Chapter Sixteen #2
"I know." His eyes came up her body slowly, and there was no mercy in them of the kind she'd braced for, there was a man at the end of twenty years of famine looking at bread.
"Then borrow mine until yours comes back.
I have been looking at you across rooms for twenty years, Cordelia Hargrove, in doorways, over documents, at one hundred dinners where I passed you the salt and went home and sat in that armchair like a man who'd been shot.
I intend to make up the arrears. Item," and his mouth came down on her shoulder, "by item," her throat, "by item," working slowly down, and somewhere in the accounting she lost the thread of the arithmetic entirely, her hands in his hair, his name coming out of her in pieces.
He found the long scar low on her belly, the one the hospital had left her in a February snow five years ago, the one page of the document she'd have torn out, and she flinched and tried to turn from it, and he held her hips still and set his mouth to it, once, deliberately, a signature on a line.
"All of it," he said, against her skin. "There's nothing here I haven't loved sight unseen."
Then he stopped being patient about everything except her.
He laid her back across the bed and learned her with his hands and his mouth like a man who had been drafting this for two decades and meant to execute it without a single error, and he was thorough, God, he was thorough.
The inside of her wrist where the pulse hammered.
The backs of her knees, which no one in her whole life had thought to be patient with.
The crease of her hip. And then, when she was past pride entirely, his mouth came down between her thighs and stayed there, unhurried and exact, until she was undone under it, saying his name and please in whatever order they came.
He was unhurried and exact and entirely without shame about watching her, that was the thing that undid her first, the gray eyes on her face at every moment that mattered, reading every gasp like sworn testimony, adjusting, returning, relentless.
The wave that had been standing offshore all evening came all the way in at last and broke her against his mouth, her hand slamming flat against the headboard, her whole body arching up into his hands, and he stayed with her through every second of it and gentled her down the far side, murmuring against her skin like a man saying grace.
She came back to the lamplight with her ears ringing and did the only reasonable thing, which was to pull him up her body by the collar he was somehow still wearing and get him out of the rest of his clothes herself.
Her hands had their own arrears. She took her time with the buttons out of pure spite for the twenty years, and he suffered it with his forehead against hers and his breath going harsher by the button, and then her palms were finally on him, the flat of his chest where the heart hammered under all that stillness, the forearms she had spent a season refusing to notice, the long lean heat of him everywhere warm as an engine that had idled for years with no one to put their hands to it.
And when she finally took him in her hand, hard and patient no longer, he made a sound she had never heard from him in all the years of hearing him speak, half word, half prayer, wholly wrecked.
She stroked him slowly just to hear it again, and his control, that monument, that public institution, cracked straight down the middle.
"Cordelia." Her name, through his teeth, both a warning and a surrender.
"There you are," she said, wicked, borrowed from him already, and he laughed once, ragged, and rolled her under him, and the laughing stopped.
He gathered her under him and stilled, the whole warm weight of him held on his forearms above her, and even now, even here, at the very end of twenty years, he waited, eyes on her eyes, asking one last silent time, and she answered by wrapping her legs around him and pulling him into her.
He pushed inside her slowly, completely, and the sound they made together at it was low and broken and belonged to neither of them separately.
When he was fully home he stopped, deep in the heart of her, forehead to her forehead, both of them trembling now, the whole of it almost too much, and said, in the wrecked remains of the courtroom voice, one word.
"Years."
"I know," she said, holding his face. "I know. Move."
He moved.
Slow first, long and deep and deliberate, a man refusing after all this waiting to be hurried at the last, and she rose to meet every stroke until the rhythm took them both over and there was no more strategy in it anywhere, only want and answer, the old bed working under them, her nails in his back, his mouth at her throat saying her name like an argument he was winning, the lamplight sliding gold over the muscle of his shoulders.
She kept reaching, out of years of habit, for the performance, the flattering noise, the managed arc, and every time he felt her leave he stopped dead, buried in her, waiting, until she came back to the room and to him and to the specific astonishing fact of skin on skin.
"Stay with me," he said once, low, when her eyes went somewhere. "There you are."
"Say my name," she asked him once, at his ear, and he said it, and she felt what it cost him travel the whole length of his body, and after that she gave him hers unasked, whenever the tide crested, and every time, every single time, it broke his rhythm like a wave taking a wall.
Twenty years of hearing her name in rooms, he managed, against her throat, ragged, twenty years of saying it like a man passing the salt, and she pulled him deeper into the dark and made him say it the other way until neither of them could say anything at all.