15. Vesper #2
Then there was no more folding, no more filing.
He lowered me back into the pillows and came with me, and he did not go careful, he kept that promise, his mouth roaming over me with an appetite that had been starved through weeks of shut doors and averted hands and was finished starving now.
He worked lower by inches, over the tender skin below my ear, over the slope of my breast, where he lingered until a sound tore loose from me that I had not authorized, down to the soft plane beneath my navel, where his breath scattered heat across nerves I did not know I owned.
His fingers found me first, patient and knowing, coaxing rather than demanding, and I broke apart against his hand in slow increments while he watched my face like a man reading a card he already knew would ruin him.
I refused to unravel alone, and reached for him, closed my hand around the heat of him, and felt the iron of his restraint shudder under my palm.
"You are going to be the death of me," he breathed.
"Then we'll go together." I drew him over me, guided him to where I wanted him, and there, at the threshold, he stopped. Braced above me on those inked knuckles, poised at the edge of me and holding, every muscle in him drawn taut with the effort of not moving.
"Say the word," he said, low and frayed. "I will not cross without it."
"Yes." I hooked my heel behind him and pulled. "Now. I want all of it."
He pushed into me slow, so slow, giving me every inch by degrees and letting me feel each one arrive, the ache and the stretch and the impossible fullness of being joined to him after all this frozen distance. I gasped and he stilled at once, buried deep and unmoving, his forehead dropping to mine.
"Too much?"
"Don't you dare stop." My voice came apart on it. "I said all of it."
"You did." Something like reverence roughened the words. "You are the one who took me. Remember that. I did not reach for you first."
"I know." I rocked against him, taking him deeper still, choosing it again with my own body. "I'm choosing it. Every second of it. Now move."
He obeyed. He set a rhythm as measured as everything else about him, deep and unhurried, drawing back until I nearly protested and then filling me again, and each return struck some place in me that undid a little more of the woman who lets no one in.
The heat built between us in long, gathering waves.
His breath grew ragged against my throat, his control wearing to nothing, the precision cracking clean through.
"Faster," I demanded, and dug my nails into his back to make it so. "Stop rationing me."
"You do not give an order in my bed and expect no answer.
" But he gave it to me, the pace climbing, our bodies finding the same insistent measure, and now neither of us was ahead, now we were racing the edge together, nothing left holding either of us up.
I felt him straining at it beside me, felt the war in him to hold and not let go before I did, and I was daring him wordless to fall first even as I tried not to, both of us hurtling toward it and unwilling, to the last, to be the one who broke.
"Look at me," he said, when I would have turned my face into the dark, when the wanting got too naked to hold anyone's eyes through. "You set the terms. Do not hide now. I want to watch you decide it. That is the part I will not do without."
"It's the hardest part," I said, and my voice wasn't mine.
"I know. That is why I am asking for it."
So I looked at him. And that was the surrender, in the end.
Not my body. My body was easy, my body had wanted him since the cold weeks when he wouldn't so much as pass me the salt with his fingers touching mine.
The impossible thing was letting him see it happen on my face.
Letting him watch the count go out of me, the guard, the arithmetic, the whole rigged machine I'd built to make sure no one ever carried an ounce of my weight.
I let go first. I don't know which of us won. I stopped caring who won, which, if you knew me at all, is the most alarming thing I have ever admitted to anyone.
And he held me. That's the thing I keep circling, lying here now.
When the floor finally went out from under me, when I had nothing braced and nothing counted and nothing in reserve, he took the whole of it.
My spine, my breath, the full dead weight of a woman who has never once in her life let herself be caught.
He held it like it weighed nothing. He held it like he'd been waiting years for someone to hand it to him and had almost stopped believing anyone would.
Afterward the tower was very quiet. The city stayed dark and doubled in the glass.
He lay with one arm heavy across me, his breath slowing at the back of my neck, and neither of us reached for the words that would put the distance back.
That was the frightening part. Usually one of us has the knife out by now, some dry little line to cut the rope before it can hold weight. Neither of us moved for it.
"You are still counting," he said into my hair. "I can feel it."
"Force of habit."
"What is the number?"
"There isn't one." I turned in the circle of his arm until I could see the wolf-gold gone soft in the low light. "That's what's got me. I keep reaching for the tally and coming up empty."
His hand moved once, slow, along my back, and he didn't answer, which was its own answer.
There was still a thing I hadn't told him, a door I'd found in the oldest bones of my own house that I'd left locked on my side.
And I knew he was holding one too, the thing from his chair at our wedding that he'd waved off and never explained.
Even here, undefended, we each kept one hand under the table.
Maybe that's what let us do the rest of it.
Maybe two people only survive this much closeness by holding one small lie in reserve, like a chip you don't bet, so you never have to be all the way empty.
I didn't think about that then. Then I only thought about how his heart had slowed to match mine without either of us deciding it should.
I let a man hold my whole weight for one night. I lay awake afterward, terrified, not that it was hard. That it was easy.