Chapter 14 #2
"You're writing our story," I say.
"Someone has to. It's too good not to."
The manuscript starts with her arriving at the retreat. With the suitcase getting stuck in the gravel, and the stranger who carried it for her, and the mortification of learning he wasn't the bellhop. Every moment, refracted through her voice. Every detail, sharper and more alive than memory.
She's turning us into fiction, and fiction into truth, and the line between the two has never mattered less.
"Come here," I say.
She closes the laptop and comes.
This is different from the inn. That night had an edge to it---urgency, the relief of finally, hands that moved fast because neither of us was sure it would last. This is slower. This is knowing.
She reaches for my shirt first, working the buttons from the bottom up, fingers unhurried, and I let her take her time.
The dress has a zipper at the back and I find it while she's still on the last button, draw it down one deliberate inch at a time until the fabric loosens and falls.
She steps out of it without looking away from me.
"You're staring," she says.
"I know where I want to look."
That earns me a sound halfway between a laugh and something else entirely.
The lamplight catches the line of her collarbone, the curve of her waist, and I take my time with all of it---mouth at her throat, her shoulder, the soft skin below her ear that makes her grip the back of my neck and pull.
When I work my way down her body and put my mouth on her, she makes a sound that's nothing like the composed, careful woman who stood at that podium two hours ago.
Her hand fists in my hair. She says my name like a warning she doesn't mean.
She comes apart slowly, then all at once, her thighs pressing against my shoulders, her back arching off the sheets. I stay with her through all of it.
"Tucker." Breathless. "Come here. Now."
When I move back up her body she reaches between us and wraps her hand around me, sure and unhurried, and the contact after that much wanting pulls a sound out of me I don't try to suppress. Her eyes are dark and satisfied and she knows exactly what she's doing.
"Kassidy."
"I know," she says. Like she's been waiting for me to lose composure. Like this is the thing she came here for.
When I push inside her the satisfaction is total---the long exhale of finally, the solid, grounding weight of her hips rising to meet mine. She hooks her leg over my lower back and pulls me deeper and I drop my forehead to hers and hold there for a moment, just breathing, just this.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. Dark eyes, lamplight, the flush rising across her chest.
We find the rhythm together the way we find everything---with minor negotiation and no wasted motion.
She knows what she wants and she asks for it without apology, with the tilt of her hips and the drag of her nails across my back and the small, sharp sounds that tell me when to slow down and when not to.
I learn her the way I learn everything that matters: completely, with full attention.
The moment before she comes she grabs my face with both hands and kisses me, hard, and I feel it when she does---the full-body shudder, the way she exhales my name against my mouth like she can't hold it back anymore.
She says it once more when I follow her over. Once is enough.
Afterward she lies with her head on my chest, breathing hard, fingers curled loose against my ribs. The cottage settles around us. The harbor moves outside the window.
Afterward, tangled in sheets that smell like us, she traces the scar on my wrist with one fingertip.
"You never told me how you got this," she says.
"Training accident. Rappelling exercise in Coronado. Rope burned through my glove."
"That's less romantic than the fiction version."
"What's the fiction version?"
"Saving someone. Being heroic."
"I was being heroic. I was heroically failing to tie a proper knot."
She laughs against my chest, and the vibration of it fills the dark room like music.
"Tucker?"
"Yeah?"
"I've been thinking about Tidehaven."
"What about it?"
"Calder mentioned there's an opening at Salt and Steel. A coordinator role---logistics, scheduling, the organizational stuff."
"He mentioned that, did he?"
"He might have brought it up. Casually. Over email."
"Calder doesn't do anything casually."
"The point is---" She lifts her head, and her eyes are bright in the dark.
"I can write anywhere. This cottage has better light than my Charleston apartment.
And Tidehaven has this harbor, and this bookstore, and this man who makes focaccia and reads Ishiguro and drives two and a half hours with Thai food when I'm being an idiot. "
"Are you asking to move in with me?"
"I'm asking if you'd want that."
"Kassidy." I tuck the curl behind her ear---the gesture that's become ours, the small, intimate ritual that means I see you. "Move in with me. To Tidehaven."
She pretends to consider. Takes her time. Draws it out with the narrative instinct of a woman who understands pacing.
"Only if I get to use you for research."
"Deal."
She settles against me, and the cottage is quiet, and the harbor laps against the dock outside the window, and the life I've been trying to build since I left the teams---the purpose, the direction, the reason to wake up at 0430---is lying in my arms with ink-stained fingers and a heart full of stories.
She's curled against me, already drifting. Her hand rests on my chest, the ink stain on her index finger dark against my skin.
The harbor laps against the dock. The cottage settles. And the 0430 silence---the one that used to hollow me out---is just quiet now. Just the sound of her breathing and the scratch of branches against the window and the ordinary, unremarkable miracle of not being alone.