Chapter 8 Kate
eight
Kate
The settlement wants me to stay. I’m not surprised, considering all that’s happened.
It’s just the facts and what they need. My research. My methods. My ability to train other people to continue what Ben and Liam started.
But I know that’s not where my heart lies anymore.
I find Finn near the trading post. He's counting bolts in a salvage bin, lips barely moving, hands working through the pieces with mechanical calm. It's what he does when the noise gets too loud. Finds something he can number. Something that holds still.
He sees me coming before I'm close.
"They want me to stay," I say.
He sets down the bolt he's holding. "I assumed they would."
"I'm not going to."
That gets a reaction, hidden but there. He waits. He's learned I always have a second half to a sentence.
"I want to come home." The word feels strange and true at the same time. "To your cabin. I want that to be where I live."
"The research?"
"I can coordinate from anywhere with a radio. I can travel when I need to and come back when I'm done." I close the last few feet between us. "I'm not asking you to be a settlement, Finn. I'm asking you to be my base camp. There's a difference."
He looks at me for a long moment. "You'd do that," he says. Not a question, exactly. More like he's testing the weight of it. "Structure your entire work around my weirdness?"
"Around our life," I correct. "Around how we work best."
He's quiet. I let him be quiet. I've learned that with Finn, silence isn't absence, it's where he keeps the things that matter most.
"I want you to stay," he says finally. His voice is low, precise. "I want to wake up and know you're there. I want to argue about methodology over bad coffee and listen to you talk through problems I'm not supposed to answer." A pause. "That's what I want. You asked, so I'm telling you."
Something in my chest comes completely undone.
"Then that's what we're doing," I say.
He pulls me against him in the kind of way that says you belong here without using any words at all. His arms settle around me. Safe. Secure.
"Finn," I say into his shoulder.
"Mm."
"I love you."
He goes still. I feel him processing it, turning it over, categorizing it, letting it land in whatever part of him has been holding the door open for all these lonely years.
Then he pulls back just enough to look at me. His face is serious and soft at the same time, that specific Finn combination that I didn't know existed before him.
"That's…hm," He stops. Starts again. "I love you too." He says it like a conclusion. Like a finding. "I've been trying to determine the correct moment to say it. I kept identifying better options and then not taking them."
I laugh, pressing my face against his chest. "You could have just said it."
"There's no such thing as just saying something important."
That night, the guesthouse room is small and the walls are thin and neither of us cares.
Finn closes the door and the settlement sounds muffle and we stand there in the near-dark, and he looks at me like he's still a little surprised I'm real.
"I spent hours," he says. "In a crowd."
"You did brilliantly."
"I had you." He crosses the room slowly. His hands come up to frame my face, thumbs tracing my cheekbones like he's memorizing measurements. "Having you there made it navigable."
"That's what I'm for."
"Not only that."
I kiss him before he can find the rest of the sentence.
He makes a low sound and pulls me in, one hand sliding into my hair, the other settling at the small of my back.
I've been thinking about this all day. About finally being alone with him after watching him hold himself together in a crowd for my sake.
I want to take him apart a little. Return the favor.
I walk him backward toward the narrow bed until his knees hit the frame and he sits, and I stay standing. His hands drop to my hips, steadying or holding, I'm not sure which.
"Kate?"
"I want to try something," I say. "Something I want to do. For you."
He looks up at me in the dim light.
I sink to my knees in front of him.
He goes absolutely still.
"You don't have to do that," he starts.
"I know I don't have to." I'm already working his belt. "That's the point. I want to." I look up at him. "Is that okay?"
His throat moves. "Yes." His voice has gone rough. "Yes, that's, yes."
He's let me lead before. He's good at following instruction, good at checking in, good at making sure I have what I need. But this is different. This is me asking nothing of him except to receive. I watch his face as I free him, watch the careful control he always carries flicker and strain.
He's already hard. Thick and heavy in my hand when I wrap my fingers around him.
I've had him inside me a dozen times now and I still feel a pull low in my stomach just looking at him.
Long, flushed dark at the tip, a bead of moisture already gathering there.
I run my thumb through it and he makes a sound like I've knocked the air out of him.
"You've never?" I start.
"No." One word. Clipped tight.
"Tell me if you want me to stop."
"I won't."
I chuckle.
I start slow. I press a kiss to the inside of his thigh and feel the muscle jump beneath my mouth. Then higher, his hip, the soft skin below his navel. Building toward him without touching him, and he's breathing hard already, hands white-knuckled on the mattress edge.
When I finally wrap my lips around the head of his cock he makes a sound I've never heard from him. Something stripped raw and helpless. I take him deeper.
He tastes clean and warm, faintly salt, and I take my time learning him the way he's learned me— unhurried, thorough, paying attention to every catch of breath.
I work my hand around the base of him and use my mouth on the rest, tongue tracing the ridge, finding the spots that make his jaw clench.
I hollow my cheeks and suck and he groans, low and involuntary, like he couldn't hold it back.
That's the thing about Finn and control. He has so much of it, all the time, over everything. Watching it slip is devastating in the best possible way.
"Kate." My name, jagged at the edges.
I hum against him in answer and his hips jerk forward like a reflex, like his body is operating without permission. He swears under his breath and I feel the effort it's costing him to hold still. Every muscle in his thighs is rigid under my hands.
I pull back just enough to speak. "You can move," I tell him. "I've got you."
The silence stretches for a beat while he processes that. Then his hand comes up and settles into my hair. Not pushing. Not guiding. Just holding, like he needs something to anchor him.
I take him deep.
"Fuck," The word splits open. His grip tightens in my hair and he rocks forward, just barely, just enough, like the control finally cost more than he had left. I take everything he gives. I keep my palms flat on his thighs and feel them shaking.
I work him with my hand and my mouth together, finding the rhythm that makes his breathing go ragged, that makes him say my name again.
I look up at him and find him already looking at me, his dark eyes blown wide and completely unguarded, and that eye contact breaks something loose in both of us.
I take him deeper still, and his whole body shudders.
He comes apart so quietly. That's the thing about Finn, even undone, he's precise.
Just his breath fracturing, my name once more, and then his body drawn bowstring-tight for one suspended moment before he comes, his hand curled in my hair, shuddering through it in long slow waves while I stay with him and take everything. I swallow every drop, hot and salty.
I stay with him until it passes.
When I look up, he's staring at me like I've just presented him with a finding he doesn't have a category for.
"Come here," he says, and his voice is wrecked.
I climb up beside him and he pulls me close, my head against his chest, and holds on with the particular grip that means he's feeling something too large to say. His heart is going fast under my ear.
"Finn."
"Give me a moment."
I give him the moment. Outside, the settlement settles into its nighttime sounds. In here it's just his breathing slowing and his arms around me and the specific warmth of someone who's just let themselves be completely vulnerable with you for the first time.
He tilts my chin up and kisses me, deep and slow and grateful, and then rolls me beneath him, and spends the next hour making absolutely sure I'm in no doubt about how he feels about what just happened.
Afterwards, he pulls me close and I listen to his heartbeat slow.
"I had a thought," he says to the ceiling.
"Mm."
"The canyon site. Three miles from my cabin. The elevation would support radio equipment—clear sight lines, good signal range." A beat. "I've been calculating it. Since before I knew I was calculating it."
I smile in the dark. "A research station.”
“A place for our new life,” he corrects and my heart squeezes with emotion.