CHAPTER 27 #2
"They're shears," I say, and my voice cracks too, and the tears that have been waiting come up hot and fast and I let them, because I've stopped pretending in this house that I'm made of buckram. "They're good shears. German. I've had them eleven years."
And he laughs, that broken laugh again, and presses his forehead to mine, and we stand there breathing each other in the dim room with the snow ticking soft against the window, and the want rises up through the fear the way it always rises with us, the danger metabolizing straight into heat, his hands sliding from my face down my throat to my shoulders and gripping, hard, like he has to hold something or fly apart.
He pulls back enough to study me. The fear is still all over his face, but there's something else under it now, something raw and unguarded and frightened of itself, and his green eyes search mine and his thumb comes up and drags across my lower lip, slow.
"I need —" He stops. Swallows. The constant talker, out of words, which from him is a slammed door, the same way Mateo's stillness is a man roaring without a sound.
"Tell me I can. Color, malyshka. Tell me green or tell me go and I'll go, I swear to God I'll go stand in the snow all night, just — tell me. Color?"
"Green," I say, and the word comes up steady and full now, the whole of me behind it, my hands already fisting in his shirt the way they want to, pulling him back down to me. "Green. Gael. Green."
He kisses me like a man who thought he'd never get to again.
Desperate, which is its own thing apart from bruising, his mouth open on mine and a sound coming out of his chest that I feel in my own, and his hands everywhere at once, my coat shoved off my shoulders and dropped, my sweater rucked up, his palms spreading wide and greedy over the soft give of my belly like he's reassuring himself it's warm, it's whole, it's here.
He walks me backward to the bed and we go down into the rumpled sheets that smell of him, gun oil and cedar and something sharp and green, and Gael Sokolov takes my clothes off me like he's unwrapping the one thing he ever wanted and never thought he'd be allowed to keep.
"Look at you," he breathes, kneeling over me, dragging the last of my underwear down over the wide flare of my hips and off, his eyes traveling down my body the way they always travel, hungry and reverent both, and there is no bracing left in me to do, that woman who flinched and waited for the for a big girl is eight weeks and a hundred years gone. I let him look.
I lie back in the lamplight in all my softness and let the blade look at me like I am the altar.
"Every time. Every single time I get to see you I lose my mind a little.
Look at these. " His hands come up and cup me, both of them, full and heavy in his palms, and his thumbs drag across my nipples until I arch up off the bed.
"And this. " His mouth goes to my belly, the round soft swell of it, open and worshipping, and he says it against my skin like scripture, like a man who means every word and needs me to hear it: "Soft.
God, you're so soft, malyshka, you have no idea what you do to me, all this, the give of you, I want to live here, I want to die here, I want —"
"Gael —"
"Say it. " He comes up over me, his auburn hair wild, the falcon inked over his heart right there above me where I can put my palm on it, and I do, I press my hand flat to the bird over his heartbeat and feel it slamming, feel how scared he still is under all of this.
His face changes. The want goes somewhere deeper and worse and more honest. "Say you picked me first."
There it is. The wound. The one I touched a month ago on a record-needle's run-out groove and wasn't allowed to finish dressing, the one Inés named for me from her safe-flat bed without ever meeting him — that boy holds himself like a receipt, like the thing you keep to prove the real thing happened.
I hold my palm flat to that slamming heartbeat and I look up at this man, the one Cape Brevik fears most, shaking over me, terrified, asking.
"I picked you first," I say.
He makes a sound and drops his forehead to mine and his whole body shudders, and then he's kissing down my throat, my collarbone, the cold steel thimble bouncing against his cheek, his hand sliding between my thighs and finding me already slick and ready for him, and I hear the slick sound of his fingers and so does he and he groans against my skin.
"That's it. That's it, malyshka, so wet for me, you came at a man with scissors and you're soaking my hand, you are the single best thing that has ever happened to me, do you know that — color, still green?"
"Green, just — Gael, please —"
He pushes two fingers into me, slow, watching my face come apart, his thumb finding my clit and circling, and the talk pours out of him the way it always pours, filthy and tender braided into one rope: "Good girl, take my fingers, that's it, feel how you clench, you want me, you want all of me, say it again, say you picked me, I need to hear it while you come on my hand —" and I am already going, the fear and the snow and the shears and the love all crashing through me at once, my hips lifting into his hand, the give of my own thick thighs falling open wider for him, and I say it, broken, I picked you, I picked you, Gael, and I come apart on his fingers with my other hand fisted in the sheets and the snow ticking far off against the dark glass.
He's past waiting now, too far gone to hold himself back another second.
He pushes his jeans down and settles the wide solid weight of himself between my spread thighs, the head of his cock dragging through my slick, and he stops there, shaking, holding himself out of me by what is plainly the last thread of his control, and his eyes are wet, I realize. Wet and green and wrecked.
"Tell me to stop and I stop," he says, my own old line turned back on me, the thing he gives every time so I always have the out, and his voice is nothing now, just a man in a dim room asking to be let in. "Even now. Even like this. Tell me to stop, malyshka, and I —"
"Don't you dare stop," I say, and pull him into me by the inked bird over his heart.