Mackenzie #3
I press my lips together and lose the fight to look stern about it. It's exactly what I need right now, though I'd never admit that to him sober.
"Holt."
"My bed. The mountain in the window behind you.
" His eyes are barely open and he doesn't seem to care.
"You had on something dark purple, lace, the kind of thing that makes a man feel like he's been handed the best gift ever.
" He says it slow, a man walking through a memory he's decided is real.
"God, you were so gorgeous. I took my time getting you out of it.
Your mouth first. Then that pretty pussy, until you were shaking and begging me not to stop. "
"Holt—"
"Then I flipped you over and took your ass, slow, so slow, until you couldn't tell anymore whether you were crying or coming."
"Holt." My face is on fire and I don't care, because there's nobody here to see it but him, and he isn't going to remember he made me blush.
"Best night of my whole life." He says it like he's reporting a fact instead of confessing one, his good hand finding mine on the blanket, thumb dragging slow across my knuckles. "Feels like something we should do again. Right now, if you're asking."
"Jesus." Half laugh, half something lower, and I don't pull my hand back, because after the last hour there isn't a version of tonight where I want to. "You cannot say things like that to a woman while you're hooked up to a drip."
"Why not? It's true."
"Because you won't remember saying it, and I'm going to remember it forever, and that's an unfair trade."
I lean in anyway, close enough to smell the antiseptic and, underneath it, that ridiculous cologne I've never once told him I love. His eyes go heavy and warm, tracking my face like it's the only fixed point in a room that's tilting for both of us tonight, just not from the same cause.
"I'll remember." His words slur at the edges. "I remember everything about you. Every version. The one riding through the timber, giving that mare her head like you'd been born in the saddle. The one in the church pew with your hair pinned up and your throat bare."
"That's not fair either."
"I'm on drugs." His head lolls sideways against the pillow, and a laugh comes out of him that isn't his, high and crazed, nothing like the sound he makes sober. "Nothing about me is fair right now."
I laugh too, wrecked and quiet, glancing at the door out of nine years of habit, because I know the nurse will be coming soon.
"Kiss me." Not a question. Long black lashes frame the softest dark brown eyes, earnest and yearning, nothing guarded left in them at all.
I go still for exactly one second. Then I lean down and give him my mouth, careful of the tape running along his neck from the monitor leads.
He gets his tongue into me before I'm braced for it, slow at first, then not slow at all.
I let myself have it, the whole four seconds of it, before I ease back.
"I've got a hard-on right now that could double as a tent pole," he tells me against my mouth, entirely without shame, "and whatever they gave me for painkillers didn't touch that part of me at all."
"Holt."
"I mean it. Come check for yourself." His good hand fumbles for the edge of the blanket, and I catch his wrist before he gets anywhere with it.
"You have a hand held together with more hardware than my truck.
" But I'm laughing again, forehead dropped to his, my own hand tightening in the sheet by his hip, fighting the exact same pull he is, for entirely different reasons than the one he thinks.
"This is not the moment, you absolute menace. "
"When is?"
"When your father hasn't just spent the last hour handing both of us more truth than either of us can carry, and you're not narrating an erection to hospital staff."
"Mm." He doesn't fully track that, eyes already sliding shut again. There's nothing to be gained from making him hold something this heavy while he's this loose. "Nobody's here but you."
"For now." I kiss him once more, quick, stealing it before the till closes, and pull back far enough to see his whole face instead of the blur of it.
His mouth is soft, almost tender, against the rough dark stubble along his jaw, the kind of contradiction I want to keep somewhere private and never explain to anyone.
"Come here," he mumbles, already losing the fight to stay awake. "Not done with you yet."
"You're barely conscious, Blackwater."
"Never stopped me before." He tugs at my hand, weak, useless, and I let him have the illusion of it anyway.
"Go back to sleep, Holt. I'll be right here."
He means to argue. He gets about as far as the first word before the drip pulls him back under, and the last thing I have is his hand going slack in mine.
I sit with it a long while after he's quiet. The purple lace that never happened, the church pew memory that's real, tangled together in a man's head so I'm never going to untangle it for him and don't especially want to. Some things a person gets to keep.
Sitting there in the growing light with his pulse steady under my fingers, I decide this is going to be one of mine.
I won't correct him. I won't tell anyone.
It's small, and it's ridiculous, and it's the one soft thing I own outright tonight, in a room that has otherwise held nothing but hard-won truth from every direction at once.
Somewhere out past the reservation line, a man who shot Holt Blackwater in the hand is still deciding what he's willing to do to keep a fifty-year-old wire transfer buried.
My grandfather's killer doesn't have a face.
He never did. What he has is a system, four generations deep, built out of men who told themselves silence wasn't the same as guilt, and I have just watched the head of that system give up the only true thing he had left rather than let his son die inside it.
I'm still sitting with that when my phone lights up on the arm of the chair.
Unfamiliar number. No name attached, no area code I recognize. Three words, and nothing else.
He showed you.
I go very still. Nobody outside this room knows what was on that paper. Nobody outside this room should know it exists at all.
I look at Holt, asleep, his hand slack in mine. Then at the door. Then back at the screen, at three words sitting in the dark like they've been waiting for me to notice them.
Whoever sent that watched us do it.