17. Enley
Enley
The clock until the breach counts down. Knight’s gone.
He left twenty minutes ago to meet Sawyer and the brAVO squad at the staging warehouse.
Their exit was the same as every other time: silent, efficient, a shadow swallowed by the dark.
He shook Render’s hand. He looked at me and said, “See you on the other side.” Then he was gone and the storage unit shrank to its smallest version.
Two people. Two laptops. One cot. One sleeping bag on a hard floor.
And the hours counting down to something that can’t be uncounted.
I run the system one more time. Not because it needs it. Because my hands need something to do and the alternative is sitting still with everything inside my head, and right now that landscape is one I don’t want to walk through alone.
Render’s at the table doing the same thing with the communication gear.
Testing the channel for the fourth time.
Checking the signal strength. Making sure all nine of us will stay connected during the breach.
His movements are precise but there’s an edge to them that wasn’t there yesterday.
A tightness in his shoulders. A way he holds his jaw that I’ve learned means his mind is running scenarios he doesn’t like the endings of.
“Stop testing the comms,” I say.
“Stop testing the system.”
We look at each other. The mutual recognition of two people doing the same useless thing for the same reason is so clear it’s almost funny.
Almost. Nothing is actually funny right now.
The air in the storage unit has the dense weight of a room where something is about to happen and both people in it know it and neither of them can say it because saying it makes it real and real is something that can be lost.
He sets down the gear. I close the laptop. The silence that fills the space between us is different from every silence that came before. This silence is clean. Stripped of every pretense. The silence of two people who have run out of things to hide behind.
“Are you afraid?” I ask.
“No.” He says it immediately. Then he stops, and reconsiders his answer.
The version of him that answers on reflex is the operator.
The one who just paused is someone else.
“I’m not afraid of the facility. I’m not afraid of the guards or the stairwell or the breach.
I’ve done this before. Not this exactly.
But close enough that the mechanics don’t scare me. ”
“But.”
“But I’ve never done it with someone outside the building who I can’t stop thinking about.
The scenarios I keep running aren’t about what happens inside.
They’re about the hours between now and when I walk through that fence and you’re standing at the mobile terminal two hundred yards away and I can’t see you.
Can’t reach you. Can’t do anything except trust the plan and the channel and the two hundred yards of empty ground between us. ”
The admission is so stripped of his usual control that it feels like seeing a room with all the furniture removed. Just walls and floor and the truth underneath everything he normally puts in it.
“I’ll be on the radio,” I say. “You’ll hear me the whole time.”
“Hearing isn’t the same.”
“No. It’s not.”
I stand up from the floor where I’ve been sitting with the laptop.
My body protests. Every joint has an opinion about cold floors and metal chairs and eight days in spaces never meant for living.
I stretch and the motion pulls his oversized hoodie up enough that cool air hits the strip of skin above my waistband.
He’s watching. He always watches. But the quality of his attention has changed in the last sixty seconds.
It’s not the careful, peripheral observation he maintained for the first five days, the seeing-without-looking that let him watch my movements without ever being caught staring.
It’s direct. Open. The attention of a man who’s decided that the pretense of not looking is a luxury he can no longer afford.
I feel the weight of his gaze on the exposed skin at my waist the way you feel sunlight. Warm. Present. Impossible to ignore.
“Render.”
“Yeah.”
“The conversation. The one we keep putting off. The one about everything we haven’t said.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to wait anymore.”
The words settle between us, sinking into the silence with a weight that steals the air from the room. They aren't loud, but they don't have to be. I feel them all the way down to my bones.
My heart stumbles, then pounds hard enough to make my chest ache as his gaze locks onto mine. There's no looking away. No escape from the truth hanging between us.
He rises.
Not in the fluid, instinctive way I've seen a hundred times before, when every movement is driven by training and survival. This is slower. More careful. Like every inch he gains is a choice. Like he's giving himself one last chance to stop... and deciding, over and over again, that he won't.
Only four feet separate us.
