Chapter 14
brOCK
She was mine.
There wasn't a discussion to be had about it, not in my head, not anymore.
Somewhere between the alley and this sofa, I'd crossed a line I hadn't known was in me. On the far side of it was a simple fact, plain as a sight picture: this woman was mine and I was hers and that was the shape of the world now.
I don't say things like that. I'd have laughed at any man who did. But I'd said nobody else into her throat and meant it down to the marrow. She'd said it back. A thing like that doesn't unsay itself.
And the sex. God help me. I'd had my share over the years—quick, functional, a need handled and forgotten.
This was a different animal entirely.
This had taken me apart and left the pieces somewhere I couldn't find them.
Fuck.
I didn't have the words for it and I wasn't going to go looking. Some things you just let be true.
We didn't talk after. There was nothing that needed saying that the last hour hadn't already said better.
I pulled her back against my chest and got an arm over her. She fit there, tucked down into me, small against all the parts of me that had only ever been built for harm.
I lay in the dark of that studio with the city glowing soft through the windows and her breath going slow under my arm, and I felt her drop—just drop, like a stone into deep water, down into a sleep so sudden and so total it told its own story.
The sleep of somebody who'd been holding the whole world up by themselves for a long time and had finally, for one night, set it down.
I dozed. Old habit. A man in my line doesn't sleep the way regular people do; he sets a watch in the back of his skull and rests under it. So, I floated, half down, the door in my sightline, even with my eyes shut.
An hour, maybe. Then I came up out of it to the slow, deliberate press of her backing into me.
She was awake. Moving against me in the dark, that perfect curve of her grinding slow into where I was already hard again—because, of course, I was, I'd been half hard in my sleep with her against me.
She made a small sound, low and wanting, and rolled her hips back into me like a question that already knew the answer.
I didn't need asking twice.
I got a hand on her hip and lifted her thigh and slid into her from behind, slow, into all that wet heat, and she gasped and arched and pushed back to take more of me.
We found a rhythm without trying for one—unhurried, deep, the kind of slow that isn't going anywhere because it doesn't have to.
My mouth at the back of her neck. My arm wrapped under and around her, holding her whole against me.
Her little moans breaking soft in the dark, each one going through me like a current.
I moved in her, easy and certain. She let me, melted back into it, her hand reaching back to grip my hip and pull me deeper.
And lying there in the dark of a paint-smelling room over a frame shop, buried in a woman I'd known for one single day, with the city asleep below us—I could not believe this was my life.
I'd spent every year I could remember in the company of hard men and harder work, in places with no light and no mercy. I'd made my peace with the idea that this kind of thing happened to other men. Not me. Never me. And here it was, anyway.
Fuck.
She came first. I felt it move through her, felt her clench around me and shake and bite down on a cry. Then, she did something that undid what was left of me. She pulled forward, slid me out, turned in the dark, and climbed on.
Took me back inside her in one smooth drop and set both hands flat on my chest and rode me.
And it changed. Whatever had been slow and tender went sharp and greedy.
She moved on me hard now, sloppy, desperate, chasing something with her head dropped and her hair hanging and her breath coming ragged, taking what she wanted with no apology in her at all.
I gripped her hips and let her. Let her use me.
I'm a man who's controlled damn near everything his whole life, and there was nothing in me that wanted control of this—I wanted to be exactly what she was making me, which was wrecked.
I was no match for her. Not even close. She rode me right over the edge. I went, hard, with a sound torn up out of somewhere I keep locked, my hands clamping her down onto me while it ran through both of us.
For a while, she just lay there on my chest, breathing, our hearts going like two engines that couldn't find idle.
Then she pushed herself up. "I need water," she said, voice rough and sated.
I let her go and watched her cross the room.
The city glow came through the windows just enough, and she walked through it bare, unhurried, every line of her lit soft and silver—the dip of her waist, the curve of her, the long, clean shape of her in the dark. I propped up on one elbow and looked my fill with no shame about it, whatsoever.
