4. Bryson
brYSON
The fundraiser meeting ends at eight. The crew filters out.
Ty waves. Tanner nods. One by one they disappear into the parking lot and their evening routines, and I'm supposed to follow them because my shift ended two hours ago and there's no reason for me to be standing in the station kitchen at eight-fifteen on a Thursday except that she's still here.
She stayed to help clean up. Of course she did.
She's wiping down the table where the committee sat, humming something I don't recognize, and she's wearing a blue sweater that's been slowly killing me for the last two hours.
It's soft looking and it hugs her in a way that her usual loose tops don't—the curve of her chest, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips.
I've been staring at the seam where the sweater meets her jeans all evening and I hate myself for it because she's not doing this on purpose.
She has no idea. That's the worst part. She genuinely does not know what she looks like, what she does, the absolute wreckage she causes just by standing in a room and breathing.
She reaches up to put a serving platter on the high shelf above the counter.
The shelf that I can reach without effort but she can't, because she's five-foot-three and the person who designed this kitchen didn't account for small women who insist on helping.
Her arm stretches. She goes up on her toes.
The blue sweater rides up, revealing a strip of skin above her waistband—soft brown, the curve of her lower back, the beginning of her hip.
I snap.
I don't decide to move. My body decides for me.
I'm behind her in two steps, reaching over her easily, my hand closing around the platter and setting it on the shelf without effort.
But I don't step back. I should step back.
My hands land on the counter on either side of her and she's caged between my arms and the counter, and she turns around and she's right there.
Inches away. Looking up at me with those ridiculous blue eyes and her lips parted and I can see her pulse hammering in the hollow of her throat.
"Bryson." Her voice is barely there. "What are you?—"
"You need to stop." The words come out rough, barely controlled, scraped from somewhere I keep locked. "You need to stop coming in here looking like that."
Her eyes go wide. "Looking like wh?—"
"Like that." I grip the counter harder because if I don't hold onto something I'm going to hold onto her.
"Smelling like vanilla and smiling at me and wearing that sweater and reaching for things you can't reach so I have to stand behind you and—" I stop.
Breathe. Try to find the version of this that sounds reasonable.
There isn't one. "I'm running out of reasons not to touch you.
I've been running out for weeks and I'm almost done. "
The silence between us is so charged I can feel it on my skin.
She's staring up at me and her breath is coming fast and her hands are flat against my chest—when did she put her hands on my chest?
—and I can feel my heartbeat against her palms and she can definitely feel it too, and whatever she sees in my face makes her pupils blow wide.
"So stop looking for reasons," she whispers.
The last thread snaps.
My mouth is on hers before the sentence ends and she gasps against my lips and I swallow the sound and it's the best thing I've ever tasted.
Better than her cupcakes. Better than anything.
I kiss her like I've been starving because I have—weeks of watching her walk through my station like sunshine through a window, weeks of memorizing her coffee order and holding doors too long and standing between her and drafts that didn't exist.
My hands leave the counter and find her waist and I lift her.
She weighs nothing to me—I bench-press more than this, I haul hose and carry equipment up stairs and this woman is light as air in my hands—and I set her on the counter and step between her thighs.
Her legs wrap around me instinctively and the position puts us face to face, her hands gripping my shoulders, my hands spanning her hips, and I pull back long enough to look at her.
"Is this okay?" My voice sounds like gravel. My hands are shaking. I'm holding her like she's made of glass and wanting her like she's made of fire and the contradiction is going to tear me apart.
"Bryson." She takes my face in her hands and her fingers are so small against my jaw. "If you stop right now I will never forgive you."
I don't stop. I kiss her again, deeper, slower, and my hands slide up under that blue sweater and I groan against her mouth because her skin is softer than the sweater, softer than anything I've ever touched, warm and yielding and curved in ways that make my hands feel like they were built specifically for this purpose.
She's making sounds—these tiny, breathy gasps that she's trying to muffle against my mouth—and I pull back and say "Don't" in a voice I don't recognize.
"Don't what?"
"Don't be quiet. I want to hear every sound. I've been imagining them for weeks and I want to know if I was right."
Her face flushes red. Her fingers tighten on my shoulders. "We're in the station kitchen."
"Everyone's gone." I drag my mouth down her neck and she shivers so hard her whole body vibrates against mine. "It's just us. Let me hear you."
She lets me hear her. She lets me peel the blue sweater over her head and press my mouth to the swell of her breasts and the curve of her stomach and she stops trying to be quiet when my hands slide into the waistband of her jeans and she says my name in a voice that breaks the last four years of silence wide open.
I take her apart on the station kitchen counter with my hands and my mouth and I am not gentle about it because I can't be—not after weeks of restraint, not with her taste on my lips and her thighs clamped around my head and her hands in my hair pulling so hard it hurts and I want it to hurt, I want to feel her everywhere, I want the proof.
When she comes she arches off the counter and grabs my shirt and hauls me up and kisses me so hard our teeth click, and her hands are yanking at my belt and she's saying "now, please, now" and I lift her again—one arm, effortless—and she wraps around me and I push inside her and her mouth falls open and she looks at me like I just rearranged her molecular structure.
The size difference is everything. My hands cover her hips completely.
I can hold her up with one arm and use the other to tilt her chin so she's looking at me while I move inside her.
She's small and soft and clinging to me and I'm the entire world holding her up and the power of that—the trust of it—makes something primal and possessive roar to life in my chest.
"You have no idea," I tell her, my forehead pressed to hers, my voice shattered. "You have no idea what you do to me. What you've been doing to me since you walked in here with those goddamn cupcakes."
She laughs. Even now, even here, she laughs, and the sound vibrates through both of us. "The cupcakes? That's what got you?"
"The cupcakes. The laugh. The sweater. The way you smile at me like I'm not—" I swallow. "Like I'm not terrifying."
Her face softens. Her hand comes up to my jaw. "You're not terrifying, Bryson."
She's wrong. I'm terrified right now. I'm terrified of how much I feel and how fast it arrived and how completely this woman has dismantled every wall I spent four years building.
But I don't say that. I kiss her instead, and I let my body say what my mouth can't, and when we both fall apart together in the quiet kitchen of Station 7, I hold her against my chest and listen to her breathe and I don't let go.
I don't let go for a long time.