Chapter Twenty-Five
IT TOOK ME days to work up to it, and in the end the walk down the path wasn’t the hard part at all. The hard part was leaving the lamp on.
Six nights I’d gone down there and done it the coward’s way, waited till I thought he was asleep, slipped in against his back, took what I needed in the dark where nobody could see me want it. Six nights he’d let me, and held still, and never once let on. I knew he was awake every time.
Sawyer’s voice had been in my head for days. Go be that girl again. Go reach.
So on the fifth night I knocked.
I’d never knocked before. That was the first thing that told him something was different. I heard him go still on the other side of the door, and then he opened it, and he took one look at my face and whatever he saw there made his own go careful in a way I’d never seen.
“Amy?”
“Can I come in?”
“You don’t have to ask me that. You never have to — ”
“I’m asking anyway.” My heart was going so hard I thought he could probably see it. “Tonight I’m asking.”
He stepped back and let me in, and I walked past him into the middle of that cabin, and then I did the thing I’d been terrified of for days.
I didn’t turn the lamp off.
I stood there with the lamp still on and made myself leave it that way. He could see me. I could see him. There was no sneaking into his bed after dark tonight, no pretending I didn't know what I was doing. I turned around and faced him, and I watched the second he understood.
His breath caught.
“Amy.” My name came out of him rough. He didn’t move toward me.
His hands stayed at his sides. “Whatever this is. You need to be sure. You need to be all the way sure, because I am not — I can’t be the one to — ” He stopped and dragged in a breath.
“It has to be you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?
Every inch of it has to be you, or I can’t. ”
“I know.” My voice shook. “That’s why I left the lamp on.”
* * *
I crossed the room to him.
The hardest part was walking to him. He stood there and let me come, didn't move an inch to make it easier, because he'd promised every bit of this would be mine to choose.
Men had been closing distances for me my whole life, deciding when they got close and how close they got, and I'd never understood until that moment what it felt like to be the one deciding.
I took another step.
I stopped right in front of him, close enough to feel the heat come off him, and I looked up at that still, raw, waiting face, and I put my hand flat on his chest the way I’d done a hundred times in the dark, except the lamp was on, and he could see me do it, and I could see him feel it.
His heart was going as hard as mine.
“Say it,” he said. Barely a whisper. Not a demand. A plea. “I need the words, Amy. I’m sorry. After everything, I need you to say the words, because I won’t spend the rest of my life wondering if I took something from you.”
“I want you.” It came out of me plain and clear, and it didn’t shake the way I’d been sure it would.
“I’ve wanted you since the first month I got here.
I wanted you before you ever broke my heart, Rune, I wanted you so bad I couldn’t breathe, and you knew it, and you were the only man on this earth I was never once afraid of, and I’m not afraid of you now.
” My throat closed and I pushed through it.
“I’m choosing it. Nobody made me come down here, and nobody’s making me say this.
I want you, Rune. I’ve wanted you for a long time, and I’m tired of waiting until it’s dark to let myself act like it’s okay. ”
For a second he didn’t move at all.
And then he made a sound deep in his chest like a man who’d been holding his breath for a year, and he reached up, slow, careful, giving me every chance to stop him, and cupped the side of my face in one big rough hand like it was made of something that could break, and he said, “There she is,” in a voice that came apart in the middle, and I understood what he was talking about.
He’d waited months for me to choose.
So I did.
And God, I loved him for making me come all the way.
* * *
He kissed me like he’d been starving.
Slowly, though, which was somehow worse.
I’d expected all that wanting I’d watched him choke down for weeks to finally break loose, but Rune kissed me like he didn’t quite believe I was real yet, one hand at my jaw and the other settling at the small of my back before he drew me against him, and I went willingly, arms sliding around his neck, my body fitting into the hard length of his while something warm and dizzy opened low in me.
I’d kissed him before. I’d wanted him before.
This was different. This was me letting him see that I wanted him and not taking it back.
His mouth changed against mine when I pulled him closer, some last thread of restraint slipping, and God, there he was.
Not the careful man on the floor. Not the one in the garden pretending he hadn’t been staring at my mouth.
This was Rune wanting me, and I’d spent so long wondering what that would feel like that actually having the answer nearly took my knees out.
He was hot and hard everywhere I was soft, one big hand spanning most of my back, the other still at my jaw like even now he couldn’t quite believe he was allowed to hold me there, and when I pressed closer a rough sound caught low in his throat.
That sound did something terrible to me. I kissed him harder just to hear it again.
And I did.
His fingers tightened against my back before he caught himself, and I felt the exact second he tried to put the leash back on.
I didn’t want the leash. Not all the way.
I wanted to know what it felt like to be wanted by Rune when neither one of us was pretending otherwise, and when his mouth left mine and found the corner of my jaw, then the place just below it, I tipped my head without thinking and felt his breath catch against my skin.
That nearly undid me more than anything.
Rune was always so controlled. Rune knew what to do with a bleeding man and a dying plant and a terrified girl on a parking-garage floor. He could sit still for six hours while I slept wrapped around him and never let one inch of what he wanted touch me.
And I could make that man shake.
The knowledge went through me hot.
I don’t remember deciding to move toward the bed. I remember his mouth coming back to mine, and my fingers sliding into the hair at the back of his head, and the low sound he made when I pulled him closer, and then the mattress caught the backs of my knees.
I sat.
Rune didn’t.
Not right away.
He stood between my knees looking down at me, breathing hard, and I’d never seen him look less like the man who knew what to do with everything.
