Chapter 18
The travel crib went up in the office, between the desk and the window, in the exact spot where Nora kept the basket of client folders she was going to sort out in the spring.
She moved the basket and put it in the hall.
She stood in her office at six in the evening and looked at a crib where a filing project was supposed to be.
She didn’t feel about it the way she had spent her life expecting to feel about things arriving unannounced in her space.
Charlie went down at seven-fifteen, because Charlie went down at seven-fifteen, and Nora had known that for weeks without deciding to know it.
She prepped the bottles on her counter the way she’d watched Rognar prep them—the scoop, the level line, the water first, then the powder, the irritating little shake.
She lined them in the drainer. Two for the night, in case.
Her kitchen, which she had spent four years arranging into precisely the kitchen she wanted, smelled faintly of formula and cow-udder balm and the warm-milk sweetness that clung to everything the baby touched.
She stood at her sink and breathed it in like it belonged there.
She heard the four a.m. wakeup on the monitor—the wind-up snuffle, the trial cry, the decision—and she was up and across the hall before she’d finished being asleep, which she had not known her body could do.
Charlie was furious in the dark and hungry and warm.
Nora scooped her out of the crib with a competence that surprised her a little, carried her to the kitchen, and warmed the bottle.
She sat in the good chair by the window with a green-skinned baby heavy and slackening against her chest.
She started to sing. She didn’t decide to.
It just came out, low and tuneless, some half-song she couldn’t have named, and it was bad, genuinely bad, off-key in a way she’d have been mortified for anyone to overhear.
She caught herself and stopped, looking around the dark kitchen for a person who might have heard. There was no one to hear her.
So she kept going. And then—a beat later, the honest beat, the one she’d have edited out of any account she gave of the night—she kept going because she wanted to.
Charlie’s eyes went to slits, then shut. The bottle emptied. The little green fist that had been gripping Nora’s collar loosened, then opened over her heart. Nora sang the bad song to the end, in her quiet full house, at four in the morning.
It was exhausting.
It was disruptive—the crib in the office, the basket in the hall, her whole schedule shot, the sleep in pieces.
She loved it.
She got two of the client calls done the next day around the naps. She rescheduled the third and told the client something about a technical issue. It was true, in the sense that the technical issue was seven months old and chewing a giraffe’s ear off in the next room.
Rognar’s plane was the late one. She knew because it was on his fridge in her handwriting. She knew what time it came. And at some point in the last hour, she’d begun listening for his truck.
She heard it at eleven-forty.
She was still up. She told herself she was still up because of the four a.m. the night before and the general chaos of the schedule.
In anyone else’s ledger she’d have caught that lie in a heartbeat.
She heard the engine cut. She heard a door.
She didn’t hear him go into the house eight feet from hers.
His house, dark and empty and waiting, the sensible place for a male to go at eleven-forty after three days on the road. Instead she heard boots on her path.
He didn’t go home first.
She had the door open before he knocked. He stopped in the doorway, his bag still on his shoulder, road-creased and tired and enormous, filling the frame of her small tidy hall. He looked at her, and whatever he’d come to say vanished.
She was already moving.
The bag hit the floor, but she didn’t hear it.
She was up on her toes with both hands fisted in the front of his shirt.
His arms came around her hard enough to lift her clean off the mat.
Neither of them said I missed you. It was in the bag on the floor.
It was in the eight feet of grass he hadn’t walked to his dark house.
It was in the way his face went into her hair and stayed there.
“I had a whole speech about the travel crib,” he said, muffled, into the side of her neck.
“Later.”
“Later,” he agreed, and got the door shut behind them with his heel.
It was different, and both of them knew it was different, and the difference was what she’d remember.
The last time he’d laughed, and she’d been shocked by the strangeness of a male laughing in her bed.
It had been light in a way she hadn’t known could coexist with heat, a joyfulness that surprised her.
There was no laughter now.
There was only him, solid and warm and heavy against her, his hands at the buttons of her shirt, his mouth on her throat, and the single-minded urgency of a male who knew precisely what he wanted and wasn't waiting for it.
She pushed his jacket off, her hands clumsy, and he kicked it away impatiently, and when she got the shirt off over his head he took hers with it, and the last of the lightness was gone.
They made it to the bed. Barely. She was on her back on the mattress, and he was standing over her, stripping off his belt, and his eyes were hot enough to burn through her remaining clothing.
His chest was broad and green and moving faster than she'd ever seen it, his breath uneven.
He ran a hand from her hip to her knee and dragged her jeans down, and she lifted to help him, and they were both half-dressed and frantic.
"Rognar." She was wet already, just from looking at him, just from his hands on her. "I don't want to wait."
