12. Evander
EVANDER
The whiteout swallows the world about a mile short of the emergency station.
We've already covered three brutal miles since leaving the wreck, and daylight disappeared somewhere behind us more than an hour ago.
One minute I can make out the path for the pass; the next there's nothing but a howling gray wall that eats sound and light and any sense of direction a normal person might trust. I trust my nose instead, and my nose says shelter, close, off to the left.
The old maintenance hut squats against the rock like it's been waiting for us, half-buried, roof sagging.
I get the door open with one heave and pull Camille in after me. The wind slams it shut behind us, and the sudden quiet is almost violent.
"We're not going anywhere until this breaks," I tell her, throwing the bolt. "Could be one hour, could be four."
"I did notice the part where I couldn't see my own hand." She's already pacing the cramped space, taking inventory the way she takes inventory of everything. "There's a stove. Old, but the flue looks intact. If there's fuel, I can get us heat without smoking us out."
There's a scuttle of coal by the wall and a box of stiff matches. She has a fire going inside ten minutes, crouched over the little iron belly of the thing, coaxing it like it owes her money. I watch her work and feel the day catch up with me.
"Sit," she says without turning around. "You've been favoring your left side since the vestibule. Don't argue, just sit, and take the jacket off."
"It's nothing."
"Evander." She finally glances at me, firelight catching the sharp hazel-green of her eyes. "I have watched you lift a train car and shrug off a beam. I am well aware that 'nothing' from you would put a normal man in the hospital. Jacket. Off."
I don't have it in me to fight her. I shrug out of it and the thermal beneath, and hear her breath catch when the firelight finds my ribs.
There's a black bruise spread across the left side, the skin split in two places from the beam.
She kneels and sets cool fingers to the edge, careful, clinical, and I hold very still because her touch does something to the animal in me unrelated to the pain.
"This should have you flat on your back," she murmurs. "And it's already closing. The cuts have scabbed. That's… hours, days of healing in what, forty minutes?"
"Faster than a human, slower than my sister likes to brag she isn’t." I try for lightness. "We're hard to kill. Not impossible, don't get ideas."
"I'm cataloging, not plotting." Her fingers trail the bruise once more, then still. "How long have you known? That your lion, that it noticed me. Specifically."
The question lands in the small warm dark between us, and I've promised her no more half-truths. So I give her the whole one.
"Since the first day. You were crouched over that coupling telling me the metal had been helped, and my lion just… decided. Before I did, before I had a single reasonable thought about you, it had already made up its mind that you mattered. Every hour since, I’be been trying to talk it out of the position. "
"Talk it out." Her mouth curves, not quite a smile. "How's that going?"
"You're kneeling in a hut on the side of a mountain, and I've never lost arguments as badly as I do with you in my life."
That earns a real laugh, the one I've started collecting like a miser. But she straightens fast, and when she speaks again there's an edge under it.
"I have a problem with your lion, though.
" She sits back, level with me. "It doesn't get a vote, not about me.
I'm the one who decides where I go and who I let close, and I'm not handing that to an instinct just because the instinct happens to be attached to you.
If this is happening, it's because I choose it.
Not because you scented me and filed a claim. "
"Good, because I don't want a woman my lion picked out. I want the one who told me adrenaline doesn't let a man catch a falling adult one-handed and then didn't run when she found out why. The lion wants you, fine, but so does the rest."
The fire pops, and outside, the storm keeps trying to tear the roof off, but in here the whole cramped world has narrowed down to the six inches between us.
"Say that again," she says quietly. "The rest…"
"The rest wants you, Camille." I don't soften it. I've softened everything since I met her and I'm done. "Not to protect, not to manage. Just, want. It's the most selfish thing I've felt in so long, and I keep waiting to feel guilty about it, but I don't."
She closes the distance.
Her hands slide up my chest, her mouth finding mine, and I let her lead because she's just told me that's what she needs, to be the one choosing.
The kiss on the train was a spark. This is the whole fire catching.
She tastes like cold and smoke and something underneath that's just her, and when I finally settle my hands at her waist she makes a sound against my mouth that unravels the last of my restraint.
I push her jacket off her shoulders. It drops behind her with a soft thump, and my fingers find the buttons of her shirt next, working them open one by one while she keeps kissing me, teeth catching my lower lip.
The torchlight throws hard shadows across her skin as the fabric parts.
I peel it down her arms and toss it aside, she's left in a thin camisole and the black lace of her bra.
I hook my thumbs under the camisole and drag it up over her head.