His hands opened and closed once at his sides, like touching me had suddenly become the most dangerous thing he’d ever done, and the sight of it, the sight of Rune barely holding himself together because of me, sent heat rolling through me so fast I forgot to be nervous.
So I reached for him.
His eyes dropped to my hands where I’d caught the front of his shirt.
“Amy.”
There was a warning in it, except I wasn’t sure anymore which one of us he was warning.
“I know.”
I pulled.
That was when he came down over me. He held his weight away, forehead settling against mine while we both tried to breathe, and when his hand slipped beneath the hem of the shirt I was wearing—his shirt—and stopped at my waist, his palm rough and hot against my bare skin, my breath caught.
His did too.
That surprised me enough to look at him.
Rune wasn’t looking at my body. He was looking at my face, watching me so closely I had the strange feeling he could hear every thought going through my head, but his jaw had locked hard enough to show me exactly what having his hand on my bare skin was doing to him.
I shivered.
He stopped instantly. “Okay?”
And God, that voice. Rough and filled with need, while his hand stayed perfectly still against my side. I could’ve said stop. Instead I covered his hand with mine and moved it a little higher.
His eyes closed for half a second.
That tiny loss of control went straight through me.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Keep going.”
So he did.
And for a little while, there was nothing in the world but him.
* * *
And then, somewhere in it, the other thing came.
It always comes. I should have known it would come.
His weight came fully over me and for one second my body forgot where it was, forgot it was him, forgot the lamp, forgot the last year, and the old fears fired all at once, the hallway, the dark, the door that doesn’t lock, and I went rigid underneath him, my hands came up hard against his chest and a sound came out of me.
He was gone before I finished making it.
Off me and up and back in the space of a breath, sitting back on his heels giving me air, his hands up off me and open where I could see them.
“You’re alright.” Low and even, the voice he uses on spooked things, the voice that has been reaching me since the first month I got here.
“You’re alright. You’re in my cabin and the lamp’s on and it’s just me. Nobody’s here but me. Take your time.”
I lay there with my heart slamming and waited for the shame to come, the way it always comes, the of course you ruined it, of course you’re broken, of course you couldn’t even have this —
And it didn’t come.
Because he wasn’t looking at me like I’d ruined anything.
He wasn’t angry, wasn’t impatient, wasn’t doing the thing men do where they’re kind about it but you can feel them waiting for you to get over it.
He’d just — stopped. Completely. The second I needed him to, no questions, no cost, like stopping was the easiest thing in the world and he’d do it a thousand times and never once make me pay for it.
He’d wait all night. I could see it on him. He’d wait all night and never touch me again and never hold one bit of it against me.
And that — that — was the thing that finally took the last of the fear out of me.
Not being wanted. I’d been wanted before, by him, in the dark.
It was being wanted by a man who would let go of all of it in an instant the moment I flinched.
A man whose wanting had a brake on it, and I held the brake, me, and I always would.
I reached up and took his hand off his knee, then put it back against my bare side myself, making sure he understood that I was the one putting it there. I looked him dead in the eyes. “It’s you. I know it’s you. Come back.”
And he came back.
Slow. So slow. And this time when the trauma came digging at the corners I just held onto him and said his name, and it went, because he was louder than it now, his slow, sure heart and his careful hands and his mouth at my throat saying something I couldn’t hear, and for the first time in my life my body and I agreed completely on where I was and who I was with and that I was safe.
I’ll leave the rest of it where it belongs, which is between the two of us and nobody else, in a cabin with the lamp on, in the middle of the night, at the far edge of a compound full of guns.
I’ll only say this. It was slow, and it was mine, and I cried when it was over. He didn’t ask why because he already knew, and afterward I fell asleep wrapped all the way up in him with the lamp still on. Neither of us bothered to turn it off.
We were done hiding in the dark.
* * *
I woke once near dawn with Rune’s arm heavy around my middle and his chest warm against my back, and for a minute I lay there trying to figure out what was different.
Then I heard him breathe.
He was asleep.
Actually asleep.
Rune, who could lie beside me for six hour, rather than let himself drift off, was dead asleep with his face half buried in my hair and one big hand loose against my stomach, and something about it made my chest ache so badly I had to close my eyes.
He trusted this too.
I lay there inside the circle of him and, for once, didn’t take the feeling apart to see if I was allowed to have it. No talking myself out of a single thing.
I just had it.
Then I remembered Sawyer.
My phone was on the nightstand. I stretched carefully until I could reach it without waking Rune, opened our messages, and stared at the screen for about three seconds before sending exactly what he’d demanded.
A thumbs up.
I barely had the phone back on the nightstand before it buzzed.
I grabbed it before it could wake Rune.
OH THANK GOD.
I clapped a hand over my mouth, but the laugh got into my chest anyway, shaking me just enough that Rune made a low, sleepy sound behind me and tightened his arm around my waist without waking, hauling me backward until I was tucked against him again.
That shut me up.
I looked down at the big hand spread loose over me, then back at Sawyer’s message, and something warm and ridiculous filled my chest.
I typed back with one thumb: Go to sleep.
Three dots appeared immediately. I put the phone facedown before he could answer.
Whatever Sawyer had to say could wait. I turned in Rune’s arms instead, and even asleep he made room for me, his arm shifting around my back as I tucked my face against his chest. His heart was slow beneath my cheek, nothing like the fast beat I’d felt under my palm when I’d first reached for him with the lamp on.
I closed my eyes.
For once there was no hallway waiting behind them.
There was only this man, this room, morning coming through the window, and the strange new knowledge that I’d reached for something I wanted and the world hadn’t punished me for it.
So I let myself have that too.
I slept until the sun was all the way up.
I didn’t dream at all.