Chapter 44 Still Breathing
Still Breathing
Emma lay next to Zach and watched him breathe.
That was all she was doing. Watching him breathe.
Making sure the slow rise and fall of his chest kept happening, because for a few terrible minutes yesterday she hadn’t been certain it would.
She’d had her hands pressed against his wound, and she’d been talking to him—stay with me, stay with me—and the words had sounded less like a request than a prayer to something she didn’t entirely believe in.
He was watching her back. He did that. Those gray-blue eyes catalogued everything, filed the world into columns of threat and non-threat, and now viewed her with an expression she’d never quite seen on his face before. Something stripped of its usual armor.
“You should try to sleep,” she said.
“So should you.”
“I’m not the one who got—”
“Emma.”
Her name in his mouth. The way he said it wasn’t a command or a deflection. It was something quieter than either of those things. Something that felt, in spite of everything, like an answer.
She exhaled.
She shifted to check his bandage and stayed close after. His hand came up to rest at her waist, steadying, except she hadn’t been unsteady. She looked at him. He looked at her. What had been building between them for weeks—finally, simply, solidified.
His hand cradled the back of her head and tugged, pulling her down to meet his lips.
He kissed her with a focus and thoroughness that warmed her skin all over, because that was how Zach did everything—completely, with his entire attention, not a fraction held back. When he committed, he went all in.
It showed in the way he touched her.
“You need rest. We don’t have to—” she started.
“I want to. Want you.” His thumb traced her jaw. “You?”
The question surprised her. Not the asking of it—of course he would ask—but the way he asked it. Like the answer mattered. Like whichever way she answered, he’d receive it without pressure or disappointment, file it away and protect it.
“Yes,” Emma tried to find the right words and then decided on the honest ones. “I need to know you’re still here.”
Something moved across his expression. “I’m here.”
“Okay.” She pressed her palm flat against his sternum, feeling his heartbeat. Steady, even, reliable as the man himself. “Okay.”
Every movement was slow. Deliberate.
She stroked her hands over his chest and arms, careful around the bandage, and he let her be careful without making it into anything—didn’t brush her off, didn’t pretend he wasn’t hurt.
He let her tend to him, which she was coming to understand was its own kind of trust for someone like Zach.
He accepted her touch with a stillness that felt like gratitude.
He understood she needed to know he was here, with her, alive.
She was wearing one of his shirts—when they’d returned she grabbed the first dry thing and hadn’t gone back to her own—and his hands went to the hem with a patience that undid something in her chest. No urgency.
Just intention. He peeled it away like he was unwrapping something worth being careful with.
His eyes moved over her, and she didn’t feel examined. She felt seen.
There was a difference.
She’d spent enough time with him to understand the distinction. Zach watched everything, always, but what he was doing now wasn’t his typical threat assessment or cataloguing. It was something older and quieter—the way a person looks at something they want to remember.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, and the plainness of it—no performance in the comment, just a fact he was stating—made her eyes sting.
She blinked them away. Reached for him even as his hands drifted over her skin, cupping her breasts, tugging and teasing.
She traced a scar over his ribs, smooth and silvered with age. He stilled beneath her fingers.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“No.”
She wasn’t only asking about pain. He seemed to know that.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. Not an answer, but it was more than she expected. She pressed her lips to it, and his hand gripped her hair. Not pulling her away. Holding her there.
She kissed each scar she found. It wasn’t a grand gesture—she wasn’t trying to make meaning out of damage or heal him with symbolism. It was simpler than that. She was telling him, in the language they’d already figured out between them was easier than words: I see all of it. I’m still here.
Zach's breathing was ragged by the time she worked her way back up to his mouth. Still controlled, because he was always controlled, but deeper. She sensed the effort it cost him to stay slow, and she loved him for it—
Loved him.
The words moved through her quietly, settling into place rather than arriving anew. A confirmation, not a revelation.
She loved him.
He hadn’t said it—might not say it for a long time. But it was palpable—in the way he touched her, in the care threaded through every moment, in the way he let her close where no one else had been.
He was changing. Opening up. Not all at once. Not in words. But here, with her. It was enough.
“Emma…” His mouth captured hers again, his hands smoothing down her spine, his body warm against hers.
She could wait for the words.
She’d chosen him, regardless.
He rolled onto his back, mouth still locked to hers, tugging her on top of him. Her legs fell to either side of his hips. His lips left hers, trailing down her throat, nuzzling and nipping. “Ride me.”
A shiver ran down her spine at his growl. She sat up, her hands on his shoulders holding her up as his dropped to her hips. She moved, just slightly, grinding against him. His breath caught, and she smiled.
“My turn to lead.”
She leaned forward and wrapped her hand around his hard cock, stroking the silky smooth skin as she centered herself over him.
She lowered herself down, taking him in.
She closed her eyes and threw her head back at the sensation of him filling her, stretching her, as she sank down until he was fully seated inside her.