Her hair falls loose around her face. I reach behind her, unhook the bra, and pull it free.
Her breasts fill my hands, warm and soft.
I bend and take one nipple into my mouth, sucking hard that she gasps and digs her nails into my shoulders.
My tongue circles, then I switch to the other side, biting lightly before soothing with my lips.
She tugs at my shirt, and I help her, yanking it over my head and throwing it toward the firelight.
Her palms skim down my chest, over the old scars, then lower to my belt.
She works the buckle open, pops the button, drags the zipper down.
My cock is already hard, pressing against the fabric.
She reaches inside and wraps her palm around me.
The contact makes my hips jerk, and I shove my pants and boxers down in one motion and kick them away.
Naked now, I pull her against me so she feels every inch of my cock against her stomach.
I drop to my knees on the rough ground, my hands go to her waistband.
I tug her pants and underwear down together, helping her step out of them.
She's bare, pussy already glistening in the orange light.
I lean in and drag my tongue up, tasting her.
She grips my hair and holds me there. I push her thighs wider and lick deeper, circling her clit with the tip of my tongue before sucking it between my lips, and I slide two fingers inside her, curling up.
She's tight and wet, clenching around them as I work her.
I keep the pressure steady, tongue and fingers moving together until her legs start to shake.
She comes hard, thighs locking around my head, a broken sound tearing out of her throat.
I don't stop until the last tremor fades.
I stand and she reaches for my cock again, stroking the length of me, thumb smearing the wetness at the tip.
I catch her wrist and turn her so her back faces the rock wall, and my mouth finds the side of her neck.
I nibble at the nape, then lick the spot with my tongue.
One hand cups her breast, squeezing, while the other slides between her legs again.
I lift her, and she wraps her legs around my waist. The head of my cock presses against her entrance.
I hold there for a second, feeling her heat, then push in slow.
She takes me inch by inch, tight walls stretching and squeezing around me.
When I'm buried deep I stay still, forehead against hers, breathing hard.
Her nails dig into my back, and I start to move, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in.
The pace builds, each thrust is harder than the last. The wet sound of her pussy taking me fills the small space between the crack of the fire and the storm outside.
I shift my grip, hands under her ass, and fuck her deeper.
She meets every stroke, hips rolling against mine.
Sweat slides down my spine, and I feel the animal in me rising, the need to claim, but I keep it on a short leash.
I’m rough enough that she gasps, gentle enough that I still feel every flutter of her body around my cock.
I change the angle, grinding against her clit on every inward thrust. Her breathing turns ragged, and I feel her start to tighten.
I don't slow down, I drive into her harder, cock slamming deep, until she breaks again, crying out against my shoulder as her pussy clamps down and pulses around me.
I keep going through it, chasing my own release now.
The heat in my gut coils tighter, and my thrusts turn short and brutal.
She holds on, legs locked around me, taking everything I give her.
I come with a low growl that vibrates through my chest, and my cock pulses hard inside her.
I stay buried deep, hips jerking through the last of it, until the tension finally drains out of me.
I ease her down carefully. We sink to the ground together, still joined for a moment before I slip free.
The air feels colder without her wrapped around me.
I pull both our jackets over us, arranging them into a rough nest against the stone.
My shoulder aches where the earlier injury sits, but the pain is distant now.
We lie tangled in both jackets and the fire's low orange light, her head on my shoulder, her fingers tracing idle patterns over the bruise that's already fading beneath them.
"Don't," she says.
"I didn't say anything."
"You're about to, I can feel you winding up to call this a mistake. Disaster brain, two people who almost died reaching for the nearest warm body." She lifts her head. "So don't, because it wasn't that, and we both know it wasn't."
"I wasn't going to call it a mistake." I mean it. "I was going to say I don't regret it, and then I was going to ruin it by worrying out loud about what happens when the storm ends and you go back to your life that isn’t here."
Her expression shifts, softer and sadder at once. "Yeah, that one I don't have an answer for yet."
"I'm not asking for it." I press my lips to her hair. "I just wanted to say it before I lost my nerve. That's new for me, saying things instead of carrying them."
"Keep practicing," she says. "You're getting better at it."
The wind doesn't ease. If anything, it gets worse.
By midnight we've stopped pretending we're reaching the station tonight.
We eat what little we've carried with us, feed the stove, and sleep in short stretches with the storm hammering at the walls.
The radio will still need fixing when daylight comes.
Right now neither of us has enough left to fight the mountain for another mile.