Chapter 7
LIVIA
He doesn't move for a moment. His eyes are fixed on mine, and I can see him running calculations behind them, the same rapid internal processing I've been watching him do all evening, weighing outcomes, assessing probabilities, looking for the version of this situation that ends with me frightened or uncomfortable or retreating.
I keep my hands exactly where they are, hovering an inch from his chest, and I hold his gaze and don't move, because I understand, suddenly and with complete clarity, that what this requires is patience.
Not the performative patience of someone waiting politely for a situation to resolve itself, but the real kind, the kind that says I am here, I am not going anywhere, and I will wait until you believe me.
He reaches up.
His hands are enormous, each one broad enough to span the entire width of my ribcage, and his fingers find the bottom of the vest and he pulls it up and over his head in a single motion, and then his hands find the hem of his soaked shirt, and he pauses again, and I think he's going to apologise again, going to offer some mathematically precise disclaimer about managing my expectations regarding his physiological presentation, but he doesn't. He just pulls the shirt off.
The sound I don't make takes genuine effort.
He is vast. Not in the way that word usually suggests excess or carelessness, but vast the way a landscape is vast, the way something geological is vast, something that exists at a scale that makes the ordinary categories of measurement feel insufficient.
His chest is a broad, pale green expanse of dense muscle, and the scars are everywhere, a mapped geography of old damage, pale lines and ridged seams crossing his shoulders, his sternum, a long curved mark that sweeps from his left ribs almost to his hip.
Some of them are clearly old, healed to the smoothest silver.
Some are less old. All of them are, I note with the precision of a woman who has not touched another human being in seven months, extremely present.
My hands make the decision before I have finished making it.
I press my palm flat against his chest, just below his collarbone, and I feel him go absolutely still beneath the contact.
His breath stops. Not the sharp intake of surprise, but the held breath of someone who has been braced for impact and received something else entirely, something they don't quite have the framework to process.
His skin is cool from the rain but warming rapidly, and beneath my hand I can feel his heartbeat, fast and dense, a deep percussion that vibrates right up through my fingers.
"These," I say, and I trace one of the longer scars with my fingertips, following its path from his shoulder across the swell of his pectoral, and I feel the muscle jump under the contact. "How old?"
"Seven years." His voice has changed. It's lower, stripped of the careful precise diction, the polite full sentences. Just the word, just the number, landing like something dropped from a height. "Training. I miscalculated a structural—" He stops. Exhales, slow and controlled. "I was careless."
"You weren't careless," I say. I don't know why I'm certain of this but I am. "I've met you for three hours and I'm already certain you've never been careless about anything in your life."
Something breaks open in his expression, something behind the amber of his eyes that has been held very carefully in place all evening, and his hand comes up, slow and telegraphed, giving me every opportunity in the world to see it coming, and his fingers settle against the side of my face with a gentleness that is genuinely startling. His thumb brushes my cheekbone.
"Livia." Just my name. No follow-up. No clause, no qualifier, no mathematically precise subordinate phrase. Just my name, in that new register of his voice, and it does something to my spine that I would not, in any professional context, be able to justify.
"Yes," I say, which isn't a response to anything he's said but is somehow the correct answer anyway.
He leans down, and I tilt my face up, and there is a brief, breathless moment of cartography, both of us calculating the geometry of this, the significant vertical distance to be bridged, and then his mouth finds mine and the math becomes irrelevant.
He kisses me with extreme caution, I can feel it, the deliberate measured pressure of someone who is very aware of what they are capable of and is working very hard to keep it dialled back.
His lips are full and warm and slightly hesitant, and I can feel his jaw tight with the effort of restraint, and something about that, the knowledge of what is being contained, makes my hands spread flat against him, and I kiss him back with zero caution whatsoever.
He makes a sound against my mouth. Not a word.
Something lower, more fundamental, something that resonates through the contact between us, and his hand slides from my cheek into my wet hair, cupping the back of my skull with a grip that is careful and certain at once, and the tension in his jaw releases.
The difference is immediate.
He doesn't lunge. It's not reckless or violent or any of the things that the anxious part of my brain has been quietly running worst-case-scenario models on for the past several minutes.
But the restraint that was governing the first kiss is gone, and what replaces it is something considerably more thorough.
He tilts my head back, finding the angle he wants with a focus that is almost professional, and he kisses me until I lose track of whether I'm still standing or whether something else has happened to the structural arrangement of my body, and when I come up for air my glasses are askew and his hand is still cradling the back of my head like he's concerned about the integrity of my neck.
"Your sofa," he says. Still that low register, but there's a roughness in it now, a friction. "Is it—"
"It holds two people."
"I weigh significantly more than—"
"Narod." I take his face between my hands, which, given the proportional difference, amounts to me cupping his jaw with both palms, and I look up at him directly. "Sit down."
He sits.
The sofa makes a sound of protest but holds, and I follow him down, and there is a logistical negotiation of bodies that is partly awkward and partly something else, something that makes us both laugh briefly, the short breathless laugh of two people discovering the practical geometry of a significant size differential.
