Chapter 8
The compound went quiet after midnight.
Nora lay in the narrow bed upstairs with her grandmother's quilt pulled to her chin and listened to the building settle — the creak of timber trusses cooling, the distant murmur of the watch rotation changing at the gate, the low idle of a truck pulling out and another pulling in.
The BNSF freight rumbled past at one and shook the walls, and then the silence came back, deeper than before.
She got up.
The hallway was dark. His door was the last one on the left, and there was no light under it.
She stood outside it in bare feet and an old T-shirt and thought about every reason this was a bad idea — the war on their doorstep, the armed men across the spur, the fact that she'd known this man for less than two weeks and was already wearing his shirts and sleeping in his building and thinking about him when she should be thinking about survival.
She knocked anyway.
It took him four seconds to open the door, which meant he hadn't been sleeping either.
He was shirtless, wearing jeans he'd pulled on fast, the button still undone.
The scar from his ear to his collarbone caught the faint light from the hallway window, and his hair was messed from a pillow he'd been staring at instead of lying on.
He looked at her standing in his doorway in bare feet with her copper hair loose around her shoulders, and something in his face cracked open.
"Nora."
"I couldn't sleep."
"Me either."
"Can I come in?"
He stepped back and she stepped forward and the door closed behind her and they stood in the dark of his room with six inches of air between them, and neither of them reached for the other. Not yet.
His room was sparse. A double bed, military-tight. A chair with his cut draped over it. A window that looked out over the same lot hers did. It smelled like him — leather, soap, the warm scent underneath that she'd been breathing off his shirts for two days.
"The first time was adrenaline," she said.
"I know."
"This isn't." She put her hand flat on his bare chest. His heart was beating hard under her palm, and the heat of his skin sank into her fingers and ran up her arm.
"This is me walking across the hall because I want to be here.
Not because somebody burned my vans or tried to break into my shop or because I'm scared or running on survival instinct. I just want you. That's it."
He covered her hand with his. Pressed it harder against his chest.
"You're sure."
"I've been sure since you drank my beer on the back steps without asking."
The sound he made was almost a laugh — low, rough, surprised. He brought her hand up and kissed her knuckles, the same ones she'd cut on the glass rack, healed now to a thin pink line. Then he kissed her palm. Then the inside of her wrist, where her pulse was hammering.
"I'm not going to rush this," he said against her skin.
"I don't want you to rush it."
He pulled her in by the wrist, slow, closing the six inches.
His other hand came up and cradled the side of her face, his thumb tracing her cheekbone, and he kissed her like they had all the time in the world.
Soft at first. Exploring her mouth the way he hadn't had time to in the shop — the curve of her lower lip, the corner where her smile started, the place on the roof of her mouth that made her breath catch.
She slid her hands up his bare chest and over his shoulders and into the hair at the back of his neck, and she pulled him deeper into the kiss, and his arm went around her waist and drew her flush against him.
She could feel every inch of him — the hard planes of his stomach, the ridge of the scar under her fingertips, the unmistakable press of him against her hip through the denim.
He walked her backward to the bed. The backs of her knees hit the mattress and she sat, and he knelt in front of her the way he'd knelt on her shop floor, but slower, his hands sliding down her sides to the hem of her T-shirt.
"Lift."
She raised her arms and he pulled the shirt over her head. She was bare underneath and the cool air tightened her skin, but his hands were warm and they slid up her ribs and cupped her breasts and she arched into the contact with a sigh that came from somewhere deep.
He kissed her throat. The hollow between her collarbones.
The freckled slope of her chest. He took his time with each one like a man learning territory he planned to hold, and she felt the claiming in it — not possessive this time, not territorial.
Reverent. Like she was something worth being slow for.
"Lie back," he said.
She did. He leaned over her, braced on one arm, and traced the silver scars on her forearms with his mouth — the twenty years of broken glass mapped on her skin.
He kissed each one. She'd never let anyone pay attention to those scars.
They were work marks, not stories. But the way he kissed them turned them into something else.
"These are beautiful," he said.
"They're occupational hazards."
"They're proof you build things." He kissed the longest one, a thin line running from her wrist to mid-forearm. "I've never met anyone who builds things the way you do."
Something opened in her chest that she'd been keeping locked since her divorce — a door she'd welded shut because the last man who'd gotten inside it had tried to make her smaller.
Slayer wasn't trying to make her smaller.
