Chapter 21 #2
“He was gone,” he said. “He’d chosen it.
He’d been gone maybe months. And I’d been on the phone telling myself he was resting.
” The gold in his eyes was very bright now, and very wet, and his voice was still flat.
“He chose it. He looked at what was left—the house, the company, me—and it wasn’t enough.
She was gone and I wasn’t enough to stay for. ”
Underneath the flat voice was a son who had put his hand on his father and found him gone by choice.
She took the glass out of his hand and set it on the sill. Then she took his face in both her dirt-roughened palms and made him look down at her rather than the dark glass.
“You listen to me.” Her thumbs moved along the hard edge of his jaw.
“That wasn’t about you. Grief did that. Grief that swallowed him whole.
It wasn’t a verdict on whether you were enough.
The fact that he couldn’t stay doesn’t mean you weren’t worth staying for.
Do you hear me? Those are two different things, and you’ve spent all this time letting them be the same one. ”
His breath went ragged. His hands came up and closed over her wrists, not to pull her away but to hold on.
“I haven’t been in there since,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t even put my hand on the door. I don’t know why. There’s nothing there. There’s been nothing there for fifteen years.”
“You loved him,” she said, “and loving somebody doesn’t have an off switch just because they made a terrible choice.
I know that.” She thought, unwillingly, of a hospital hallway and a friend she’d married who’d never gotten to be more than that, but she pushed it back.
This was his sorrow, not hers. “You didn’t fail him.
He failed you, and it still hurts, and that’s allowed.
That’s allowed, Garrick. You don’t have to be made of stone about the stone. ”
Something broke in him then. Not loudly, not with any of the drama a smaller male might have brought to it. His head simply bowed the way his father’s stone head bowed, and he pressed his forehead to hers and just breathed. His great body shook under her hands, and she held his face and let him.
When he kissed her it wasn’t like the other times. The other times had been heat and hunger and the desire that had run between them since the first morning. This was a male reaching for the one thing that had given him comfort.
She kissed him back with everything she had, and wound her arms up around his neck as he bent to her. When his hands found her waist and lifted her clean off the floor she went, wrapping her legs around him, letting him take her weight.
“Toby’s asleep,” she breathed against his mouth.
“You’re sure.” It wasn’t a question. He was giving her the choice anyway.
“Garrick.” She put her mouth against his ear. “Take me upstairs.”
He carried her. Of course he carried her. The male could have carried a Bobcat if a Bobcat had needed carrying. Up the stairs with her fingers curled at the back of his neck and his mouth at her throat, and into the big quiet room where she’d woken three days and a lifetime ago.
He set her down like she was breakable.
“I’m not going to break.”
“I know what you are.” His voice had dropped into the register that did things to the backs of her knees. “Let me be slow.”
So she let him be slow, and slow turned out to be worse. Or better. She lost track of which. He took the buttons of her shirt one at a time, and every time his knuckles brushed her skin he paused as though he’d found something he hadn’t expected.
She got his shirt open and put both hands on his chest, on the warm grey skin that ran hot when he wanted her, and felt it under her palms. The resonance. The low deep hum of him that meant he was there, he was alive, he was staying.
“Feel that?” she said. “That’s you.”
The gold came up in his eyes like a furnace door opening.
“Say it again.”
“That’s you.”
He made a wordless sound, and took her down onto the bed.
Then her clothing went, one piece at a time.
Her jeans. Her bra, which defeated him for a second and made her laugh, and her laugh made his mouth curve against her shoulder.
His hands were enormous and hot and he had learned exactly what to do with them in a single night on a rug.
His wings went wide and open, because he never could keep them shut when he wanted her this much.
“Garrick—”
“I remember.” He moved down her body. “I remember all of it.”
He put his mouth on her, and she had to put the back of her hand across her mouth, because her son was asleep one floor below and there was nothing quiet about what he was doing to her.
He was patient about it, as patient as he was with the stone, taking his time like he had all night to wait.
She came with her fingers locked at the back of his skull and his name in her mouth.
When he came back up her body she was still shaking. He looked down at her with the gold filling his eyes.
“Again,” he said.
“No.” She got a hand around the back of his neck. “Now. Come here.”
He was burning hot. That was the thing about him she would never get used to, the cool grey quiet when he was at rest and then the furnace under her hands as the need took over. She reached down between them and wrapped her hands around him, and he shuddered against her as though she’d hurt him.
“Maris.”
“I know.” She guided him. “I know.”
He paused there, braced on his forearms, looking down at her, and she understood he was giving her the moment to be sure. She pulled him down.
He filled her the way water finds a gap in the rock, slow and inevitable and exactly right, and the sound he made went from a word to something older. His wings came down around them both, creating a warm dark room made of him.
She kept her palm on his chest the entire time.
The first time had been the fire and his hands and the sheer astonishing size of him.
This was the vibration under her hand and the two of them in the darkness beneath his wings with nothing to look at but each other.
She could feel the resonance against her where their bodies pressed together and then she could no longer tell if she was feeling his heartbeat or her own.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t—”
He didn’t. He put a hand under the small of her back and lifted her into him, and his ridges caught her where she needed catching, and she came apart the second time with her mouth pressed against the hot skin of his shoulder.
He followed her over with her name in his mouth, and his weight settled down over her, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.
Afterwards she lay with her cheek on his chest and his resonance under her ear, and told him the only truth that mattered.
“I’ve got you.” Her hand spread over his chest. “I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere.”
And the huge body shuddered, and held her, and stayed.