He groaned. He stripped off her underwear with the same urgency, and she heard his belt come free, and then he was on top of her with nothing between them, and she reached for him.
He was huge and hard and too hot to be real, and she wanted him so badly she couldn't wait to take her time. She arched up against the head of his cock, and he made that low sound she liked, and his hand went to her jaw to tilt her face up to his, and he watched her as he pushed in.
"Look at me," he said. "I want to see you."
He went slow, which she'd have thought impossible in the state they were in, but she was grateful for it, because he was big, and she had to adjust to him a little at a time.
She bit her lip, and his thumb moved there, and he eased her lip out from between her teeth and held it there while he seated himself, deeper and deeper, his eyes never leaving her face.
She felt him fill her, all the way in, her legs around his hips, and he stopped for a second with his face close to hers, and said, "Nora," in a voice she'd never heard before. Rough. Throaty. And then he started to move.
She didn't last. She hadn't expected to.
She was already on the edge from the look in his eyes, from feeling him above her, the size of him, the weight of him, and the way he was looking at her.
She came fast and hard with his hand on her face, her nails in his back, and he held still through it and watched her every second.
She was still shaking when he leaned down and kissed her, a deep, tender kiss that was nothing like the rest of it, and when she opened her eyes he was smiling at her.
"I missed you too," he said.
He stayed on top of her, his weight balanced on one elbow, and kissed her while she caught her breath.
Then he started to move again, and she knew he'd been waiting for her, holding back, and she kissed him deeper and wrapped her legs tighter around him and let him take her the way he clearly needed to.
He was still careful, even now, moving with a control that must have cost him, because she could feel how much he wanted to lose it. She reached between them and found him with her hand, and he groaned into her mouth and pushed into her grip, and that was what broke him.
She felt it when it happened, the precise second he let go and gave her everything he'd been holding back.
He buried himself in her with a long, raw sound, and she felt him everywhere, his hand clutching her hip, his mouth on her throat, the way his body fit hers like he'd been made for it.
She held onto him, her hands in his hair, and let him drive them both to the end, and when he came it was with her name again, and his whole body shuddering against hers.
“I missed you,” she whispered. “More than I expected.” And she felt him smile against her skin.
Then he turned onto his back and pulled her against his side, and lay there in the dark with his eyes open, breathing.
After a while his hand came to rest over her heart, and stayed.
She didn’t move. His thumb did that small and slow movement, one beat and then another, and she understood, with a sudden absurd rush of feeling, that he was checking.
Making sure she was still there. He did it in his sleep now.
The monitor breathed. Charlie shifted, settled, went quiet. Rognar’s breathing slowed and lengthened and finally caught into the deep, even rhythm of a male who was home after two hundred miles and three days, his hand still warm and open over her heart.
She lay awake in the darkness.
Her house was full. She lay there in the dark with the facts laid out in front of her like a set of books she couldn’t force to balance.
Her office had a crib in it. Her counter had bottles on it.
Her hall had a basket of client folders shoved against the wall that had no business being there.
Her bed had a sleeping orc in it whose hand rose and fell on her chest with her breath.
Her nightstand had a monitor on it carrying the small snuffling snores of a child who wasn’t hers, in the technical sense, and was becoming hers in every other sense.
She had spent four years and a considerable amount of money arranging her life to be quiet and safe.
She had chosen the house for the quiet. She had built the business so she’d never have to depend on anyone’s schedule but her own.
She had made, brick by brick, invoice by invoice, the exact opposite of the places she’d grown up in.
The ones with the disconnected power and the different addresses and the mother who loved her and could not, for one single billing cycle, be relied upon.
She’d called it a success. She had genuinely believed it was one. She had the words for it—solvent, stable, independent, secure—and she’d used the words on herself for years, the way she’d read a good statement to a nervous client. See? Everything’s accounted for. Nothing’s outstanding. I’m fine.
She lay in her full loud house at two in the morning with an orc’s hand over her heart and a baby breathing through a plastic speaker, and she reached for the words.
They weren’t there.
Not gone, exactly. Just—insufficient. The words were all still true, every one of them, and every one of them had stopped being enough to describe what she was feeling.
Independent didn’t have a word in it for the eight feet of grass he hadn’t walked.
Secure did not know what to do with a hand that counted her heartbeats in the dark.
Success had been the name she gave the quiet, and the quiet was gone, and she could not make herself want it back.
She didn’t decide anything. She was too tired to decide anything, and anyway she had, for once, no desire to make one. She simply lay there, in the full dark and the loud quiet, listening to the two of them breathe.
And she found she could no longer describe her life, in any terms she’d ever trusted, as a success.