He was kissing the proof that she was exactly the size she was, and his hands on her body felt like room, not walls.
She pulled him up and kissed him hard. Ran her hands down to the open waist of his jeans and pushed them off his hips. He shucked them and she pulled him onto the bed over her, his weight settling between her thighs, and the skin-on-skin contact drew a groan from both of them.
He dragged her copper hair across the pillow and fanned it out, his fingers combing through the weight of it, and then he lowered his mouth to her breast and drew her nipple between his lips and worked it with his tongue until her back bowed and her fingers dug into his shoulder blades.
She hooked her leg over his hip and rolled him.
He went. Let her put him on his back and rise over him, her knees on either side of his hips, her hair falling around both of them like a curtain.
She sat up and looked down at him in the faint light from the window — the scar, the silver hair, the gray-blue eyes looking up at her like she was the whole horizon.
She dragged her hips along the hard length of him, nothing between them but heat, and watched his jaw clench and his hands grip her thighs.
"Nora." His voice was wrecked. "You keep doing that —"
"I know exactly what I'm doing."
She reached for the nightstand where she'd seen the box — he had them in his room now, not just his wallet, and that detail made her want him more — and rolled the condom on him slowly, deliberately, watching his abs tighten and his breath go ragged.
She rose up and took him in.
They both went still. The stretch, the fullness, the perfect aching fit of him inside her. She pressed her palms flat on his chest and felt his heart slamming under her hands, and she started to move.
Slow. She set the pace and he let her, his hands on her hips but not guiding, just holding — feeling her rhythm, letting her take what she wanted.
She rose and fell and each stroke drove him deeper, and the sound she made on the downstroke was low and rough and private, a sound she had never made for anyone.
He sat up into her. Wrapped his arms around her so they were chest to chest, and she wound her arms around his neck and they moved together, rocking, his forehead pressed to hers.
This close she could feel his breath on her lips and the flex of his stomach muscles and the tremor in his arms as he held himself back, letting her lead.
"Look at me," she whispered.
He did. And the look in his eyes was the thing she'd been afraid of since the back steps — not wanting, not hunger, but the absolute, wrecked certainty of a man who had fallen for her and knew it and wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
She kissed him and moved faster. His hips rose to meet her and the angle changed and she gasped against his mouth as the pleasure sharpened.
His hand slid between them and found her, his thumb circling the place that made her whole body clench, and she broke the kiss to drop her head to his shoulder and moan his name into his scar.
"Slayer — God — right there —"
"I've got you." His mouth was at her ear. "Let go. I've got you."
She let go. The orgasm hit her in slow, rolling waves that started where they were joined and radiated out through her whole body, and she clenched around him and shuddered and felt the tears behind her eyes and didn't know why they were there except that she had never been held like this while she came apart — like she was the most important thing in the room, like he would hold her through anything, like she was safe enough to fall.
He followed her. His arms tightened and his hips drove up once, twice, and he came with her name on his lips and his face buried in her hair, and the sound he made was the sound of a man putting down something heavy he'd been carrying for a very long time.
They stayed. Wound together in the middle of his bed, breathing hard, her hair sticking to both of them, his arms still around her.
After a while her heartbeat slowed and his breathing steadied and the world came back — the freight train, the distant sound of the watch truck idling, the cool air through the window.
"Stay," he said.
One word. No command in it. A request from a man who didn't make them.
She thought about her narrow bed down the hall with the grandmother's quilt and the father's photo on the dresser and the careful distance she'd been maintaining between borrowed and chosen.
"Yeah," she said. "I'm staying."
He pulled the blanket over both of them and curved around her, his chest to her back, his arm heavy across her waist. She laced her fingers through his and held his hand against her stomach and felt his breathing slow into sleep behind her.
She didn't sleep yet. She lay in the dark in a dead man's compound with a dangerous man's arm around her and the war still outside the window, and she thought about the last time she'd stayed. Three years ago. The marriage bed that had become a battleground. The man who'd wanted her smaller.
Slayer's arm tightened in his sleep, pulling her closer, and she felt his breath warm and steady against the back of her neck.
He didn't want her smaller. He wanted her exactly the size she was. And she was staying because she'd decided to, on her own two feet, the same way she'd decided everything else in her life.
She closed her eyes and let herself fall asleep in the arms of a man she hadn't planned on and couldn't walk away from, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, she didn't dream about the shop.