Chapter 15
Gemma
He takes my hand at the front door and doesn't let go.
Not dramatic. Not a declaration. He just takes it. We walk inside, the door closes behind us, and he turns to look at me the way he's been not looking at me for weeks — all that careful distance gone, like he finally stopped holding his breath.
My heart is doing something irresponsible.
He reaches up and pushes a strand of hair off my face, tucking it back with two fingers, and then he doesn't take his hand away. Just rests it along my jaw, his thumb at the corner of my cheekbone, and looks at me like he's trying to memorize something.
"You sure?" he asks.
It's not a performance. He's actually asking. He wants an actual answer and he will stand here all night waiting for one, which is — that's — I didn't know I needed someone to actually ask.
"Yes," I say. "Beck. Yes."
His exhale is slow. Then he leans down and kisses me — different from the porch, that one caught me off guard and was over before I understood what I'd started.
This one is deliberate. He has both hands in my hair and he takes his time about it, and I feel it everywhere — the warm press of his mouth, the slight scratch of his jaw, the way his fingers curl at the back of my head like he's been thinking about exactly this.
My hands find the front of his shirt and I hold on, because my knees have apparently decided this is someone else's problem.
When he finally pulls back, just enough to look at me, my pulse is loud in my ears and I've forgotten what I was going to say next.
His room is at the end of the hall, which I have never been inside, and the room is surreal in a specific way while he turns on the lamp — like the house has been holding this room back from me and now it's letting me see it.
Everything is neat, because of course it is.
Dark wood furniture. A quilt on the bed that looks handmade.
One book on the nightstand and, pushed to the back corner, a small plastic stegosaurus that Ivy must have left there and that Beck has apparently decided to leave alone.
I think I might love this man. The thought arrives without asking permission, and I decide we're going to have that conversation later — much later, when I'm less terrified of it.
Beck is watching me take in the room.
"It's clean," I say.
"It's always clean."
"I know. It's alarming." I turn to face him. "Your six-year-old's dinosaur is on your nightstand."
"She left it there," he says. "It doesn't bother me."
It doesn't bother him. He sleeps next to his daughter's plastic dinosaur because she left it there and it makes her feel like some part of her is with him. My chest does something like a load-bearing wall shifting.
I go to him. He doesn't move away, which is its own kind of answer.
"Hey," I say, standing in front of him.
He looks at me — not the guarded look, the real one — and his jaw is already doing the thing.
"Stop thinking so hard," I say.
"I'm not —"
"Beck." I put my hands flat on his chest. "It's okay to want this."
He goes still. Looks at me for a long moment. Then something in the set of his shoulders shifts, fractionally, like a load he's been carrying getting set down.
"I know," he says, and his voice is quieter than usual.
"Then stop being so careful about it."
His mouth curves at the corner. "You're very bossy."
"I'm helpful," I say. "There's a difference."
He kisses me again, and this time there's no careful in it at all. His hands slide from my jaw down to my waist and pull me in. I go up onto my toes and press into him. His breath comes out unsteady against my mouth, which I file away as a small victory.
He isn't rushing — just paying attention in a way that makes my pulse loud in my ears and my knees less reliable than I'd prefer.
His mouth moves to my jaw, the curve of my neck, and I tip my head back and grip his shoulders.
He finds a spot below my ear and I make a sound I didn't plan on making, and the low sound he makes in return does something significant to my nervous system.
He has my shirt untucked and I have his.
He pulls back to look at me — actually look, the lamp catching his eyes, nothing guarded in them.
The light throws warm gold across the quilt and his face, and everything feels very real and very present, which is not how this usually goes for me.
Usually there's some version of me that goes a little absent, manages from a slight distance.
Right now there is no distance. I am completely here.
He reaches for the hem of my shirt. I reach for the buttons of his. His fingers find my zipper.
Which does not move.
He tries again. The zipper makes a small strangled noise and holds its ground with the conviction of something that has decided today is not the day.
Beck tries a third time, methodically, with full focus, because Beck Delano does not accept operational failures from inanimate objects.
The zipper does not care.
"Of all the —" he starts.
"It does this," I say.
He leans back and looks at it. "What do you mean it does this?"
"The track is a little bent. I have to pull it from the bottom first and then — here." I reach back and do the maneuver, the slightly embarrassing two-handed shimmy that fixes it. The zipper releases with a sound like it's conceding under protest.
Beck watches this entire process.
"You have a broken zipper," he says.
"I have a finicky zipper."
"On clothes you wear regularly."
"It's my favorite shirt."
He looks at me for a moment, and the corner of his mouth moves. "Only you."
"You have a stegosaurus on your nightstand."
The warmth moves through his eyes, fond and exasperated and wanting, the whole complicated stack of it. His hands find my hips. We are not arguing about the zipper anymore.
