Chapter 14
She didn't knock.
She walked into Slayer's room that night — their room, she corrected herself, and the correction felt right — and closed the door behind her and stood in the lamplight with the day's decision still warm in her chest, and she looked at him sitting on the edge of the bed untying his boots, and she said nothing at all.
He looked up. Read her face. Set the boot down.
"You look like a woman who's made up her mind about something."
"I made up my mind this morning. This is the part where I do something about it."
She pulled his flannel off and dropped it on the floor.
Underneath she was wearing a tank top she'd borrowed from the laundry and a pair of cutoff sweats, and she'd showered and her hair was down, still damp at the ends, and she was barefoot because this room was hers now and she didn't wear shoes at home.
He stood. The lamp on the dresser threw warm light across the room and across both of them, and for once there was no rush — no adrenaline, no aftermath, no war pounding on the door.
Just a woman standing in front of a man she'd chosen with her own brain and her own spine, in a room she'd decided to keep.
"Come here," he said.
"You come here."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something better. He crossed the room to her and stopped close enough that she could feel his body heat but not touching, and he raised his hand and traced the line of her jaw with one finger, from her ear to her chin.
"I want to take my time tonight," he said.
"We've got nothing but time."
He took the hem of her tank top between his fingers and lifted it slowly, his knuckles grazing her skin as the fabric rose — the curve of her waist, the ridge of her ribs, the underside of her breasts.
She raised her arms and he pulled it over her head and let it fall, and she stood in front of him in lamplight and the sweats and nothing else.
He looked at her. Not the way he'd looked at her in the dark of the shop, hungry and half-blind with adrenaline.
Not the way he'd looked at her in the projects room, desperate and raw.
He looked at her the way a man looks at something he's been given that he intends to keep for the rest of his life.
"Every freckle," he said. "I'm going to learn every single one."
He started at her shoulder. Pressed his mouth to the constellation of freckles the mountain sun had scattered across the cap of it, and she felt his lips move against her skin like he was counting.
He kissed across her collarbone, pausing at each cluster of copper spots, and down to the freckled slope of her chest.
She closed her eyes. Her hands found his hair and rested there, not pulling, not guiding. Just holding on while he mapped her.
He kissed the freckles on the inner curve of her breast. The ones below her navel that she forgot about until summer.
The pale ones on her forearms hiding between the silver scars.
Each one got his mouth, his breath, the focused quiet attention he brought to everything that mattered, and by the time he'd worked his way back up to her throat she was trembling and it had nothing to do with cold.
"You're shaking," he said against her pulse.
"You're driving me crazy."
"Good."
He hooked his thumbs in the waist of her sweats and slid them down her hips, and they pooled at her feet and she stepped out of them. He knelt and kissed the inside of her knee, then the inside of her thigh, and her hands tightened in his hair as his mouth climbed higher.
He stopped. Looked up at her.
"Get on the bed," he said.
"I'm not done with you yet." She pulled him up by his shirt and stripped it over his head and put her hands on his chest, running her palms over muscle and scar and warm skin.
She worked his belt open and pushed his jeans down and he kicked them off, and they stood naked in the lamplight, face to face, and the ordinariness of it — no broken glass, no smoke, no chemical foam — made it feel more intimate than anything that had come before.
This was just them. No emergency. No excuse. Two people who'd said I love you on a mountain and meant it.
He laid her back on the bed and stretched out beside her, propped on one elbow, and ran his hand down her body in one slow sweep — breast to hip to thigh and back.
She turned toward him and their legs tangled and their mouths found each other, and the kiss was deep and unhurried, the kind of kiss that takes fifteen minutes and never gets boring.
His hand slid between her thighs. She was already wet, had been since he'd started with the freckles, and his fingers moved through the slickness with the patient precision of a man who had learned exactly how she liked to be touched.
Slow circles that built heat in the pit of her stomach.
Long strokes that made her hips roll against his hand.
He kissed her through it, swallowing every sound she made.
She was close — he could feel it, she could see it in the way his eyes darkened and his breath shortened — and he pulled his hand away.
"Not yet," he said.
"You're cruel."
"I'm thorough."
She shoved him flat on his back. He went with a sound that was almost a laugh, and she climbed over him and straddled his hips and looked down at him in the lamplight — the scar, the silver hair on the pillow, the gray-blue eyes looking up at her with that wrecked, devoted expression she'd fallen for on the mountain.
He was hard against her and she rocked her hips once, a slow deliberate slide, and watched his head press back into the pillow and his hands grip her thighs.
"Now who's shaking," she said.
She reached for the nightstand and rolled the condom on him, taking her time, and then she rose up and sank down onto him in one smooth motion that drew a long groan out of both of them.
Full. Perfect. The feeling of him inside her that was becoming as necessary and familiar as breathing.
She set the pace. Slow, rolling her hips in a rhythm that was pure pleasure, feeling him move inside her with each rotation. His hands were on her hips but not pushing, not pulling — just feeling her, his thumbs tracing circles on her hipbones that matched her movement.
She braced her hands on his chest and leaned down and kissed him, her hair falling around both of them, and he groaned into her mouth and his hips lifted to meet hers.
The angle changed and she gasped and ground down harder, chasing the pressure, and his hand slid up her body to cup her breast, his thumb brushing her nipple, sending a jolt of pleasure straight to her center.
"You feel incredible," he said. "Every time. Every goddamn time."
She sat up and picked up the pace, rising and falling, and he watched her move above him with the lamplight turning her copper hair to fire, and the look on his face was worship and hunger and something so naked it stole the air from the room.
He sat up into her. Wrapped his arms around her and pressed his chest to hers and they moved together, rocking, her arms around his neck, his face in her throat.
She could feel his heartbeat against her breast and the flex of his stomach muscles and the tremor in his arms, and she knew he was holding back, waiting for her, and the patience of that — the deliberate, stubborn patience of a man who would not finish before the woman he loved — was the hottest thing she'd ever experienced.
"Let go," she whispered in his ear. "I'm right there. Let go with me."
His hand slid between them one more time and found her, and two strokes of his thumb was all it took.
She came with her mouth against his shoulder, the orgasm rolling through her in deep, steady waves that contracted around him, and he followed her with a ragged sound against her throat, his arms locked around her, both of them shuddering and holding on and breathing each other's names.
They didn't move for a long time.
Wound together in the middle of the bed, his arms still around her, her head on his shoulder, the lamp throwing warm shadows across the tangled sheets. Their breathing slowed together, synched the way their bodies had synched, and the room was quiet and warm and belonged to them completely.
"I have a confession," he said.
"Mm."
"I lied about taking my time. I was going to take my time. Then you flipped me on my back and I forgot the plan."
She laughed. A real laugh, loose and happy and pressed into the scar on his collarbone. "I'll let you take your time next time."
"You won't."
"I won't."
He pulled the sheet over both of them and curved around her, and she settled against him with the easy comfort of a woman who had nowhere else to be and no desire to be anywhere else. His hand rested on her stomach, warm and heavy, and her fingers laced through his.
No adrenaline. No smoke. No war at the door. Just two people in a bed they'd chosen, in a life they'd claimed, with the lamp still on because neither of them could be bothered to reach for it.
She fell asleep with his hand on her stomach and his breath in her hair and the lamplight warm on both of them, and the last thing she thought before sleep took her was that this was the first night since the vans burned that she hadn't been afraid of anything at all.