Chapter 3 #2
The whole left side of him is a sunset of bruising, deep purple going yellow-green at the edges, a boot's worth of ruin printed across bone.
I press two fingers to the worst of it, feather-light, and he flinches.
"These are broken," I say. "At least two. You need a hospital, or at least Doc?—"
"No hospitals. No Doc." He catches my hand before I can argue. "They can't do anything for cracked ribs but tape them and tell you not to laugh. I know how this goes, Tindra. I've done it before."
I've done it before.
Four words, and a whole childhood in them.
I don't push on that either, because we're not talking about it, because I promised.
Instead I wrap his ribs the way I've watched Doc do it, firm and even, my hands moving slowly over the wreckage of him.
He breathes through it and lets me, and every place my fingers touch him I feel him ease a fraction more into being home.
"There," I murmur, tucking the wrap. "Now you can't laugh either. We're even."
He laughs anyway, one broken huff, grabs his side, and swears.
I laugh too because it's that or cry, and for a moment the two of us are only grateful and wrecked together in the small bright light of my bathroom.
Then he looks at me, and the gratitude turns into something warmer and lower.
His good hand slides from my hip around to the small of my back and draws me in against him.
"Bodul." I put a hand flat on his good shoulder. "You have broken ribs."
"I've got a lot of things broken." His voice has dropped, rough and low. "Not the part of me that's been thinking about you since I’ve been gone."
I should say no.
Every sensible cell in me knows a man with two cracked ribs has no business doing anything but sleeping.
I open my mouth to tell him so, but he catches my chin the way he did the night he left and tips my face to his, and whatever I was going to say dissolves.
He kisses me carefully, because he has to. The split lip won't allow anything else.
The carefulness is its own kind of undoing. Bodul never does anything careful.
Bodul kisses like he's trying to prove something.
This is slow, soft, his good hand cradling the back of my skull like I'm the fragile one, cracks me open in a way nothing rough ever has.
"Bed," I breathe against his mouth. "If we're doing this, we're doing it where you can lie down. I'm in charge of everything. You don't move unless I tell you."
Something flares in his good eye, heat and surrender at once.
"Yes, ma'am," he says.
I get him to the bedroom and down onto his back in slow stages.
I take my time getting the rest of his road clothes off him, and then I stand at the end of the bed and pull my own shirt over my head while he watches me with the one eye gone dark and greedy in the low light.
Whatever the beating took out of him, it didn't touch this.
He looks at me like a starving man looks at bread.
I come down over him with a knee on either side of his hips, holding my weight up on my own arms so I don't put an ounce on his ribs.
The position puts me in charge of all of it, every inch, every pace, and the low pull of that goes warm between my thighs before he's even touched me.
"Careful," I tell us both, and lower myself, and take him in slow.
The stretch of it steals my breath.
He fills me by degrees, and I sink down onto him an inch at a time, watching his face the whole way for the wince that means I've hurt his side, and it doesn't come.
What comes instead is a low broken sound from the back of his throat, his good hand flying to my hip and gripping, his head going back into the pillow, and the sight of him coming undone underneath me while I set every inch of the pace lights me up hotter than anything rough ever could.
"There you are," I whisper, seated fully, the two of us fused, my pulse pounding everywhere at once. "I've got you. Just feel it. Let me."
And he does. He lets me.
That's what guts me even as it winds me tighter, the way this impossible man, who rode with broken bones rather than call a soul for help, lies back under me and lets me have all of it.
Allows me to hold him and move on him, and take care of him even here.
His hand stays locked on my hip, not steering, only holding, his thumb stroking the crest of the bone in time with the roll of me, and every slow grind drags a sound out of one or both of us into the dark.
I ride him gentle and deep because gentle is all his body will allow, and it turns out to be its own devastation.
There's no hiding in slowness.
Every place we're joined I feel with my whole body, the drag, fullness, and the heat building.
I have to brace one hand flat on his chest, careful of the wrap, to keep from folding down onto him.
"Look at me," he rasps. "Tindra. Don't close your eyes. Let me see you."
So I look at him while I move, his one good eye holding mine, and it's almost too much, the intimacy of being watched while I come apart.
The heat coils tighter and tighter low in my belly with every roll of my hips until it's a live wire, until I'm gasping his name, until it snaps.
It goes through me in waves, and I break above him with my head thrown back and his name in my mouth.
My whole body clenching around him, and he follows me a heartbeat later with a groan he can't hold in.
His hand a vise on my hip, his hips lifting the barest fraction into me before the ribs stop him and I take over, working us both through it slow and deep until we're wrung out and shaking.
I come down onto him, folding to his good side, my head on the shoulder that isn't wrecked, and for a long while neither of us says anything at all.
He strokes my hair.
Slow, absent, his split knuckles catching now and then in the strands.
I lie there with my palm spread flat over his heart, feeling it slam and then gradually slow, and I press a kiss to the unhurt curve of his shoulder and pull the blanket up over the both of us.
"Was that too much for your ribs?" I ask quietly.
"Worth every cracked one." His voice is thick, half gone to sleep already. "Don't you dare feel guilty. That's the first time in days I've felt like a person."
I tuck myself in closer, and I hold him.
I listen to him breathe, slow and even, until sleep finally takes him under.
And I stay awake.
I lie there in the dark with this broken, sleeping man wrapped around me, sated and safe and loved down to my bones.
Underneath all of it, low and cold, the unease I've been feeling won't leave me be.
Because he told me pieces tonight. A father. A sister named Marit. A family that isn't good. And I believe every piece he gave me.
It's the outline of what he didn't give me that keeps my eyes open in the dark.
He came home carrying something. I felt it in the way he held on.
Loving him means I let him keep it, for now, sealed behind that wall he can't climb.
I only hope to the gods I don't find out too late what I let him carry alone.