Chapter Fourteen #3
I take my time with her. I’ve wanted to do this for weeks, whether I admitted it or not, and I’m not rushing a fucking second of it.
I work my way down her body, and she lets me, one hand still in my hair, her breathing coming apart by degrees.
When my mouth finds her inner thigh, she makes a sound I’ve never heard from her.
It’s unguarded, open, nothing managed about it, and her fingers tighten.
“Prophet.”
“Tell me to stop...” I say, against her skin, “... and I will.”
She doesn’t tell me to stop.
I take my time. She tastes of the specific, concentrated version of everything Lily is—precise, fierce, and entirely present.
Her thighs tighten around my head. Her breathing goes ragged.
She comes apart with her hand pressing hard against the back of my skull.
The sound she makes, she bites back halfway through, then stops biting, then lets it go entirely.
The letting go is the most honest thing I’ve heard from her in all my time here.
I come back up her body. She pulls me in before I’ve fully arrived, both hands at my face, mouth finding mine with an urgency that has nothing composed about it.
“Now,” she says, against my mouth.
I position myself between her thighs and look at her face. Her hair is loose across the pillow, her eyes dark and entirely direct.
“Yes,” she says, before I ask.
I slowly push into her. Her breath goes out in a long exhale, her head tipping back against the pillow. I hold myself still, long enough for her to feel the full weight of it and to register what it means to finally be here, inside her, with no distance left between us.
Then I move.
There is no grace here. No remnant of the divine.
Only this, her body, mine, and weeks of accumulated weight finally finding somewhere to go.
Lily meets every movement. She is not passive but fully and actively present, the way she is with everything she’s decided matters, and she has decided this matters.
Lily wraps her legs around me, pulls me deeper, and the sound that comes out of me is not anything I planned.
Lily tells me what she needs without words, with the angle of her hips and the grip of her hands, and I pay attention.
I have always been good at paying attention.
What’s different now is that every detail lands at a frequency below thought.
The pressure of her fingers on my spine.
The catch of her breath when I change the angle.
The specific broken sound she makes when I slow down and make her wait for it.
“Don’t stop,” she says, voice rough.
“Not stopping,” I say.
I reach between us and find her with my thumb, and her entire body tightens. Her nails find my back. She says my name, as if I belong to her, and fuck if I don’t want to.
Lily comes hard, her whole body pulling in around me, and it takes me with her. For one long moment, there is nothing in the world but this, her, me, and the stove burning low with Alaska outside the window, vast and indifferent. None of it matters at all.
Afterward, she lies against my chest. Her breathing is not even, and neither is mine. Bear, from the foot of the bed where he has been pointedly ignoring the entire situation, repositions himself against our feet. The air about him suggests considerable restraint.
Her hand rests flat against my chest, feeling my heartbeat. I know this because she’s a cardiologist and old habits are hard to break.
“Still beating,” I say.
“Adequately,” she says. The driest possible delivery, and something in my chest turns over warm.
We lie there while the afternoon light moves across the wall. The stove has burned down, and neither of us moves to feed it.
“Two days,” she says after a while.
“Two days,” I confirm.
Her hand presses harder against my chest. The hand of a woman who needs accurate data before she plans her next move. I cover her hand with mine and feel the warmth of her knuckles against my palm.
“You’re coming back,” she says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No,” I say. “But I know I’m coming back to you.” I feel rather than see the expression she makes when she’s received something she’ll think about for a long time.
She’s quiet.
“Okay,” she finally says, a small word doing enormous work.
When the stove finally needs tending, I get up and feed it without turning on a light, working in the low winter afternoon gloom the way I’ve learned to in this cabin. Afterward, the north window draws me over, and I stand there for a while.
Two days.
Blade will come through the wilderness with my brothers, and whatever Calix has waiting at the tree line is going to learn exactly what that means.
My chair at that table in Crystal Creek is still mine.
The brothers are still mine.
Tessa is alive.
Lily comes to stand beside me at the window, and her shoulder finds mine.
“Two days,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Think they’re ready for my mountain?”
I look at the dark tree line. “No.”
Bear leans against the backs of our legs, and Lily’s shoulder stays warm against mine.
I should be thinking about Calix, about what waits beyond those trees and everything that can go wrong when my brothers get here.
Instead, all I can think about is the woman beside me and the fact that, I have something worth defending instead of something to avenge.
Two days. Let them come.