Chapter 23
She couldn't stop laughing.
It hit her on the mezzanine stairs, climbing behind Switchback toward the bunk with the compound going quiet below them and the last of the beer-warm voices fading into the hum of the building settling.
She put her hand on his back to steady herself and the laugh came up out of her like something uncorked — low and loose and helpless, the sound a body makes when it's been holding fear for weeks and finally, completely lets it go.
He turned on the stairs. "What?"
"Nothing." She pressed her forehead against his shoulder blade, against the route map through his T-shirt, and shook with it. "Nothing is wrong. That's what's funny. Nothing is wrong."
He turned around and sat down on the step above her and pulled her in between his knees and held her while she laughed against his chest. His arms were loose around her.
His chin rested on top of her head. And after a moment she felt his chest start shaking too — not a full laugh, not from a man who weighed every sound like it cost something, but the quiet rumble of a man who'd been carrying the same weight and had just set it down.
They sat on the stairs laughing at nothing, at the absence of everything that had been chasing them, and it was the best sound the compound had heard all night.
She pulled him up by the hand. Led him to the bunk — their bunk, the quilt folded at the foot, his cut on the bedpost, her boots under the frame — and turned him around and pushed him down onto the mattress with both hands flat on his chest.
He went. Sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at her with those hazel eyes that had spent weeks reading danger and were now reading something else entirely — a woman standing over him loose-limbed and grinning with her brassy hair down around her bare shoulders and not a single thing in the world to be afraid of.
"Take this off," she said, tugging his T-shirt.
"You take it off."
She did. Grabbed the hem and pulled it up over his head, slow, running her hands up his stomach and his chest as the cotton climbed.
The bruises from the Devane fight were going yellow now, fading, and the new scratch from Vane's nails was a thin red line across his cheekbone with the butterfly strip already peeling at the edges.
She pulled the strip off gently and kissed the scratch.
"Battle scars," she said.
"You should see the other guy."
She laughed again. Bright and sudden, her head tipping back, the sound of it bouncing off the mezzanine ceiling, and she felt his hands come to her waist and his thumbs hook in the waistband of her jeans and tug her closer.
She stripped for him without hurry. Tank top first — crossed her arms and pulled it over her head in one smooth motion and dropped it on the floor.
Then she unhooked her bra, and the look on his face when it fell away made her feel like the most dangerous woman in the room, which she was, because this room only had two people in it and both of them were hers.
She unbuttoned her jeans. Slow. His hands tightened on her waist but he didn't rush her — just watched, hazel eyes dark and steady, his thumbs tracing circles on her hip bones while she worked the zipper down and shimmied the denim off her hips.
She kicked the jeans aside and stood in front of him in nothing but the faded ink band on her bicep and the freckles he'd been mapping since the first night.
"God, Nora."
"Just me." She pushed him back on the bed.
He went — dropped onto his back, arms spread, surrendering to whatever she wanted, and the trust in that gesture cracked her open wider than any claiming word he'd ever said.
She climbed over him and straddled his hips and sat there, bare skin on denim, feeling him already hard underneath her through his jeans.
She undid his belt. Button. Zipper. He lifted his hips and she tugged everything down and off, and then it was skin on skin from hips to chest and the warmth of him between her thighs was the warmest thing in the world.
She rocked against him. Not taking him in yet — just the slow, wet slide of her body against his, the friction building between them while she sat on his lap with her hands on his chest and watched his face.
His jaw clenched. His hands gripped her thighs.
His hips pushed up against her, seeking, and she smiled down at him and kept the pace exactly where she wanted it.
"You're killing me," he said.
"You'll survive. You're good at that."
His laugh was rough and wrecked and it made her stomach flip. She reached between them and took him in her hand and stroked him once, twice, watching his eyes go heavy, and then she lifted her hips and guided him to her and sank down onto him slow.
They both exhaled. Long and shaky, the breath of two people coming together with nothing between them but heat and want and the particular luxury of having nowhere to be.
She settled fully onto him and held still for a moment, just feeling — the stretch, the fullness, the ache that wasn't pain but something deeper and sweeter than pain, the feeling of being joined to the one person she'd chosen to stay for.
She started to move.
Slow. Rocking on his lap with her hands braced on his chest, her fingers spread across the route map, her brassy hair swinging loose around her face.
His hands roamed up her back — rough palms on her spine, her shoulder blades, into the loose fall of her hair.
He gathered it in one fist and tugged gently, tipping her head back, and put his mouth on her throat.
She rolled her hips. He groaned against her neck.
She did it again and felt him push up to meet her, and they found the rhythm — the same easy, unhurried rhythm they'd found over and over, in the back room and the garage and the bunk and every place they'd come together, the rhythm that belonged only to them.
He sat up under her. Wrapped both arms around her waist and pulled her tight against his chest, and suddenly they were face to face, chest to chest, her legs wrapped around him on the bed and his arms locked around her like he never intended to let go.
Their foreheads pressed together. She could feel his breath on her lips and his heartbeat against her ribs and every inch of him inside her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on.
They moved together. Slow and deep, the rocking of two bodies that knew each other so well the pleasure was almost conversation — the tilt of her hips saying there, the press of his hands saying I know, the sound she made when he hit the angle that made everything go white saying don't stop in a language they'd invented in the dark.
She started laughing again. She couldn't help it — the joy kept spilling out of her, mixing with the pleasure and the heat until she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
She laughed against his mouth and he swallowed the sound and kissed her, and she rocked against him laughing and kissing and the whole thing was so easy and so right and so impossibly good that she wanted to live in this exact second forever.
The slow pace couldn't hold. The heat built the way heat always built between them — not a cresting wave but a rising tide, lifting them both until the rocking became grinding and the grinding became urgent and she was pressing down onto him hard, chasing it, and his grip on her waist went from loose to bruising and his breath went from steady to ragged.
"Nora — God — right there—"
She ground down against him and felt the edge come and tipped over it with her face pressed against his and her arms locked around his neck and the laugh finally turning into something else — a high, breathless sound that was his name and her name and the sound of a woman coming apart in the arms of a man who'd caught her every time.
He gripped her hips and drove up into her twice, hard, and let go.
She felt him shudder against her, inside her, his arms crushing her against his chest and her name breaking apart in his mouth, and they held each other through it — shaking, breathing, wrapped so tight together that she couldn't tell where she ended and he began.
They fell sideways onto the bunk. Tangled.
Laughing again — both of them now, the low, spent, ridiculous laughter of two people who'd just had each other and had nowhere to go and nothing to fear and were lying in a narrow bed in a warehouse full of bikers with their legs intertwined and their hearts hammering and every terrible thing that had chased them dead and gone.
She sprawled across his chest. Her cheek on the route map. Her fingers laced through his. The quilt pulled up over them by some shared instinct neither of them remembered acting on.
"Nothing outside the door," she murmured.
"Nothing."
"No cars on the curb."
"No."
"No clipboard man. No saboteur. No lieutenant. No tidy man in a gray suit."
"Just us." His hand moved in her hair, slow and warm. "Just the warm door and the people inside it."
She closed her eyes. His heartbeat was slowing under her ear, steady and strong, the metronome she'd been falling asleep to for weeks now — the sound of the man who'd walked into her laundromat at three in the morning and stayed.
Nothing outside the door. Nothing left to listen for. Just the bunk and the dark and the man and the map on his chest that led to a summit where there was nothing but sky.
Nora fell asleep smiling.