've got — I'm here."
"I almost lost you." Her voice broke on it. "And you almost — Knox, you turned your back on him. On Swain. I saw you. You had him and you turned around and came to Tiny and you let him —"
"I chose." His forehead dropped to hers, the two of them gasping, the word coming out fierce.
"I'll choose it every time. Him or the people I love, it's not even a choice, there is no version where I don't turn around.
Let him run. Let all of 'em run. It doesn't matter what it costs me down the line.
I am not spending one hand on killing when I could spend it on keeping you.
" His grip tightened. "You. You're what these are for.
I finally know it. I knew it kneeling in that boy's blood watching you do the thing I could never do. "
And that undid the last of her. She pulled him down and he lifted her at the same moment and they came together hard against the door she'd just heard him bolt, her legs around him and her back against the wood, both of them still half-dressed and shaking and streaked with a boy's blood neither of them would wash off till it was done.
Washing it off first would have meant stopping, and stopping was unthinkable; the blood was the truth of the night, and they took each other inside the truth of it and not around it.
There was nothing soft in it and nothing slow and she did not want either one.
Ch7's gentleness belonged to a different night, a safer night, a night when death hadn't just breathed on all of them.
Tonight she wanted proof, and proof was physical — his weight, his heat, the hard living drive of him, the flex of a back she'd watched take a war, the pulse she could feel hammering everywhere their skin met.
She wanted the loud undeniable animal argument of a living body against her own living body, the fact of him hammered home over and over until it drowned out the sound of the window blowing in.
She got a hand down between them and closed it around him and guided him and he pushed up into her standing, holding her whole weight against the bolted door with one forearm under her and the other braced by her head, and she gasped and drove her nails into the meat of his shoulders and hauled him deeper, wanting no air left anywhere between them, wanting to be so far inside the raw fact of him alive that death couldn't have slipped a blade in edgewise.
His mouth was everywhere — her throat, the print of blood on her cheek, her mouth again — and hers was on the salt of his shoulder, and every sound either of them made was half pleasure and half the grief they hadn't put down yet, and neither of them tried to make it pretty.
It wasn't pretty. It was survival wearing the shape of sex, two people who'd looked at the end of everything and come back and were now shouting no at it with their bodies in the only language loud enough.
"Don't stop," she said, and it wasn't the plea it had been other nights; it was a command, hers, the same voice she'd used to keep a boy alive. "Don't you dare stop. I need to feel you. I need —"
"I know." His mouth was at her throat, her jaw, back to her mouth, greedy, alive. "I know. I've got you. Take it. Take whatever you —"
"You," she said. "I just need you. Alive. That's the whole —" and the words dissolved as he drove up into her and hit the place that made the room go white, and she stopped needing words, and so did he.
They ended up on the bed at some point, or near it, or half on it — the whole of it blurred, the door and the floor and the square-cornered bed, his hands and her hands, the low broken half-words they said into each other's necks, the blood and the sweat and the tears all running together until there was no telling which was which.
It was not like any night that had come before.
The first night had been years of held-back wanting finally breaking loose; the night in this same apartment had been her choosing him out loud against the world; the slow night in Mae's back room had been him letting himself be seen for the first time ever.
This was none of those. This was the marsh grass lit up in her headlights and the gold letters blowing inward and a boy's blood going tacky on her forearms and six feet of ringing quiet across which she had, against all odds, found him still standing.
This was two people who had watched death come all the way up to the door and lean on the latch, and who had bolted that door and turned to each other and said, with everything they had and no words at all, the single truest thing there was left in the world to say.
We lived. We lived. We lived.