She stilled, luxuriating in the extreme fullness. The connection.
“Sooooo good,” she breathed. His hands clamped on her hips, grinding her down harder. She opened her eyes to meet the blazing intensity of his.
“I don’t follow.” Zach growled; lifting her almost off him before bringing her back down, thrusting up at the same time, controlling her body easily. Deep and slow. Measured. A pace designed to drive her insane. A frisson of heat made her gasp as it flowed down to stoke the fire between her legs.
“More,” she demanded, but he continued his deep, slow strokes even as she tried to speed him up, and she realized she may be on top, but he was still in full control. She bit her lip and swallowed a giggle. Two could play at that game.
She flexed her inner muscles around him, and he gasped a breath. He narrowed his eyes, and a playful slap landed on her ass. Her pussy clenched. “Bad girl.” He massaged the tiny sting away. This time, she couldn't keep the laugh in, and she grinned down at him.
His hands came up under her swollen breasts, cupping the fullness, weighing them with his strong fingers, his thumbs strumming her sensitive nipples to the edge of pain. A flash of need shot through her, throbbing between her legs, and her humor vanished.
With an impressive display of muscle, he locked her to him and rolled over, never leaving her, his weight now pressing her into the mattress.
“You’ll take what I give you.” He growled into her ear as he resumed those slow, deep thrusts. The words should have bristled, but they didn't. He'd give her what she needed.
It felt so good. He felt so good. His weight pinning her to the mattress, the hard muscles of his back bunching beneath her hands as she explored all that hot, male skin.
She was on edge, desperate for more. So close…
“Please, Zach…”
He lifted his head, met and held her gaze; the intensity in his features stole her remaining breath. He surged deeper, harder, faster—giving her more, but still not enough to push her over. She tightened her legs around his waist, trapping him against her, as her hands slid to his ass and gripped.
“Come. Now.” His fingers found her clit, pinched, and his hips slammed into hers. She broke; pleasure cresting. Her inner muscles clamped down, squeezing and pulsing. He continued thrusting, prolonging her orgasm, as her body shivered and thrummed with satisfaction, until every muscle went limp.
But he wasn’t finished. His hand pressed against the small of her back, arching her, anchoring her in place as he stroked in and out of her, almost leisurely now, a look of pure bliss on his face.
She nuzzled her face into the crook of his neck and breathed him in—mahogany and teakwood and beneath that something human and warm—as his exhale stirred her hair.
We made it.
He checked in through touch rather than language—a pause, a look, a question asked through the tilt of his head—and she answered the same way, with her hands on his face and the curve of her body toward his.
They found a rhythm the way they’d found everything else: without discussion, simply through paying attention to each other, and there were no more words.
Only movement—the slick slide of him into her, hard muscle against soft skin.
She’d almost lost him. Lost this. Lost what they could be together. She tightened her arms around him, and with a mere flex of his fingers, he pulled her to him, eliminating that last fragment of space between them.
He knew. She didn’t need to explain it. He was there too, in whatever space existed between relief and recklessness and the animal certainty of being alive when you nearly weren’t.
When she broke apart again—slow and warm and complete, his name catching somewhere between breath and sound—he nuzzled her neck as he let go. Like he needed to be part of her. Both breathed heavily as their muscles relaxed, hearts competing to see whose beat the fastest.
“God, Zach, I love you so much.”
His arms squeezed impossibly tighter around her. “Never letting you go.”
He rolled them onto their sides, their bodies still joined. She draped a knee over his hip and snuggled her face into his chest. Listened to his heart rate come down.
Outside, the distant sound of birds began, the tentative reemergence of a world that had decided to continue.
She was so tired. The tired that lived behind your eyes and in the marrow of your bones, the kind that only arrived after something that had demanded everything from you.
Zach’s hand moved in her hair, combing out the strands. Slow, rhythmic. Like he was the one soothing her.
“You should sleep.” His voice was low and rough at the edges, the way it always was when he was closest to something real.
“Mm.” She didn’t argue. Couldn’t. She was already most of the way there; her body deciding before her mind weighed in. It had been a long night. “You too.”
“I will.”
She believed him. Zach said what he meant.
What he didn’t say, he wasn’t ready for yet. She understood that.
She shifted, resting her palm against his chest. Under her hand: the strong, steady beat of a heart that came dangerously close to stopping. Her fingers curled slightly, instinctively.
His arm tightened around her shoulders.
I’m here, that pressure said. In his language. In the only language he was fluent in: the language of presence, of showing up, of covering a door with his body and staying between her and the thing that wanted to hurt her.
He was here. He didn’t pull away. He kept her locked to him, with no distance between them.
She heard it loud and clear.
She closed her eyes.
The last thing she was conscious of before sleep pulled her under was his lips pressing against the top of her head—brief and quiet, as if he thought she was already asleep and was saying something he wouldn’t have said otherwise.
Emma smiled into his chest and didn’t tell him she felt it.
She could wait for the words.
She’d chosen.