He closes the distance in two strides.
The same way he crossed the storage unit the night he kissed me for the first time.
The same way he crossed that shipping container to cut the zip ties from my wrists.
Render James has always moved with absolute purpose.
No hesitation. No wasted motion. When he decides to reach you, nothing in the world feels capable of standing in his way.
He stops just a breath away.
Close enough that I catch the steady beat of his pulse in his throat. Close enough that the warmth rolling off him wraps around me before his hands ever do. One tiny shift, one careless inhale, one impossible ounce of courage from either of us would erase the last sliver of space between us.
Eight days of pretending.
Eight days of restraint.
Eight days spent building walls that suddenly feel paper thin.
“I need you to be sure,” he says. His voice is low.
Not the rough, wrecked quality it had during the first kiss.
Calmer. More controlled. Like he’s holding the volume down because he doesn’t trust what happens if he lets it rise.
“Because in six hours I’m walking into a building to get your brother out of a cell, and your brother is my best friend, and if we do this it changes everything between all three of us. Not just tonight. After.”
“I know.”
“If Poe finds out…”
“Nothing that happens between us makes you less loyal to him. It makes you something else to me. Both things can exist at the same time.”
He lifts his hand. The same gesture from the kiss. Not to my face. To the side of my neck. His fingers find the pulse point and this time I know he can feel the speed of it because his breath catches slightly when the contact registers what my heart is doing.
“Tell me to stop,” he says. The same words from the first kiss. But the voice is different. That kiss was a collapse. This is a choice.
I take the front of his shirt in both fists and pull him the last twelve inches.
His mouth finds mine and the contact isn’t like the first kiss.
That one was desperate and sudden and flavored with the surprise of a wall coming down.
This is different. This is the second time, and the second time is slower only for a moment, only for the breath it takes for both of us to register that we’re choosing this, actively, with full knowledge of the cost and the timing and the six hours ticking away and the brother in the cell and the crew in the facility and every single reason we have not to do this right now.
We choose it anyway.
The slowness burns off fast. His hand slides from my neck into my hair and his other arm wraps around my waist and yanks me hard against him.
The contact is total. Chest to chest. Hip to hip.
The heat of his body through the thin thermal shirt is so intense it feels like standing too close to a fire I walked into on purpose.
I pull at his shirt. Not carefully. Roughly. The fabric bunches in my fists and I use it as leverage to press harder against him. He makes a low, broken sound against my mouth that I’ve never heard from him before. Desperate. Needy. Filthy with want.
“Fuck,” he mutters against my lips. “I’ve wanted this for so goddamn long. Wanted you. Wanted to get my hands on you and my mouth on you and feel every inch of this body I’ve been starving for.”
We hit the wall. My back against the cold metal of the storage unit, his body pinning me there hard.
His hands are in my hair and on my waist and then sliding under the hoodie, rough and hungry.
His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to the side of my neck where my pulse is racing so hard it feels like it might break through the skin.
“Enley.” My name in his mouth, spoken against my throat, the vibration of his voice traveling through me like a current.
“You have no idea how many times I’ve thought about this.
Jerked off to this. About bending you over something and making you come so hard you forget every reason we weren’t supposed to do this. ”
His words turn me on. The thought of him relieving himself to thoughts of me nearly undo me.
I yank the hoodie over my head and drop it.
The thermal base layer underneath is thin and I hear his breathing change the second he sees me in it.
He’s seen me in this same layer for days.
But context changes everything. Context is the difference between a base layer worn for warmth and a base layer worn by a woman who just pulled off the only barrier between his hands and her skin.
His hands find the hem. His fingers slide under the fabric and touch my bare waist and the contact of his hot skin on mine sends a shock through my system so sharp that my knees buckle. He catches me. Obviously he catches me. I think this man will always catch me when I fall.
“Jesus,” he breathes, voice rough and ragged. “You’re so fucking soft. I knew you would be. I’ve been dying to get my hands under these clothes and feel you like this.”