The shirt goes. His does too, and I get my hands on him properly for the first time and take a moment to appreciate that Beck Delano is, objectively, a lot to deal with — broad shoulders, the flat plane of his stomach, the kind of arms that come from actually doing physical work rather than performing it.
He watches me looking and doesn't say anything, which is very him, but his hands tighten slightly on my hips.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi," he says, and there's something in his voice that wasn't there before.
He reaches behind me and unclips my bra with a competence that should be illegal.
His hands are on my skin, his mouth follows, and somewhere in the middle of it my ability to track time — or anything else besides the weight of him and the sound of his breathing and the way he says my name — stops being something I bother with.
His mouth closes over my breast and I exhale sharply, my fingers sliding into his hair, holding on.
He takes his time about it — of course he does — and by the time he works his way down my stomach I've stopped pretending to be composed about any of this.
My jeans come off, his follow, and then there's nothing between us.
He pulls back just enough to look at me in the lamplight.
I look back. I let him see me doing it.
He settles beside me, one hand tracing from my collarbone down to my hip like he's learning the geography of me. I turn toward him and get my hands on his chest, his stomach, lower. The sound he makes against my temple is low and rough and extremely satisfying.
"Okay?" he asks, his mouth at my throat.
"Very," I say.
His hand slides between my thighs and I stop being capable of further commentary.
He is deliberate about this the way he is deliberate about everything — unhurried, attentive, coming back to what makes me pull at his shoulders and say his name in a voice I don't entirely recognize.
I tell him so and he does it again. At some point I am making sounds that would embarrass me under any other circumstances. I find I don't care at all.
"Beck." I pull at him. "Now."
He moves over me and meets my eyes — checks, once, and I nod — and then he's there, slow and deliberate, and I exhale against his jaw at the stretch of it, my hands sliding to his lower back to pull him closer.
He goes still for a moment, forehead dropping to mine, breathing carefully, like he needs a second to hold himself together.
I know the feeling exactly. I turn my head and press my mouth to his jaw, his cheek, whatever I can reach.
He makes a low sound and starts to move.
He moves and I move with him. The room is warm, the lamp throwing gold across his shoulders, and I keep my eyes open because I want to watch his face — want to see the moment the careful, controlled captain of Station 7 stops being careful and controlled entirely.
It happens slowly, and then all at once.
He says my name when it does, low and wrecked.
I follow him over the edge with both hands in his hair and my face pressed to his neck.
Later, when we're both catching our breath, there is a loud crash from the direction of the nightstand.
We both freeze.
The plastic stegosaurus has launched itself off the edge and landed on the floor with a resonance entirely disproportionate to its size. It's upright. Both of us stare at it.
Beck closes his eyes.
"It's fine," I say.
"It was watching us."
"Dinosaurs have been extinct for sixty-five million years."
"That one," he says, "had a direct sightline."
I press my face against his shoulder and try not to laugh and fail completely. He makes a sound that is unmistakably a laugh — low, surprised at itself — and then he's laughing too, properly, in a way I haven't heard from him before, and the whole thing collapses into the best kind of disaster.
He leans over and picks up the stegosaurus and sets it on the dresser, facing the wall, with the calm of a man settling a workplace dispute.
"Better?" I ask.
"Significantly," he says.
He comes back and I'm still laughing and he's still smiling, and it's different now — softer, easier, all that careful wanting turned into something that has room in it for us to be people.
Real people, as it turns out, with finicky zippers and a kid's plastic dinosaur standing sentinel on the nightstand.
He pulls me back to him and we settle, and the room gets quiet again, and this time it's not the careful kind of quiet.
It's later, and the lamp is still on, and I'm on my back and he's beside me, and outside the window the Montana dark is complete — no city glow, just pure black and the occasional sound of wind through the trees.
My hand finds his jaw before I think about it. He's been wound tight for as long as I've known him — something in the jaw, in the set of his shoulders, that never quite releases. But right now, under my fingers, his jaw is loose. Unclenched. The muscle that usually lives there is just — gone.
I trace it slowly. He lets me.
"I'm not leaving," I say.
The words come out before I've decided to say them. They're bigger than the sentence. Both of us feel it.
His eyes open. He looks at the ceiling for a moment, then at me.
I meant it about tonight. About Copper Ridge.
About all of it, maybe — I didn't know until I said it, but I meant all of it, and the terrifying part isn't that I said it out loud.
The terrifying part is that I mean it. That some girl who has kept a bag half-packed since she was in her early twenties just said I'm not leaving and felt no instinct to take it back.
His arm tightens around me.
"Good," he says.
One word. Just that. Beck Delano at maximum emotional output, and somehow it's the most complete sentence I've ever heard.
Outside, the Montana dark holds everything still, and I wait for the itch to go — the one that has been with me since Denver, that shows up at moments exactly like this — and it doesn't come.