PART TWO HOLT #2
Neither of us is in any hurry to stop touching.
Her hand wanders the length of my chest, over the scroll, down the ridge of every rib to the flat of my stomach, no destination in it at all.
Mine goes the other direction, up the outside of her thigh, over her hip, into the dip of her waist, learning her again in daylight.
She's warm and relaxed and most of the way to asleep, and neither hand stops, and somewhere in the middle of it I go hard against her hip.
She feels it and laughs low and wicked against my collarbone.
"Already?"
"Blame the mountain air."
She doesn't answer that. She wraps a hand around me first, slow, deliberate, and I groan and let my head fall back against the blanket. Then her mouth follows, and I lose the last coherent thought I own somewhere around the second pass of her tongue.
"Mac." My hand finds her hair, fists in it, not pulling her off, just holding on. "Stop. Stop, I'm going to lose it before I've had you again."
She lifts her head, lips swollen, entirely pleased with herself, and climbs my body instead, in no hurry, her mouth trailing up my abs, over one nipple and then the other, teeth grazing just enough to make me hiss, up the line of my throat until her lips are at my ear.
"I want you to bury your cock deep inside me." Her voice has gone deep and filthy, exactly the register I've been chasing out of her since a line shack in February. "Want to feel you come apart while I'm still riding you."
That's all it takes. I get both hands on her hips and drive up into her in one long thrust. She cries out and takes over from there, setting the pace herself, hips rolling hard and shameless, her tits right there in front of my mouth, nipples puckered tight in the mountain air.
I catch one between my lips and suck, and she rides me harder for it, chasing everything at once.
We explode together, her scream ripping into the clearing loud enough that something in the trees breaks and takes flight. I follow her two heartbeats later, buried to the hilt, her name the last thing left in me.
We lie tangled after, skin drying in a sun that's finally started sliding west.
"Two," she says, quiet, pleased with herself. "My fantasy was giving you two."
"Fantasy achieved, then." I press a kiss to her temple. "Maybe three next time?"
"You're insufferable."
"You love it."
"I love you." She says it easy this time, no catch in it at all.
She traces slow shapes over the scroll on my chest, down to the small line of numbers under it she's never once asked me to explain.
"You go quiet every time I get this far," she says, soft, her finger resting on the ink. "Every time. Like you're waiting for me to ask."
"Wasn't sure you wanted to know."
"I've wanted to know since a line shack in a snowstorm, Holt. I just decided it wasn't mine to take if you weren't ready to hand it over."
I look down at her, hair drying gold across my chest, and understand there isn't a version of today where I keep anything else from this woman.
"Every Ranger's got a scroll. Most of them stop there.
" My finger covers hers over the numbers, guiding it along each one.
"These are coordinates. Every man in the regiment assumes it's a base.
A drop zone. Something that means home in the only language the job ever gave us.
" I press her palm flat against my chest, over the ink, over the numbers, over the whole of it. "It's not a base."
"Then what is it?"
"Right here." My eyes go to the falls, the wildflowers, the water still running loud and clean behind her.
"This exact ground. Got it inked the week I came home between tours, before I went back to the Middle East a second time.
Didn't know, each time I left, if I'd ever see this place again.
Needed one coordinate on my own body that belonged to me and nobody else.
Someplace the Army never touched and my father never owned. "
Her breath catches, and I watch her face, watch her understand exactly what she's sitting in the middle of.
"Holt."
"Been carrying you here since before I ever met you," I tell her softly, my thumb tracing the last digit. "Didn't know it yet. But I built this body around a place, and then I spent twelve years waiting to find the one person worth finally bringing to it."
We eat the last of the bread as the sky goes copper, then purple, then finally full dark, more stars than either of us has ever counted, the meadow gone quiet except for the falls and two horses cropping grass at the tree line.
"There," she says, pointing, and I catch it a split second after she does. A streak tearing clean across the entire black bowl of the sky, bright enough to leave a trail behind it before it burns out somewhere over the Front.
"Make a wish," she says, breathless, still staring up at where it disappeared.
"Already have one." I pull her back against my chest, both of us wrapped in the blanket now, her hair still smelling like creek water and woodsmoke. "Confirmed it about an hour ago."
She twists around to look at me, and whatever she sees in my face has her smiling in a way I intend to spend the rest of my life earning.
"Confirmed," she repeats, soft, and settles back against me to watch the sky finish falling.
Somewhere down the mountain, past the timber and the fence line and the ranch waiting for us both, the young, careful signature on the Calgary paperwork is still sitting in the bottom drawer of my desk, unexplained, unshown, patient as everything else this family has ever buried.
I don't think about it tonight.
Tonight there's only her heartbeat under my palm, and a sky that just handed us both exactly what we asked for.
The End