Fuck, she's perfect. Not the polite word people throw around. The real one. There wasn't a thing about her I'd have changed, standing there in the half dark drinking from a mason jar like she'd lived in this room her whole life.
She drained the whole glass in one go, set it down, filled it again at the tap.
And the ache hit me. Low and deep and bigger than wanting. I'd wanted things in my life—wanted out, wanted quiet, wanted the noise in my head to stop. I'd never once ached toward a person like this, like there was a hook set behind my breastbone and the line ran straight across that room to her.
It scared me, same as her sitting in my lap had scared me, and I didn't care. That was the new thing. I didn't care.
"You want one?" she said, lifting the glass.
"Yeah."
She filled a second and turned and started back toward me across the dark room, a glass in each hand, the city behind her—
—and my phone buzzed against the floor from inside my jeans.
Damn.
I knew before I moved who it was. I rolled, dug the cell out of the denim heaped by the sofa, and answered.
"Yeah."
"I need you." Tommy. No preamble, no light in it at all. "Now, Brock. Right now."
I looked across the room at Mary Catherine, standing there holding two glasses of water in the dark, watching me with the start of a question in her face.
"Okay," I said.
"Car'll come to you. It already knows where you are. Be ready."
The line went dead.
And then it was just the two of us in the quiet, the kind of quiet that comes right after a door's been kicked in, even when no door has.
"Who was that?" she said.
I could've lied. I lie for a living. But I looked at her standing there bare in the city light with water she'd poured for me going warm in her hands, and I found I didn't have it in me. Not about this part.
"My brother," I said. "I have to go."
"Oh." Just that. One small syllable. But I watched it land in her, watched something flinch behind her eyes—the hurt of a woman who's been left before, who knows the exact shape of a man putting his clothes on in the dark.
She covered it fast, the curated calm coming back down.
But I'd seen it. I see everything. It's the one thing I've never been able to switch off.
I was up off the sofa before I'd decided to be, crossing to her bare as the day I was born.
I took the glasses out of her hands—gentle, both of them—and set them on the windowsill.
Then, I bent and got my hands under her and lifted her clean off the floor.
She made a surprised sound and wrapped her legs around me on instinct, her arms going around my neck, her face dropping level with mine.
I looked at her. Made sure she was looking back.
"There is no other place I want to be than right here," I said.
"Hear me. Not one. But my brother doesn't call like that unless he's in real trouble, and that trouble is the reason I'm in this city at all.
So, I have to go see about it." I held her eyes.
"And then I'm coming back. I promise you that.
I don't make promises I don't keep—it's about the only clean thing I've got. I'll be back."
She studied my face the way she did, reading it for the lie, and didn't find one because there wasn't one. Something in her went soft and certain.
"Okay," she said, and kissed me—slow, deep, both hands in my hair, a kiss that said it believed me. Then, she pulled back an inch, and that reckless shine I'd first seen on the pier came up in her eyes, right there in the dark with my hands full of her.
"Do we have time," she said, "for one more?"
I grinned. Couldn't help it.
"Darlin'," I said, "I've carried heavy things my whole life, and not one of 'em ever felt like getting to hold you. The car can wait."
The dumbest, sappiest line yet, and I felt myself doing it again, handing this woman my whole soft underbelly on a plate.
This time, I didn't even reach to take it back.
She laughed against my mouth, low and delighted, and tightened her legs around me.
I turned and put her back against the one bare stretch of wall in that room full of her secret work.
She weighed nothing. Less than nothing. I held her up against that wall like she was made of light and took my time about it, the city quiet below and the glasses sweating on the sill and Tommy's car somewhere out there closing the distance.
With every move of her against me, I felt the thing behind my breastbone pull tighter and fill up with something I had no name for and no defense against.
Whatever was waiting out there in the dark of Charleston could have me in ten minutes.
For now, I had this. And I was going to be here for all of it.