Chapter 4 The Weight of Being Seen
The footsteps stopped.
One floor below. A key scraped into a lock. A door opened, then clicked shut. Muffled voices—Mrs. Calloway’s television, turned up too loud as always. The third-floor landing stayed dark. Stayed silent.
Marlene let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
“Neighbor,” she whispered. “Second floor. She always comes home late on Thursdays.”
Gideon’s hand was still fisted in her hair, his body coiled beneath her like a spring wound too tight. She felt the tension bleed out of him by degrees—first his shoulders, then his jaw, then the grip on her scalp softening into something closer to a caress.
“Thursday,” he repeated. “What’s today?”
“Friday now.” She glanced at the clock on her nightstand. Pale blue digits read 12:47 a.m. “Past midnight.”
“Friday,” he said, and the word came out heavy, weighted with something she couldn’t name. “Three years since I got stateside. Didn’t realize until now.”
Marlene looked down at him. Splayed beneath her, scarred and half-undressed and watching her with those deep brown eyes. Three years home, and he still didn’t track the days. She understood that. Some cages didn’t need bars.
She opened her mouth to say something—she didn’t know what—but Gideon moved first.
His hands found her hips. Gripped. And then the world flipped.
The ceiling was above her. The mattress against her cheek.
She blinked, disoriented, processing the speed of it—the fluid shift of muscle and weight that had put her on her stomach with her face pressed into rumpled sheets.
Gideon’s body covered hers from behind, his chest against her spine, his breath hot against the shell of her ear.
“My turn,” he said, throwing her own words back at her. His voice was low and rough and vibrated through her vertebrae.
A laugh caught in her throat. “That was—”
“Efficient?” His lips brushed the curve of her ear. “I’ve had training.”
“In flipping women onto beds?”
“In taking control of a situation.” His teeth grazed her earlobe, just barely, and her laugh dissolved into a sharp inhale. “Is this okay?”
She pressed her hips back against him. Felt him hard through his unbuttoned jeans. Heard his breath stutter.
“Does that answer your question?”
His forehead dropped to the back of her neck. A sound rumbled out of him—half groan, half something that might have been her name. Then his weight shifted, and his mouth found the knob at the top of her spine.
He kissed it.
Once. Soft.
Then lower.
Another kiss, this one at the space between her shoulder blades. Then lower still—the dip of her lower back, his lips tracing the path of her vertebrae like he was reading braille. His stubble scraped, and the sensation sent goosebumps cascading down her arms.
“Gideon.”
“Shh.” His breath puffed against her skin. “You explored. Now it’s my turn.”
His hands found the waistband of her jeans.
She hadn’t thought about her jeans until now.
Hadn’t thought about how long she’d been wearing them—the twelve-hour shift, the walk from the diner, the hour on the bed with nothing but denim separating her from him.
They were worn soft at the thighs and frayed at the hems, and when Gideon’s fingers hooked into the belt loops, she lifted her hips without being asked.
He didn’t pull them off.
Instead, his thumbs pressed into the small of her back.
Deep circles, working the muscle there. She let out a sound that was closer to a sob than a moan—years of standing on linoleum floors, years of bending over inventory spreadsheets, years of tension she’d stopped noticing until someone’s hands were undoing it.
“You’re tight here,” he said.
“Waitressing will do that.”
“This isn’t just waitressing.” His thumbs dug deeper, and the pressure bordered on pain before it bloomed into something else entirely. Something that made her toes curl. “This is years.”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Her eyes had fallen shut, and her cheek was pressed into the sheets, and for a moment the only thing in the world was the slow, deliberate work of his hands on her back.
He found knots she hadn’t known were there.
Worked them loose with a patience that seemed impossible given how urgently he’d flipped her over seconds ago.
Then his hands moved lower.
Palms dragging down her sides. Thumbs tracing the curve of her hips. Fingertips slipping just beneath the waistband of her jeans and then retreating.
She made a noise of protest.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh—low and dark and pleased with himself.