He ends up partially reclined against the arm of the sofa, and I end up partially in his lap, which places me at roughly the right altitude, and his hands come to my waist and the span of them is remarkable, his thumbs nearly meeting at my sternum, his fingers reaching my spine, and I feel this with a clarity that bypasses thinking entirely.
"You're going to tell me if I—" he starts.
"You're not going to."
"You can't know that with certainty."
"I'm good at risk assessment." I slide my hands back to his chest, watching his expression as I do it, watching the precision drain out of it, the careful maintenance of his features under which something considerably rawer is operating. "I've decided the risk profile is acceptable."
"That is not a scientific determination."
"It's absolutely a scientific determination," I say. "I've done the analysis." I lean in and press my mouth to the line of his jaw, just below his ear, and his whole body tightens beneath me. "My sample size is sufficient."
The growl that comes out of him at that is brief and low and vibrates through his chest and into mine, and his hands tighten on my waist, not painfully, but with a definitive certainty, a grip that communicates its intention clearly, and I am abruptly horizontal against the sofa cushions with a transition that happens so smoothly I don't quite track when it occurred, and Narod is above me, his weight distributed carefully on his forearms, bracketing me in a cage of green muscle and old scars, and he is looking down at me with those amber eyes that have lost every trace of the apologetic, hunched, careful calculation he's been wearing all evening.
"Hi," I say, because apparently that's where we are.
"Hello," he says, and the absurd formality of it in this context makes me laugh, and he looks briefly worried by the laugh, and I pull him down by the back of his neck and the worry resolves into something considerably more interesting.
He is thorough. That's the word that my brain, operating at reduced capacity, keeps arriving at.
Where the first kiss was restrained and exploratory, this is thorough, systematic, the same focused attention he apparently brings to actuarial tables and spreadsheets, directed entirely at the question of what makes me make noise.
He finds the answer with a rapidity that I find both impressive and slightly humbling.
His mouth at my throat. The precise, careful pressure of his hands moving the fabric of my blouse, asking permission at each new point of contact not with words but with a momentary stillness, a pause that waits for my response, and I give it, consistently and without ambiguity, because I have done the risk assessment and I stand by my conclusions.
He works my blouse open button by button, and the concentration on his face is enormous and sincere, as though this is genuinely the most important task he has undertaken all week, which I find absolutely devastating in a way I couldn't fully articulate to anyone I know.
When he presses his mouth to my sternum I make a sound I'm not going to repeat and his hands go still, and I think he's checking in, and I say his name, and the quality of stillness changes.
The restraint snaps cleanly and completely somewhere around the point where I slide my hands into his hair and say his name for the second time, and the Narod who was perching on my sofa holding a porcelain teacup like it was an explosive device is simply gone, replaced by something considerably more certain, something that knows what it wants and has stopped politely subordinating that knowledge to social anxiety and risk calculation.
He is still careful. The care never disappears, it's structural, it's load-bearing, it's what everything else is built on.
But careful and restrained are not the same thing, and he has stopped being restrained, and the difference is significant.
He is enormously strong. I know this in the abstract because he is a six foot nine Orc, but I know it now in a different way, in the way the sofa cushions don't give him enough resistance and he compensates without effort, in the way he shifts me with one hand when the angle is wrong, in the way my entire body fits inside the frame of his attention with room to spare.
There is something about being this comprehensively contained, every point of my periphery occupied by the size and heat of him, that trips a circuit in my brain that I wasn't previously aware I had.
"You need to tell me," he says, his voice a low rumble against my skin, "if anything—"
"I'll tell you." My hands at the waist of his trousers. "I promise I'll tell you." A pause, and then, because I need him to understand this clearly, I add, "I'm not telling you to stop."
He exhales, long and slow, and lowers his forehead to mine for one moment, and his eyes are closed, and I feel the exact moment his last remaining calculation concludes, the final risk assessment filed and settled, and then he opens his eyes and they are dark amber now, deep and without reservation, and he says, very quietly and completely without hesitation,
"Good."
I wake up and the first thing I register is that I'm warm, which is unusual, because my sofa throws are inadequate and I usually wake up cold when I fall asleep out here.
The second thing I register is that I'm wrapped in what appears to be every blanket I own, tucked so thoroughly and with such structural intentionality that it takes me a moment to work out how to extricate an arm.
The third thing I register is the silence.
Full silence.
The sofa cushions are back in place. The teacup is washed and in the drying rack, the delicate porcelain handle pointing upright at a careful angle. The towel I gave him is folded on the arm of the chair, a precise rectangle.
The apartment is immaculate, every trace of him tidied away with the methodical efficiency of someone who didn't want to leave a mess, or possibly didn't want to leave evidence, and I sit on my own sofa wrapped in all my own blankets and I look at the empty flat and I think, with a clarity that has not yet been blunted by sleep,
He's gone.