Chapter 17
He came back to the bunk hurt.
Nora heard him on the mezzanine stairs — slower than usual, the creak of the old wood interrupted by a hitch in his step that said ribs, probably the left side, and the careful way he leaned on the railing said the rest of him wasn't much better.
She was sitting on the bed with a first-aid kit she'd assembled from the compound's supply closet and a basin of warm water, and when he came through the door she saw all of it: the split lip, the swelling along his jaw, the way he held his left arm close to his body like the ribs underneath were telling him things he didn't want to hear.
"Sit," she said.
He sat. On the edge of the bunk, his boots still on, his cut still on, the blood from his lip dried to a dark line down his chin. He looked like a man who'd driven through a wall to kill someone on the other side, which was more or less what he'd done.
She knelt in front of him and unlaced his boots. Pulled them off one at a time and set them beside the bed. Then she stood and eased the cut off his shoulders — careful, slow, the leather sliding down his arms — and hung it on the bedpost where it always lived.
"Arms up," she said. "Slow."
He raised his arms and she pulled his T-shirt over his head, and the bruise on his left side was exactly where she'd expected it — a deep, angry purple that spread from his lower ribs around toward his back, the shape of a blackjack's impact printed in his skin.
She dipped a cloth in the warm water and started cleaning.
His face first — the split lip, dabbed clean with a gentleness she hadn't known she had in her hands, then the scrape on his cheekbone where someone's fingers had clawed.
He watched her with those hazel eyes while she worked, and she could feel the weight of his attention like heat from a dryer vent, constant and close.
"Devane?" she asked.
"Down."
"The crew?"
"Broken. Scattered." He winced when the cloth touched the edge of the bruise on his ribs. "Nora, that map you drew—"
"Shh." She pressed the warm cloth flat against the bruise and held it there, and she felt him exhale — long, slow, the breath of a man letting something out that he'd been holding since before the fight started. "Let me do this."
She cleaned every mark on him. The scrapes on his knuckles, the raw skin on his forearms where the chain-link had bitten, the second bruise blooming on his kidney that she found when she made him turn.
She washed the blood from his chin and pressed a butterfly strip across the split in his lip and taped his ribs with the efficiency of a woman who'd patched her own injuries alone for years and was now, for the first time, patching someone else's.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the cleaning stopped being clinical and became something else.
Her hands slowed on his skin. The cloth came away and her fingers stayed, tracing the edge of the rib bruise, then moving up — the lean muscle of his flank, the flat plane of his stomach, the line of dark hair that ran from his navel into his jeans.
She felt him go still under her hands. Not tense.
Waiting. The stillness of a man who'd just let a woman tend his wounds and was watching her decide what came next.
She decided.
She leaned in and kissed the bruise. Soft, barely there, her lips on the dark purple skin where the blackjack had landed.
He inhaled sharp through his nose. She kissed it again, and then higher — the ridge of his rib, the flat of his chest, the scar below his collarbone that she'd never asked about and didn't need to.
Her mouth found the route map on his shoulder.
The ink she knew by touch now, the roads she'd traced in four different beds, the summit road to Donner Pass that she'd kissed and claimed as hers.
She traced it with her lips, slow, following the lines the way she'd follow them on a real map — down the ridge, around the curve, into the valley inked across his shoulder blade.
His hand came up to her hair. Not fisting — threading. His fingers moving through the brassy weight of it, slow and careful, pulling it back from her face so he could watch her mouth move across his skin.
"Nora." His voice was rough and low and undone.
She worked her way down. His chest. His stomach. The line of muscle at his hip that flexed under her mouth. She undid his belt with steady hands and pushed his jeans down, and he lifted his hips to help, and she pressed her mouth to the hard length of him through the cotton and felt him shudder.
She pulled the cotton down and took him in her mouth.
Slow. The way she was doing everything tonight — without rush, without urgency, just the warm, wet slide of her tongue and the sound of his breath going ragged above her.
His hand tightened in her hair, not pulling, just holding, and she worked him with her mouth and her hand until his hips were rocking and his head had dropped back and the sounds he was making were barely words.
"Stop — Nora — I'm going to—"
She didn't stop. She took him deeper and felt his whole body go tight, and then he was hauling her up — both hands under her arms, lifting her off her knees with a strength the bruised ribs shouldn't have allowed — and rolling her under him on the bunk.
The mattress sank. His weight came down on her and she opened for him — legs, arms, everything — and his hands were on her tank top, pulling it up and off, and then his mouth was on her throat and her collarbone and the hollow between her breasts, and his weather-rough hands were sliding her shorts down her legs.
He returned everything she'd given him. His mouth on her ribs, the line of her hip, the ink band on her bicep kissed with the same slow attention she'd given his scars.
He worked his way down her body with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be and nothing in the world more important than the woman under his hands, and when his mouth found the center of her she arched off the bed and her fist twisted in the sheets.
He used his hands and his mouth together.
Rough palms on her inner thighs, holding her open, his tongue moving in a rhythm that matched the slow, thorough way they'd been building all night.
She let go of the sheets and found his head, fingers curling in his short hair, holding him there, and the sounds she made filled the dark mezzanine like a song in a language only they spoke.
He brought her close. Let her hover. Brought her close again.
"Please," she whispered. "Aaron. Please."
He crawled up her body. Chest to chest, hip to hip, his forehead against hers, and he slid into her in one long, slow stroke that made them both go still.
She wrapped her legs high around his waist — above his hips, above the bruise — and pulled him in as deep as he could go, and they breathed together in the dark.
They moved.
Long. Unhurried. The rhythm of two people who knew each other's bodies and had stopped counting the times.
His strokes were deep and steady, and she met every one with a slow roll of her hips, her legs wrapped tight around him, her hands on the route map across his back.
His forehead stayed against hers. Their eyes stayed open.
The low light from the window caught the sweat on his skin and the freckles on her shoulders and the space between them that had closed to nothing.
She felt it building. Not fast, not sharp — a deep, slow tide that rose through her thighs and her stomach and her chest, the kind that took its time because there was time, because nobody was coming through a door or dying on a concrete pad or staging cars in the dark.
Just him inside her and his weight above her and his breath mingling with hers.
She came apart under him. Quiet this time — a long, shuddering exhale and her whole body arching into his, her face pressed against his neck, her legs tightening around him as the wave broke and rolled through her and left her trembling.
He let go right after. A deep, slow pulse inside her, his breath stopping in his chest, her name on his lips so quiet she felt it more than heard it. He stayed deep inside her and they rode it out together, the last tremors moving between their bodies like a current shared.
They stayed joined.
Neither moved. His weight was on her — all of it, not holding back, not braced on his forearms — and she took it, wanted it, the full heavy fact of him pressing her into the mattress and the quilt.
His face was in her hair and her arms were around his back and she could feel his heartbeat slowing against her ribs, and the bunk was warm and the mezzanine was dark and there was nowhere in the world either of them needed to be.
"Your ribs," she murmured.
"Don't care."
"You'll care tomorrow."
"Tomorrow's a long way off." His mouth moved against her hair. "Right now I'm exactly where I want to be."
She closed her eyes. His heart beat steady against hers. The compound breathed below them — the hum of the compressor she'd rebuilt, the creak of the old building settling, the low murmur of brothers standing watch on a night when the last lieutenant was dead and the end was in sight.
She held the man who'd fought for her block and her door and her people, who carried bruises the shape of weapons on his ribs and her name in his mouth, and she stayed still and quiet and joined with him in the dark, in no hurry to move.
In no hurry at all.