CHAPTER 13 #2
"Don't what. " But he's heard it. He hears everything. He's gone still again and his eyes have dropped to my mouth and the whole temperature of the room has changed.
Dr. Reyes ties off the last stitch in his forearm, snaps her gloves into the bin, and is a professional.
"He's not concussed, no broken bones, the arm and the brow are closed, keep them dry forty-eight hours, the knuckles I've taped.
" She gathers her kit. At the door she pauses, doesn't turn around.
"I was never here past two. Goodnight, Mrs. Sokolov.
" And then it's just us and the antiseptic and the held breath of the empty house and the surgical scissors gleaming on the tray.
"Upstairs," I say. "Not here. This room smells like blood."
He slides off the table. He's careful with the arm and reckless with everything else, and he follows me up the back stair with his hand not quite touching the small of my back, close enough that I can feel the heat of him through the robe, far enough that it's my move, always my move, because that is the rule they made for me without ever saying it and it is the most seductive thing about all three of them — that the door is always mine to open.
My suite. My territory. The dress forms standing in the dressing-room dark like quiet witnesses, the half-built shape of the gown I'm making myself draped over the nearest one.
He shuts the door. The latch clicks. He leans his back against it — wide grin trying to climb up his face, the cover, the joke that's coming to save us both from the size of the thing in the room — and I cross the floor and put my hand flat on his chest over the racing heart of him and feel it going like a fist on a door.
"Don't make a joke," I tell him. "Leave this one bare. I don't want the cover tonight."
The breath goes out of him.
"Color, malyshka?" he says instead, and his voice has gone rough and quiet and dead serious under it, the playboy stripped out, just the man asking.
He catches my wrist where it lies on his chest, gentle, gives me the out he always gives, the out that wrecks me every time because no one before these men ever offered me one.
"I'm wired to the teeth and I'm not gentle when I'm like this.
You tell me green or you tell me go to my own bed and I'll go and I'll hate it and I'll go. Where are we."
"Green. " It's out of me before I can dress it up. "God. Green. And I'm furious with you, and that's part of it, so don't you dare go soft on me to make up for the face."
His grin then is nothing like the grin downstairs. This one's all teeth and relief and want.
"There she is," he breathes, and then his mouth is on mine.
It lands more like a collision than a kiss, the whole weight of everything he's been holding off since the gravel.
He tastes of copper and adrenaline and the clean burn of the vodka somebody must've poured into him in the car, and he kisses like he fights — fast, filthy, no patience in him at all — one bandaged hand fisting into my hair to tip my head exactly where he wants it, the other dragging the robe off my shoulder.
The robe goes. I let it. I'm in the thin slip I sleep in and then his hands are everywhere at once, greedy, reverent, mapping me like he's afraid the lights'll come up and prove I was never real.
"Look at you," he says against my throat, low and ruined, walking me backward until my spine hits the wall beside the workroom door.
"Look at all of you. You know how I think about this?
On a job? I shouldn't, it'll get me killed, I do it anyway.
" His mouth drops to the slope of my breast where the slip's gone crooked, and he palms the full heavy weight of the other one like it's the only thing his torn-up hand was ever built to hold.
"These. The give of you. I get a man's hands around my throat and I'm thinking about how soft your hips are when I grab them and whether I'll live to do it again."
"That's morbid," I gasp, and arch into his mouth anyway.
"That's love, trouble, you'll have to forgive my delivery.
" He wraps it in the shape of a joke, and the truth sits there underneath it anyway, and we both let it stand.
He shoves the slip up over my hips, both hands closing on the width of them, thumbs digging into the soft of me, and he groans like he's the one being taken care of.
"Spread for me. There. Fuck. Look at these thighs.
I could write a man's whole confession on the inside of these thighs. "
His fingers find me wet and he says something in gutter Russian I don't need translated, and then he's at my clit, fast and exactly right, no warm-up, no mercy, because he knows by now that tonight I don't want to be coaxed, I want to be answered.
The fury and the want are the same heat, he was right, and he wrings it out of me with two clever fingers buried in me and his thumb working tight circles and his filthy mouth at my ear.
