Chapter 18
Owen
She left me on the table with new thread in my side and the Ford fire sitting in the room.
I sat there until the blood on the shirt went stiff. I got off the table careful and lay on the bench on the good side and stared at the lamp. The stitches pulled when I breathed. My cock was still wet from her mouth. The rite was still the rite. She had come on the truth and said so.
Melanie knocked once and did not come in. “Huntington wants you off the cut. I told him you were off it. Don’t tear that open walking to her hall.”
“I’m not walking to her hall.”
“Good.” Her voice flattened. “Joss knows you talked. He can smell it. He wants the rest said where Landers can hear it.”
“Not tonight.”
She left.
Hours went. The bond tugged uphill and stayed there. Reilly in a clean shirt. A letter. Gareth. I felt her sit at a desk and not write Ford. I dozed and came up out of it with my hand on my cock for no reason except the cabin. I took the hand off. The stitches were a useful pain.
She came back near dark with a clean cloth and a bowl and a face that said she had not planned to come back.
I sat up. The room tilted. She put the bowl on the crate and barred the door herself.
“Shirt off.”
I got it off. She checked the line. Two stitches had wept. She cleaned them and did not look at my mouth.
“Finish it,” she said.
“You believed me.”
“I believed the part you said with your fingers in me. That isn’t the whole thing. Finish it while I can still stand here without getting on you.”
I told her the rest.
Not the pretty version. The back wall going up while I was on the front with a line of people who could still walk.
The boy Joss carried who didn’t make the trees.
My mother’s sister in the pantry who wouldn’t leave a pot.
The ones I pulled. The ones I didn’t. The way the heat moved like it had been fed.
Hillsford men on the far side who were not putting fires out.
“Alexander signed the report,” I said. “Not with a speech. With a name in a box and a seal. Gareth learned the short version at a table. Tillson let it burn. Tillson ran. Tillson sold his own. A cleared man still had nowhere to go because clearing it would have meant Hillsford admitting they set the wall. I let the rumor live. A living rogue can work. A cleared name with no pack is just a man standing in someone else’s yard waiting for a rite. ”
She stood between my knees with the cloth in her fist. I watched her throat.
“How many,” she said.
“Out? Enough to make a company later. Not enough to sleep through it.” I wasn’t going to give her a number so she could do arithmetic with the dead. “Joss wants this in your hall. I told him no. You heard why. Your people will take Hillsford’s paper over my mouth if the grain gets shorter.”
“I know what my people will take.”
She set the cloth down. She was shaking. Not afraid. The bond was doing the same ugly thing it had done when I said Ford the first time. Heat. She opened my pants like an apology she would not say out loud.
“Reilly.”
“Don’t talk.”
I was only half-hard from the telling. Her mouth fixed that.
She got on her knees on the boards beside the bench, careful of my side, and took me in.
Slow. Not the river. Not the shack. She used her hand on the shaft and her tongue under the head and when I thickened she took more, eyes down, like she could pay the boy and the pantry and the seal with her throat.
I put my hand in her hair and did not push.
The stitches pulled when my stomach tightened.
I let them. She sucked and stroked and I got all the way hard, swell starting, and she locked her fingers around the base the way she always did when she was keeping the knot out of her mouth.
I watched her lips. I watched my cock disappear.
I thought about Alexander’s seal and I thought about her coming on me hours ago while I said the fire and I hated how all of it lived in the same body.
“I’m going to come.”
She stayed. I spent on her tongue, a long pulse that made me grip the bench, a sound I could not swallow. She swallowed. She kept her mouth on me until I twitched and then she pulled off and wiped her lip with the back of her wrist and sat back on her heels.
The same rule sat in the room before either of us said it.
“No bite,” she said.
“I know.”
“No knot.”
“I know.”
“No hall. You don’t get the hall because I believe you. You don’t get the claim because I put you in my mouth.”
“I can live on scraps.”
I said it. I was lying. She heard the lie. I saw it in her face. She stood up and I caught her belt before she could put the clean version of herself back on.
“You’re wet,” I said.
“I know that too.”
I opened her pants one-handed. She let me.
I slid my fingers into her underwear and found her soaked, swollen, like the story and the sucking had done the same job.
I rubbed her clit with two fingers and she grabbed my good shoulder and came after a short, mean climb, standing, dripping on my hand, her mouth shut so the path wouldn’t hear.
I worked her through it until her knees bent and then I took my hand out and showed her the shine.
She looked at it. She did not take the rite back.
I wiped my fingers on the ruined shirt. She fastened her belt. Her mouth was red. My cock was still out, wet, softening. The stitches had bled a little through the cloth she had put on. She pressed it with her thumb and swore at me.
“You stay on this bench tonight,” she said. “Melanie holds the cut. If you tear those pulling a knot I didn’t let you use, I am not sewing you twice.”
“I can live on scraps,” I said again, because I was a fool.
She looked at my mouth. “Stop saying that.”
“Then don’t come down here and put me in your throat after I tell you about a pantry.”
“I didn’t do it for the pantry.”
“I know what you did it for.”
She went to the door. I wanted her on the bench. I wanted to put her on her back and lick her until she cried again and shove in and knot her and make the lie about scraps die in the lock. The side pulled when I sat forward. That helped. Pain was useful.
“Joss will try the hall,” I said.
“I’ll handle Joss.”
“Gareth’s letter.”
“I’ll handle the letter.” She had her hand on the bar. “I believe you. That is all you get tonight. Don’t dress it up.”
She unbarred the door and went out. Cold air. Path. I sat with my pants open and the fire in my mouth and her mouth still a wet memory and I said, to the empty cabin, “I can live on scraps.”
The empty cabin did not believe me either.
Melanie came after the lamp had burned lower. She looked at my open belt and my side and the bowl.
“She came back.”
“Yes.”
“You told her the rest.”
“Yes.”
“Did she take the rite back.”
“No.”
Melanie nodded like that was the only sane thing anyone had done all day. “Then close your pants and lie down. If you bleed through that cloth I am fetching Huntington, not her. I am tired of this room being a hall you don’t get to claim.”
She waited until I fastened the belt. She left.
I lay on the good side.
I went through the names I had not given Reilly. I did not say them out loud. I could live as a rogue. I had lived as a rogue. I could take a contract and a cabin and her mouth when she was guilty and her no when she was Luna. That was scraps.
I was lying.
The bond pointed up the hill at a woman who believed me and had still walked out. I got hard again thinking about her on her knees after the pantry sentence. I did not touch it. The stitches were a reason. The lie was another.
Sleep came in pieces. In one piece she took the words back. In another Alexander’s seal was on her desk next to my cock. I woke from that one with my hips moving and my side screaming and I lay still until it passed.
Gray. I sat up. The thread held. I put on a clean shirt Joss had left outside the door like he knew I would ruin the last one. I did not go to the cut. I stood in the doorway and looked at the path and wanted her coming down it with the rite undone.
She did not come.
Scraps.
I went back to the bench and sat with Ford finished and the claim unfinished and her taste gone from my mouth, and I did not say the lie again because saying it a third time was going to make it true or make me walk up to her hall and that was a fire Joss would have been happy to strike.