Chapter 23
DANIIL
The doorway frame was cool against my shoulder. I leaned there and did not move.
Rhea's nightlight threw a soft gold disc across the rug.
Beom-Beom was tucked under her arm where she always put him, his cotton paw curled near her cheek.
Faint pastel smudges still ghosted on the inside of her small wrist, a leftover from the face-painting at the party, blue and pink threading her skin where she had wiped her own hand a hundred times that afternoon.
She had refused to scrub it off. She had said she wanted to keep it for tomorrow.
Chloe sat on the edge of the bed. Her hand moved over Rhea's hair in long quiet strokes, smoothing it back from her temple, tucking a stray piece behind her ear.
She whispered something I could not hear, something low and slow, and Rhea's eyes went heavier with each pass of that hand.
The blanket rose and fell over her chest. Rhea's small mouth parted.
I watched, and the day finally settled into my chest like a stone going still in deep water.
Today I had been given a birthday. Today there had been a room full of people who carried no weapons and ate cake my child had iced. Today a woman with dark hair and a quiet mouth had told me, in front of God and a paper plate, that she loved me.
A man does not get many evenings like this. I knew that. I knew it the way I knew my own pulse.
Chloe stayed on the bed until Rhea's breathing evened out into the slow give and take of true sleep. She tucked the blanket up under Rhea's chin with two careful fingers. She bent and kissed her forehead, soft, the kind of kiss that did not wake. Then she rose without making the mattress creak.
She came to me in the doorway. Her face was soft in the gold light, and her eyes found mine and held. She slid her hand into mine without a word. I closed my fingers around hers. We turned for the hall together.
The compound was quiet at this hour. Most of the men were down at the gate or asleep in the wing across the courtyard.
The wall sconces had been dimmed to their low setting.
Our shoes made almost no sound on the runner.
I could hear her breathing beside me, and the faint hum of the heater somewhere behind the walls, and the small distant tick of the clock in the front hall.
Her hand was warm in mine. Her thumb moved once across my knuckle.
I looked at the side of her face as we walked.
"You know what?" I said, low. "You are going to be a good mother."
Her step did not break, but her chin lifted a little, like the words had landed somewhere she had not expected them to land. A slow smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.
"You think so?"
"I do."
She squeezed my hand. The smile stayed. "I want to be a good mother too. But not yet. Let's solve the problems first."
"Yes."
We walked another few steps. The runner muffled everything. She was looking down at our hands.
"When this is all done," she said, "I want you to meet my grandma. I know she misses me already."
My hand tightened on hers without my permission. I turned my face toward her without slowing my stride.
"I will finish it, Chloe. As soon as I can. I promise you that."
She did not answer right away. Her thumb moved across my knuckle again, slower this time, like she was choosing her words on my skin first.
"I don't want you to rush it," she said. Her voice was gentle, and it was also firm, and the two did not fight each other. "I want you safe while you do it."
I held my answer one beat longer than usual. I wanted her to feel that I was hearing her. I wanted her to feel that the words were going in past the place where I usually filed promises away.
"I will try."
Her shoulder brushed mine. She did not press for more, and I loved her a little harder for it.
We reached my door. I opened it and let her go in first. The room was dark except for the lamp on the low table by the window, throwing a warm cone of light across the rug and the foot of the bed. The bed was made. Everything was as I had left it that morning, which felt like a year ago.
She turned to me in the middle of the room. She rose onto her toes and kissed me. Soft at first, just her mouth on mine, the give of her lower lip, the warm hush of her breath. Then a beat longer than soft. Her hand came up and lay flat over my heart.
When she pulled back, her fingers slid to my jaw. She tilted my chin a little, the way a woman tilts the chin of a man she has decided to keep, and studied my face with a small private amusement.
"Go shower," she said. "Your face is still a mess."
I caught her meaning. There was a faint blue smear along my temple where Rhea had painted me a star earlier and I had not bothered to scrub it off. There was probably frosting somewhere along my jaw too.
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
Her laugh followed me into the bathroom.
I closed the door behind me. I stripped without ceremony, left the clothes in a quiet heap by the basket, and stepped under the spray.
The water came down hot. I let it. It hit my shoulders first and then ran in steady sheets down my back, and the steam started to climb the glass within seconds.
The room filled with the smell of whatever soap the household kept in here, something clean and faintly woodsy.
I closed my eyes. I let my head tip forward under the spray and let it run over the back of my neck, and I rinsed the day off me one breath at a time.
The small white scar across my left index knuckle was going pink under the heat.
I watched it for a moment without really watching anything at all.
I did not hear the door.
The first I knew of her was her arms going around me from behind.
Bare arms. Her chest pressed against my back, and through the heat of the spray I felt the two hard points of her nipples drag against my skin as she settled in.
Her cheek came to rest in the dip between my shoulder blades, her breath warm and slow there, and her skin was already wet from the water bouncing off mine.
Skin to skin, no fabric anywhere, only the warm press of her against the length of my back.
My hand had been flat on the tile in front of me.
It stopped moving. A long line of heat went down my spine, slow, taking its time, settling somewhere low in me where I could not pretend it was nothing.
She did not say anything at first. She only stood there with her arms around me, her mouth against my back, breathing me in. I felt her thumb trace one slow arc across my stomach under the water. Just one. Then it went still again, as if she were giving me a moment to know she was there.
I closed my eyes. The water hit the top of my head and ran down between us. I did not turn yet. I let her have the back of me for one more breath, because the part of me that was still a soldier knew enough to take the soft moment when it was offered.
"Can I help?" she whispered, into my spine.
My breath went out of me in one slow controlled stream. It was not as controlled as I wanted it to be. She heard it. I felt the small smile against my back where her mouth was.
I turned. Slow. I kept one of her arms locked around my waist as I did it, so she had to follow me through the turn, around into the spray with me.
When I had her in front of me I had to stop for a moment and just take her in.
Her hair was already darkening with water, plastered along her temples in dark wet lines.
Water ran in clean tracks between her breasts and down the soft plane of her stomach.
Her lashes were dark and clumped where the spray had hit them.
Her mouth was open just a little. Her smile had a wickedness in it that did not usually live there in daylight, the kind a woman wears when she knows she has the man in front of her exactly where she wants him.
I had to take a breath. I took it. It went in less smoothly than the last one.
She reached past me without breaking my eyes. Her fingers closed around the bar of soap on the ledge and she lifted it up between us like a small announcement.
"Stand still," she said, light, teasing.
I stood still.
She started at my collarbones. She worked the soap between her palms first to raise the lather, and then her hands came to my chest and began to move.
Slow. So slow it was almost a punishment.
Across the plane of my chest, down the center along my sternum where the water was running in a thin line, out to my shoulders, and back in again.
She drew a long curve under one pectoral, then the other, the slick of the soap making her palm glide where it should have caught.
She traced the line where my ribs ended, paid attention to the small dip just below them, then ran the heel of her hand down across my stomach.
My abdominals tightened under her palm without my asking them to.
Her hand went lower. She followed the cut of muscle into the V of my hip on one side, and then, deliberately, instead of going where I wanted her, she crossed and traced the other side.
My jaw worked. I did not move. I had told her she could play. I was going to let her play.
She watched my face the whole time. That was the worst part. She knew exactly what she was doing and she wanted me to know that she knew.
Her thumb dragged across the soft place under my navel and stopped.
Did not go lower. Did not lift away either.
Just stayed there, warm and slick, and she tilted her head a little as if she were measuring the breath I was about to lose.
I lost it. One quiet exhale, more sound than I had meant to give her.
Her smile widened a fraction. She knew she had pulled it out of me.