“Patience.”
“Says the man who just threw me onto the bed.”
“You threw me first.”
“I pushed you. There’s a difference.”
His mouth replaced his hands. A kiss pressed to the dimple at the base of her spine, right above where her jeans began. His tongue darted out—just a flick, just a taste—and her back arched off the mattress.
“There it is,” he murmured.
“There’s what?”
“What you’ve been holding back.”
She twisted her head to look at him over her shoulder. He was braced above her on his elbows, his face inches from her lower back, his eyes lifted to meet hers. The streetlamp caught the scar on his collarbone and lit it silver.
“I’m not holding anything back,” she said.
“Yes, you are.” He kissed the spot again. Softer this time. His lips lingered. “You’ve been the one in control since the diner. Opening doors. Leading me upstairs. Pushing me onto this bed. And now you’re face-down, and you can’t see me, and you’re tensing up.”
She opened her mouth to deny it.
Closed it.
He wasn’t wrong.
“I’m not used to this,” she admitted. The words came out smaller than she intended. “Not used to someone else taking over.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No.” Her answer was immediate. “No, I want—” She stopped. Swallowed. Made herself say it. “I want you to keep going.”
His lips curved against her skin. She felt the shape of his smile pressed into the small of her back.
“Good.”
His hands found the button of her jeans. The one she’d fastened after the diner, after the near-interruption by the car. He worked it free with one hand, and then his fingers were pulling down the zipper—slowly, tooth by tooth, the sound loud in the quiet room.
She felt cool air against skin that had been trapped in denim for far too long.
His knuckles brushed the lace edge of her underwear. Plain cotton again. Black. She couldn’t remember if they matched the bra that was somewhere on the floor, and she couldn’t bring herself to care.
“Lift your hips,” he said.
She did.
He peeled the jeans down. Inch by inch. His mouth followed the path of the denim—kissing the newly exposed skin of her hip, the curve of her thigh, the sensitive place behind her knee. Her breath came faster now, shallower, and her fingers twisted in the sheets.
The jeans slid past her ankles. Dropped to the floor with a soft thump.
Gideon’s hands wrapped around her calves. His thumbs pressed into the muscle there, and she realized with distant surprise that her legs were sore too. Everything was sore. Everything had been sore for years, and she’d stopped feeling it until just now.
“You’ve been on your feet all day,” he said.
“Twelve hours.”
“When’s the last time someone took care of you?”
The question landed harder than she expected. Her throat tightened. She buried her face in the pillow and didn’t answer.
She didn’t have an answer.
His hands slid up her calves. Past her knees. Along the backs of her thighs. He kissed the crease where her leg met her hip, and she felt the wet heat of his mouth through the cotton of her underwear. Her hips bucked involuntarily.
“Easy,” he murmured.
“Gideon.” His name was a plea now, all pretense of control stripped away. “Please.”
“Please what?”
“I don’t know.” A broken laugh escaped her. “Please everything.”
He rose up over her. She felt the shift of the mattress, the heat of his bare chest as it pressed against her back once more. His mouth found the curve of her shoulder. His hips settled against her backside, and she could feel him—all of him—through the thin fabric that separated them.
His lips brushed her ear.
“I’ve got you,” he said.
Three words. Simple. Unadorned.
She believed him.
Outside, the streetlamp flickered once and steadied. The television on the second floor went silent. Somewhere in the distance, a truck downshifted on the highway, heading west toward California, toward places neither of them had been.
Marlene didn’t hear any of it.
She heard only Gideon’s breathing, ragged and close. Felt only his weight, solid and warm and real. And beneath her, the mattress that had held only her for three years now held them both, and the unmade sheets smelled like cedar and salt and something that might have been hope.
His hand slid up her arm. Found her fingers where they still twisted in the sheets. Wove his between them.
“Still okay?” he asked.
She squeezed his hand.
“Better than okay.”
His lips pressed to the nape of her neck. And stayed there.