Chapter 10 #2
I press her back against the door and kiss her hard, one hand braced against the wood beside her head, the other finding the curve of her waist and pulling her flush against me.
She makes a sound low in her throat that I feel more than hear, and her fingers curl into my shirt, twisting the fabric like she needs something to hold onto.
I reach behind her, find the handle, and we stumble into the room together. The door swings shut. The lock clicks.
She reaches for my shirt before my eyes adjust to the dark.
Her fingers work the buttons fast---not frantic, deliberate, the focused efficiency of a woman who has decided something and is done reconsidering it.
I let her. The shirt drops. Her palms flatten against my chest, tracing the planes of it slowly, and the expression on her face---intent, unguarded, no sarcasm left in it---does more damage than the touch itself.
"Research?" I manage.
"Shut up."
She hooks a finger into my belt and walks backward toward the bed, pulling me with her, and there is nothing in eight years of training that prepared me for this woman looking at me like that.
The back of her knees hit the mattress and she sits, which puts her mouth at my abdomen. She presses a kiss there, open and warm, and then looks up at me from under her lashes with an expression that short-circuits my higher reasoning entirely.
I reach down and find the zipper at the back of her dress. Draw it down slowly---spine by spine, the sound of it swallowed by the dark---and she shivers as the fabric separates. The dress pools at her waist. I push it the rest of the way, and she lifts her hips to help, and then it's gone.
The sight of her in the dim light stops me cold.
"Don't stop now," she says, which is when I realize I've gone still.
"I'm not stopping. I'm appreciating."
Her laugh is breathless. I lower her back onto the mattress and cover her body with mine, and the full length of contact---her skin warm against every place we're touching, her legs parting to fit me between them---pulls a sound out of me I didn't plan to make.
She arches up. Her mouth finds my jaw, my throat, the hinge of my shoulder. Her hands slide down my stomach and work my belt open with the same focused efficiency she used on my shirt, and then her fingers wrap around me and my forehead drops to her shoulder.
"Okay," I say. "Okay."
She makes a sound that might be a laugh. Her grip tightens, strokes once, slow and deliberate, and the sound I make is not something I'd call dignified.
"Tucker." My name in her mouth, fractured at the edges.
I pull back just enough to look at her. Then I lower my head and draw her breast into my mouth, my tongue tracing the soft weight of it, and her hand goes still and her back bows off the mattress and the sound she makes is the most honest thing I've ever heard.
"Tell me what you want," I say against her skin.
"You." Her hips roll up against mine, deliberate, devastating. "All of you."
The rest of our clothes come off in pieces.
There's a moment---her hands guiding mine, her breath going ragged, the two of us finally without anything between us---where the urgency tips over into something slower.
I kiss the soft curve of her ribs. The inside of her wrist, where her pulse hammers against my lips like punctuation.
I slide my hand between her thighs and learn exactly what undoes her, and I don't stop until she's shaking.
"Tucker." Different this time. Less fractured, more certain. A word she means to say.
"Yeah."
"Now."
When I push inside her, the sound she makes stops my heart.
She's warm and close around me and her legs wrap my hips and pull me deeper, and for a long moment neither of us moves.
We just breathe. Her eyes are open, fixed on mine in the dark, and the look in them strips away every defense I have left.
I take my time anyway. Because she's been running from this for five days and I want her to feel every second of choosing to stop.
She moves with me, and I answer every shift of her hips, every press of her hands urging me harder, closer, more.
The sounds she makes are honest in a way that rewrites everything I thought I knew about being untouchable.
When she comes apart, she says my name like it means something.
When I follow her over, I think: whatever happens after tonight, this woman has rewritten something permanent in me.
Afterward, we lie tangled in sheets that smell like salt and us. Her head rests on my chest, her fingers tracing idle patterns on my ribs. The room is dark except for the blue glow of the alarm clock.
"Tucker?"
"Yeah?"
"I haven't felt like this in a long time."
"Like what?"
"Like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be."
My arm tightens around her. The warmth of her skin, the weight of her against me, the steady rhythm of her breathing---it's the opposite of the silence I've been running from. It's full. It's alive. It's the thing I didn't know I was looking for because I didn't know it existed.
"Kassidy?"
"Hmm?"
"The kid in the back row. The one who cried at your story."
"What about him?"
"You did it again. Made someone feel something with words you arranged."
She laughs softly, and the sound vibrates against my chest. "You're not a kid in the back row."
"No. But you made me feel something. And I wasn't sure I still could."
She rises on one elbow and looks at me---really looks---with an expression that's stripped of sarcasm and defense and all the armor she wears so well. Underneath is the woman who writes love stories because she believes in them, even when she's afraid to.
"Don't let me run tomorrow," she whispers. "I'm going to want to. It's what I do. But don't let me."
"I won't."
Her breathing slows against my chest. Outside, the last of Helena scrapes along the coast, dragging its wreckage east.
Tomorrow the roads open. Tomorrow she drives back to Charleston with a manuscript that has my face in it.
I tighten my arm around her. She murmurs something---a character's name, or mine---and presses closer.