3. The Crack #3
The other stays free, habit. Eleven weeks of her in the next room, of her scent on the air after a shower, of the way her pulse jumps under my thumb when I check her for injury she will not admit to. Eleven weeks of calling it duty while my body keeps a different ledger.
I shove my jeans down just enough. I am already hard, and heavy, with the kind of ache that has been riding me since she first put her hand in mine and left it there like she trusted the weight of it.
I wrap my fist around myself and the first stroke is almost a flinch.
Too much. I ease off, breathe through my nose, and try again slower.
The memory comes without asking. Her fingers sliding between mine, the small pressure of her palm, the way she would not meet my eyes. Now, I feel her fingers are on my dick and holding it tight. I feel the ghost of that lace again, the soft give of her skin.
My grip tightens. I stroke once, twice, the wet sound of it loud in the quiet house. Heat rolls up my spine. I picture the column of her throat, the place just under her jaw where the skin is thin and warm.
I have seen her swallow there when I stand too close. I have watched the pulse jump. My thumb would fit there. My mouth would fit there.
Harder and bigger still, I stroke myself furiously, the rhythm turning rough because control is what I am trying to spend. The base of my dick is slick now. Every pull drags a low sound out of my chest that I kill before it can carry.
She cannot know. The door is closed and she is asleep and that is the only mercy left in this. I think of her hand again, the way it felt small and certain inside mine, and my hips jerk.
My orgasm hits hard and sudden, my hips shuddering, a white-hot clamp that empties me in long, shaking pulses against my fist making the strokes easier and the floor. I keep stroking through it until the last of it is gone and my knees are soft.
I clean up in the dark with the same economy I use for blood. Hands washed at the kitchen sink, making sure I don't drip anywhere. DIck back in. Boxers up but failing to keep the weight inside. Jeans up and belt back. Rifle across my knees again. The chair is the same chair.
After, the house is the same house and the door is the same door, and the thing I was carrying has quit shouting.
It has not gone anywhere. It has only stopped being the loudest thing in the hallway, which is all I asked of it and all I am going to get. The wanting is still there, sitting quiet in the chair with me, and in the morning it will still be there, and it will still be hers.
What I have bought is a clear head until first light. I take it. A man does not get to be proud of every tool he uses to hold a hallway.
I put my eyes back on the door, and this time it takes.
Nolan, The Probe
The kit changes its mind at ten past the hour.
It's ticked the same slow idle all morning, the green pulse you quit hearing the way you quit hearing your own heart. Now it stutters. The light catches, holds a half-beat too long, and a pattern crawls across the little screen the idle never makes.
My feet are taking me out of the chair while my eyes are still on the screen. A vehicle that sat the far ridge longer than weather or curiosity allows, then pulled off. A second set of tracks on the only road in, fresh, laid down in the dark while I held the door and watched the wrong direction.
"Company on the ridge." The rifle's already up off my knee. "And tracks on the road that weren't there at dark."
She's out of the chair without asking which ridge. "How many?"
"Two sets. Maybe three."
"Coming, or looking?"
"Lookin'." I put my eye back to the glass and give her the rest of it, because she'll have it in a minute anyway and I'd rather she had it from me. "Same as the truck on the dead road. They come and they look and they go tell somebody."
"Then we have until somebody gets told."
"That's about the size of it."
She's up. The case snaps shut under her hands, the bag goes onto her shoulder, and she's two steps into her part of the drill while the sentence is still in my mouth. She moves like a woman who's run for her life enough times to do it asleep, every motion already paid for.
"Reading us," she says.
"Readin' us. Gettin' better at it, too."
We make it three steps toward the back door before the kit lights the whole screen at once.
Off the ridge now. Off the road. Into the dry brush at the edge of the property, a contact where no animal moves and no wind reads, closer than a look has ever come and still closing.
Her eyes find mine across the dark room. One second. The whole question and the whole answer riding it.
We break for the door. The grip from this morning is still in my palm.
Whatever that thing between us is, it's going out the door alongside us into whatever's waiting in the brush, and it's going to have to hold itself together until we're on the far side of this.
I'm steady. So is she. We made something with our hands today and it is going to have to keep.
Close outside, past the thin glass, a man's voice says one quiet word into a radio.