17. Piper
PIPER
The first kiss had been the dam breaking. What came after was the flood, and floods, it turns out, can take their time.
He kissed me like a man who had decided something and meant to be thorough about it.
My back was against the wall and his hands were in my hair and the frantic edge of it, the weeks of almost, burned off fast and left something slower underneath.
He pulled back just far enough to look at me, breathing hard, his thumb moving along my jaw, and I watched him make the choice not to rush.
Of course he wouldn't rush. The man sands a board for an hour to save five minutes of finish.
"We don't have to," he said. Low. Rough. "I need you to know that. We can sit by the stove and wait out the storm and I will not think one less thing of you."
"Marcus."
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it. You mean everything. It's exhausting." I got both hands flat against his chest, over the wet flannel, and felt his heart going like mine. "Ask me what I want. Properly."
His eyes searched my face. "What do you want?"
"You. This. All of it, and not in a year, and not after a long think about the risks." My voice wanted to shake and I didn't let it, because this was the truest thing I had said out loud in longer than I could stand to count. "I'm tired of almost. Take me to bed, Marcus. Such as the bed is."
The corner of his mouth did the thing. "It's a camp cot."
"I'm aware of the cot's limitations."
"It's rated for one person who lies very still."
"Then we'll test it past spec," I said, and pulled him down by the collar, and that was the end of the talking for a while.
Getting there was not graceful. We left a trail of wet wool across the parlor floor, his jacket, my flannel, a boot I had to hop on one foot to lose while clinging to him for balance, and he caught me by the waist when I overbalanced and we both laughed into the kiss, and the laugh did something the heat alone couldn't. It made it real.
It made it us, the two specific ridiculous people we were, and not some breathless scene I was performing in my own head.
That mattered more than I could have said out loud. Every other time there had been a man, some part of me had stayed up near the ceiling the whole while, watching, directing, checking the angle. Tonight nobody was up there. There was only us, and the floor, and the firelight.
Dozer, who had taken up a chaperone's post in the doorway with his ears at full attention, got firmly relocated to the front hall with a folded mover's blanket and a closed door and the great wounded sigh of a dog who has seen everything and approved of none of it.
The cot received us with a shriek of protest that echoed off the bare plaster.
"That," I gasped, "is the least romantic sound in the world."
"Told you. One person. Very still."
"Are you laughing? Marcus Webb. Are you laughing right now?"
"No," he said, plainly laughing, the rarest sound he owned, and then he stopped laughing, because I had gotten the last of his shirt off and spread my hands over the warm broad fact of him, and whatever he'd been about to say left without him.
"Say something," I whispered, because the quiet of him at close range was its own kind of overwhelming.
"Can't." His forehead came down against mine. "You took my words. You've had them for weeks. I just never told you."
I want to tell it the way it happened, which was slow.
He undressed me like he was uncovering something he'd been told was lost, his rough hands learning me the way they learn wood, reading every line with his thumbs, pausing where I caught my breath, going back to the place that had pulled a sound out of me and staying there until it came again.
He looked at me the whole time. That was the part I wasn't ready for.
I have been wanted before, by men who watched the room over my shoulder while they did it.
He watched me. Only me. Like there was nothing else worth the looking, like the storm and the house and the whole dark mountain had narrowed down to the inch of skin under his hand.
His hands went everywhere a slow man's hands go when he has decided there is no hurry left in the world.
Down the line of my spine and back up. The curve of my hip.
The soft inside of my thigh. The underside of my breast, where the weight of it settled into his palm and he made a low sound against my skin, like the find was better than he had let himself imagine.
Everywhere he touched woke up and reached for the next place.
I had not known a body could be read like that, line by line, each one given its full due before he moved to the one below it.
It undid me faster than any amount of skill could have.
Because here is the thing nobody warns you about being truly seen.
It is terrifying. I have spent my whole adult life keeping a camera between me and everyone, a bright performed version of Piper turned outward so the real one could hide behind it, and there was no camera here, no audience, no better-lit angle to turn toward.
There was just me, scared and bare in the firelight, and a quiet man looking at me like I was the finest thing he had ever been allowed to touch.
"You're shaking," he said, gone very gentle.
"I'm not cold."
"I know." He brushed the hair off my face. "We can stop."
"Don't you dare stop." I pulled his hand back to me. "I'm shaking because you keep looking at me. Nobody looks at me. They look at the show."
He went still over me, that whole-body stillness he gets right before he solves something. "I'm not watching a show," he said, and something raw scraped under his voice. "I have never once been able to look away from you. I drove down that mountain every night trying to."
I could not hold still under it any longer.
I got my hands between us and worked his belt loose, wanting him the way you want air after too long underwater, and he let me, his breath breaking apart when my hand found him, his forehead dropping hard to my shoulder.
For one long second the careful man hung on the edge of his own control, and feeling that, feeling what I did to him, lit me hotter than any touch had.
Then his mouth came back to mine, and his hand slid low and sure between my thighs, and whatever I had been about to say left me as his name and nothing after it.
And then he stopped holding it back.
He measured everything twice his whole life.
That night he didn't measure anything, and I understood it was the bravest thing he knew how to do.
The careful man, the one who tapes off what isn't ready and does it one stair at a time, let go of all of it, and what was under the control turned out to be reverence and a hunger he'd been starving on purpose for three years.
