16. Damian #3
"Look at me," I said, and she did, eyes dark and half-lidded, lips parted, and holding that gaze while our bodies moved together was more intimate than anything else that had happened between us that night.
She reached up and traced the line of my jaw, and I turned my mouth into her palm without thinking, an instinct I didn't recognize in myself anymore.
"Damian." Softer now, almost reverent, her fingers tightening at the back of my neck. "I'm close again."
"I've got you. Take what you need."
I shifted my angle, one hand sliding beneath the small of her back to change the pitch of her hips, and the new angle dragged a sharp gasp out of her, her whole body drawing tight beneath mine.
I kept the pace steady, slow and relentless, feeling her tighten around me in slow, rolling pulses that nearly finished me before she got there, her hands roaming restlessly over my shoulders and down my back like she couldn't decide where to hold on.
"Damian, I..."
"That's it. Let go."
She broke with my name torn loose and her nails biting crescents into my shoulders, her body arching so hard off the mattress that I had to hold her through it, murmuring against her ear that I had her, that she could let go, that nothing was pulling me away.
The waves of it moved through her, her body clenching and releasing around me in a rhythm that stripped away whatever was left of my restraint.
The sight and sound of her like that, undone entirely because of me, pulled me under right behind her.
My own rhythm stuttered, control finally giving out after holding on so long it had felt like another kind of strength, and I drove into her twice more, hard and unsteady, before the release took me apart with a force that left my ears ringing and my arms shaking where they braced on either side of her.
I came with her name half-spoken against her throat, my whole body shaking with something that felt less like a physical release and more like surrender.
For one unguarded moment I wasn't thinking about the men on shift at the gate downstairs, or the ledgers waiting in my office, or the locked garage bay two floors down that I hadn't opened in longer than I wanted to count. I wasn't thinking about anything I'd built my life around protecting.
I was just there. With her.
For a long moment neither of us moved, my weight braced above her, both of us breathing hard, her hand coming up to rest against my jaw like she needed to touch something solid.
I turned my head and kissed her palm, and she made a small sound, half laugh, half sigh, that told me everything I needed to know.
"Hi," she said, breathless, and I felt my mouth pull into something that must have looked like a real smile.
"Hi."
After, I didn't move away, though every instinct I'd trained into myself over the years told me to put distance between us, to get up, to be useful, to do anything other than stay still and be known.
I stayed. I gathered her against my side, and she came willingly, her leg sliding between mine, her head finding the spot just below my shoulder like it had always belonged there.
Her fingers traced slow idle patterns over my ribs, over the scar she hadn't asked about, and neither of us said anything for a long while, the only sound our breathing gradually settling back into something ordinary.
I thought about all the nights I'd lain in this bed alone, running through tomorrow's logistics until sleep took me by force rather than invitation, and I couldn't remember the last time my mind had gone this quiet this fast. There was nothing left to plan.
Nothing to check. Just the weight of her against my side and the slow, steady fact of her breathing, more grounding than anything I'd built my life around.
"Damian," she said eventually, voice thick with sleep already tugging at the edges of it.
"Yeah."
"Thank you for tonight. All of it. The coney dogs too."
I pressed my mouth to her hair and didn't answer right away, because I didn't trust my voice not to give away more than I meant to. "Go to sleep, Mira."
"Bossy," she murmured, but she was smiling, I could feel it against my chest, and within a few minutes her breathing evened out into something slow and steady, her hand still resting over my heart like she meant to keep it there.
I lay awake long after, staring at the ceiling, the city's glow moving faintly across the plaster in bars of light and shadow.
Her weight against my side was warm and real and nothing like the empty side of the bed I'd gotten used to for nine years.
Two floors down there was a locked garage bay with a car under a tarp that belonged to someone who mattered, and I didn't reach for that thought the way I usually did when the quiet got too big.
I let it sit where it was, distant, without pulling it into the room with us.
For the first time since I could remember, the quiet didn't feel like something I had to survive.
I looked down at her, at the loose fall of her hair across my chest, at the peace on her face that I'd had some hand in putting there, and something in me that had been braced for nine straight years finally, quietly, let go.