"That's it, malyshka, soak my hand, give it to me, you're so angry and you're dripping for me, I love it, I love you—" the word slides out under the filth, the way the truest things always do with him, hidden in the noise so it can't be held against him, and I let him have the cover for the third time tonight because some confessions have to be allowed in through the side door or they'll never come at all.
I come hard against the wall with his name breaking apart in my mouth, the dress forms watching, the gown a pale ghost at the edge of my sight.
He doesn't slow down. He waits exactly long enough for me to come down an inch, and then he's hauling my thigh up over his hip, freeing himself one-handed, and pausing — even now, even wired, even shaking — to find my eyes.
"Still green?"
"Still green. Now, Gael."
He drives into me on the wall and we both make a sound that isn't civilized.
It's rough, exactly like he promised, and I give it back — my nails in his shoulders, careful of the closed arm and careless of everything else, my teeth at the cord of his neck, marking him because I want to, because for once in my life I want to leave a mark on something instead of being the one marked and abandoned.
He sets his teeth to the soft slope where my neck runs down into my shoulder and bites, with no gentleness in it at all, and I feel it go all the way down, the small bright pain folding into the heat of him fucking up into me, the wall hard at my back and his hands sure on the give of my ass holding me exactly where he needs me.
"You feel that?" he pants. "You feel how I'm not careful? Nobody lets me not be careful. You let me be exactly what I am and you don't flinch—" His forehead drops to mine. His rhythm stutters. "You don't flinch, Amara—"
And there it is, the switch I've been waiting for — mid-rough, mid-filth, the blade turning back into a man right there inside me — his hips slow, the next thrust goes deep and aching instead of fast, his bandaged hand comes up to cradle my jaw like I might break, like he might, and his green eyes are suddenly wet and furious about it.
I catch it and I hold it, and I keep him here in the open where the grin can't reach him.
"I see you," I tell him, because I do, because the tenderness is the one loaded thing in this room neither of us has a safe word for, and we both know it. "I've got you. Stay here with me. Don't go back in the drawer."
He makes a sound like something tearing and buries his face in the crook of my neck and rolls into me slow and deep and shaking, all the speed gone out of it, just the long ache of it now, his hand spread wide and worshipful over my soft belly like he's holding something sacred, and I come again on the slow of it, quieter, with my fingers in his bloody auburn hair and his heart going wild against the falcon and against me.
He follows me over the edge with my name and that word again, the buried one, love, love, I love you, malyshka, no joke under it this time at all, and lets me feel every second of it.
After, the only sound is the tide working at the black water below the windows, and we are a tangle of slip and bandages on top of my too-grand bed.
I've gone over him with a wet cloth — the brow, the arm, the knuckles I re-tape from the kit Nadia left, because of course I'd patch him again, I'd patch him a hundred times.
His shirt's off now and his chest is bare under my eyes, rising and falling, the inked wings riding the heart of a man who still can't believe he's been kept.
He won't look at me directly. The bravado's all spent.
What's left is a thirty-year-old enforcer who caught a knife for his brother at nineteen and called it Tuesday, lying in a girl's soft bed letting himself be tended, and finding it harder to bear than the knife.
"You missed a spot," he mumbles, eyes already closing, voice gone to gravel. "Inside. Don't think that one's stitchable, doc."
"Hush. " I draw the surgical scissors closed on the nightstand — snick — having trimmed the last tape, the bright small sound of my real life put, tonight, entirely to the service of his ruined body, and I set them down and pull the blanket over the both of us.
Blood and gun oil and rosewater and chalk.
My two worlds, lying down together at last in the one bed.
"Nobody patches the knife," he says, almost asleep, the old line, the wound said one last time in the dark like a man checking whether the floor's still there.
I find the last suture in his eyebrow with my fingertip, the neat row I set into him with my own hand, the row that will hold and heal in a week or ten days and leave a thin pale line beside the old one — and I tie off the thought of him the way I tie off a hem, with a knot that doesn't slip.
"I'm not nobody, Gael. " I pull him in against the soft of me, where he wants to be, where he's afraid to want to be. "And you're not a knife. Sleep."
He does.
It scares us both.