His mouth moved at my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast, unhurried and ravenous at once, and then lower, down my stomach, slow as a man with the whole night ahead and no intention of wasting a minute of it.
When he found me where I was aching for him, the first stroke of his tongue arched me clean off the blanket.
He took his time there too, because of course he did, working me with the same complete attention his hands give to anything they love, reading every gasp, staying exactly where I needed him and not a half inch off it, until I was trembling and fisting both hands in his hair and saying please, a word I am not certain I have ever said and meant the way I meant it then.
He gave me what I asked for and held me through the fall of it, and somewhere in there the thing I do, the narrating, the performing, the running commentary I keep going every waking second, finally went quiet.
For the first time in years there were no words left in me.
There was only him, and the firelight, and my own breath, and the blessed ringing silence where the performance used to live.
When he finally rose over me and pushed inside, slow, the stretch and the fullness of him pulled a sound from me I did not know I had.
He went still a moment, buried deep, his forehead dropped to mine, both of us breathing the same air.
Then he moved. Slow at first, deep and deliberate, the same unhurried thoroughness in this as in everything he sets his hands to, until slow was not enough for either of us.
I wrapped my legs around him and took him deeper, and felt the last of his control burn off, his rhythm turning hard and certain and exactly right.
I stopped being afraid of being seen. He had already seen all of it, every hidden, unphotographed inch of me, and he was still here, braced over me in the orange dark, saying my name like the one prayer a faithless man keeps anyway.
I came apart with my hands fisted in his hair and his name breaking open in my mouth, and he followed me over a breath later with a low rough sound I felt in my own ribs, shaking himself now, wrecked by tenderness more than by want.
That was what broke me open. Not the heat.
The tenderness. A man that strong, that careful, that long alone, coming undone not because of how it felt but because of how much it meant.
The cot did not survive with dignity. Nothing survived with dignity.
At one point a leg of it folded with a crack and dropped us four inches onto the floor and we froze, and then I started laughing, helpless, my face in his neck, and he was laughing too, the second time in one night, a personal record, and he gathered me up off the broken cot and onto the dry blanket and the drop cloths by the stove and kept going like the floor had been the plan all along.
After, the storm had quieted to a steady tick of snow against the black glass, and we were tangled together under the one dry blanket with the stove throwing its low orange heat and Dozer reinstated and snoring in the doorway, forgiven all around.
Marcus was on his back and I was half on his chest with my ear over his heart, and I lay there and listened to it slow down, this huge, careful man holding me like I might be taken from him in the night, and I felt the bottom go out of every last plan I had carried up that mountain.
This was supposed to be content. That was the deal I'd made with myself on the drive up, radio off, eyes forward.
A renovation. A comeback. A redemption arc with good lighting and a happy little before-and-after for an audience that would love me again as long as I kept winning.
A chapter. Something I would do and film and survive and move on from, stronger, untouchable, the woman who rebuilt herself in public so nobody could ever do to her again what had already been done.
It was none of those things now. I could feel it.
It had stopped being a chapter somewhere in the last hour, or maybe weeks ago and I'd only just let myself notice, and turned into the actual thing.
My life. Not the broadcast of a life. The one underneath, the one I'd stopped believing I was allowed to have, the one with no camera on it and no comeback narrative and no exit I'd already scouted.
"You've gone quiet," he murmured into my hair, half asleep, like quiet from me was a thing worth remarking on. It was. We both knew it was.
"I'm thinking."
"Dangerous."
"Extremely." I pressed my mouth to the slow beat under my cheek. "Go to sleep, Marcus."
"What are you thinking?"
I almost gave him the bright answer. I had three of them loaded, easy and funny and safe, and I felt them line up out of pure old habit. Then I let them go, because the whole point of the night had been that I was done hiding behind the easy answer.
"That I'm in trouble," I said. "The good kind. The kind you don't get out of."
His arm tightened around me. He didn't say anything to that, but he didn't have to. I had learned to read his quiet by now, and this quiet said the same thing back, and meant it down to the joists.
We lay a while in the kind of quiet I used to run from, the sort that arrives when there is nothing left to perform and no one is leaving in the morning.
For two years I had filled every silence I met before it could fill me.
This one I let be. It was the most at home I had felt in my own skin since before Denver, since before the camera, maybe since I was small enough not to have learned yet that being adored and being safe are two different things, and that you rarely get to keep both at once.
I lay awake long after his breathing went deep and even.
I watched the dark soften at the windows, gray, then the faintest gray-pink, and then it came, dawn breaking pink and clean over three feet of new snow, the kind of light that turns a wrecked half-built room into something out of a painting.
It crept across the drop cloths and the cold tools and the broken cot leaning in the corner like the scene of a happy crime.
It found the sawdust in his hair and the line of his jaw gone soft in sleep.
It lit the whole hushed world we'd been snowed into together.
I was wrapped in a sleeping man's arms in a house we had saved from the storm with our own four hands, warm under one blanket while the mountain lay buried and silent outside, and I was terrified. Not of him. Not of the snow, or the broken cot, or the winter coming, or the work still left to do.
I was terrified by exactly one thing. How completely, perfectly right it felt to be exactly here.