5. The Line Gives
Chapter five
The Line Gives
Nolan, Dark, The Safe House
Nolan, The Line Won't Hold
The call ends and the work gets put to bed, and then it's just the two of us and the rest of the dark, and the thing she started doesn't end with the call.
She told me the worst of herself with her fingers in the hair of my arm and her mouth an inch off my jaw, and Eli's man on the phone bought us maybe an hour before the truck comes to bring us in.
One hour. After all this time keeping a foot of air between us like it was the only thing holding the building up.
Walls I'm good at. You lose what I've lost, you get good at them or you don't get up in the mornings. Eleven weeks I kept her exactly the distance the order draws, and told myself the keeping was for her, which it was, and told myself it cost me nothing, which was the lie I told best.
It's costing me everything right now. She's a hand's width away in the cold with the truth of her still hanging in the air, and every reason I've used to hold the wall up has gone thin as the space between us.
The order hasn't changed. Strictly professional or replaced. What's changed is I've stopped being able to hear it over the sound of her breathing.
She's the one who breaks the quiet, which is how I know how far past the old rules we already are.
"Say something." It comes out low. "You've been standing watch over the worst thing I ever told anyone for ten minutes, and you haven't said a word."
I ain’t keepin’ watch on it" I keep my voice down where the dark keeps things. "I'm keepin' it company."
A breath goes out of her, half a laugh with no floor under it. "That's not in any protection manual ever written."
"No, ma'am. Wrote that one myself."
"The truck is coming."
"It is."
"And the wire is going to see everything there is to see."
"It surely will."
"Then tell me the smart thing." Her eyes stay on mine, level, the way they were when she turned her hand over and gripped back. "Tell me to step away, and I'll try to believe you mean it."
I've got the whole speech somewhere. The order, the line, the wire, every smart word in a row, weeks of them. I look at her in the dark and can't find one worth the air it would cost.
“I've got nothing to tell you, Mira.” I feel my baritone vibrating in my chest.
Her name lands in the quiet like a match set down still burning. First time I've let myself say it. She hears everything riding inside it, the whole surrender, and she doesn't ask for the speech again.
She looks at me. I look at her. Neither one of us reaches for the wall.
Nolan, The Line Gives
It gives the way her hand gave this morning. Both of us, at the same time, on purpose.
There's no lunge in it, and she doesn't fall. We move toward each other the way two people move who've thought it all the way through and decided anyhow, slow and deliberate, eyes open the whole way, so neither of us can call it a mistake come morning.
My hand finds the side of her face the way it did across the case file this morning, except this time there's no order with a vote in it and no hand pulling back. I kiss her. Or she kisses me. Or maybe the floor just tipped toward the middle of us and shoved us together.
It doesn't matter. She rises into it, both hands coming up to my jaw like she's been holding them back from it for weeks, and she kisses me like she means to be remembered for it.
The foot of air closes to nothing, and the wall behind it, the one I've kept a great deal longer, goes down with it.
And nothing in me fights it. That's the part that undoes me, after.
No piece of me reaches for the brake. The wall I've held since the worst day of my life comes down, and for once what's behind it isn't the wound.
It's her. The wanting I quit letting myself have a long time back, walking straight up out of the floor and into my hands.
We're both on the wrong side of the line, and we both walked here, and there's no walking it back. I find I don't want to. For the first time in longer than I can count I'm not holding a single thing back, and the not-holding is the most alive I've been since before the truck pulled away.
Nolan, No Wall Left
What comes next has been weeks building, and a good deal longer than that underneath, and she meets every bit of it.
She gets her hands in my shirt first. The same hands that crossed a table this morning to land on my arm, that worked the hair of it tonight while she told me the leash.
They go to the buttons now with that same quiet certainty, like she settled this a while ago and is only now letting the rest of her catch up.
Her hands go flat against my chest, cool at first and then not. And I feel the exact second she finds my heart going hard under her palm and goes still over it, reading me the way she reads everything.
"Look at that," she says, low, her hand staying right over the drum of it. "Stonewall." There's no mockery anywhere in it. It's the nearest thing to wonder I've ever heard out of her, that the immovable man has a pulse running like a green private's, and that she's the one who set it going.
“You did that,” I tell her, and my voice has gone all the way down to gravel. “Been doin' it since the courthouse.”
And I'm reading her back the whole time. That's the thing I can't ever stop doing, even here, even now, with the wall down and the order dead on the floor. The watch never quits. Except tonight every bit of it is aimed at her, and what it brings back isn't a threat in a window or a man in a mirror.
It's her face an inch from mine, the steadiness finally cracked clean through. Her breath gone short. Her eyes dark and certain and on me the whole time. A woman who's done deciding, who hit the bottom of all that deliberating a while back and has been waiting on me to catch her up.
So I catch her up. My hands go where they've wanted to go for weeks, and she makes a sound against my mouth I mean to keep the rest of my life. She pulls me down to her. There's no more deciding left in either one of us to do.
Nolan, No Distance Left
The cold and the dark and the rest of the world fall away, and there's no distance left anywhere in it.
I kiss her like a man who's been standing guard outside heaven for eleven long weeks, and now the gates are open.
My palms slide down the curve of her back, pulling her flush against me, and the way she fits, soft where I'm hard, trembling just enough to tell me she feels it too, nearly undoes me right there.
Voss. Even in my head I call her that, the name I've used like armor between us, the last polite barrier I've clung to while the Network circled and I kept her safe.
But armor is gone now.
Her fingers fist in my shirt, tugging it free with a quiet desperation that matches the heat coiled low in my gut.
I break the kiss only long enough to yank it over my head, while she works by belt buckle off.
I drop my jeans and step out of them. She hooks her fingers on my boxers amd pull them down.
Coming up, she comes face to face with my hardness that its aching and throbbing. She holds my base and stroke the head I groan and tip my head back. It's already beading.
I pull her up and my mouth trace the line of her jaw, the delicate pulse beneath her ear. She arches into me with a soft gasp, and I taste the salt of her skin, the faint sweetness that's haunted my dreams since the first night I stood watch outside her door.
"Travis," she whispers, my given name, the one almost no one uses anymore, and it hits me like a shot of good bourbon, warm and burning all the way down, while she is stroking me slowly.
I ease her back onto the bed, reverent as a southern gentleman ought to be, even when every instinct is roaring to claim. My hands map her slowly, learning the weight of her breasts, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips that I've tried so hard not to notice.
When I peel away the last of her clothes, I pause, just looking. She is beautiful in the low light, strong, scarred in places the world never sees, alive in a way that makes my chest ache.
"You sure about this, Voss?" I ask, voice rough as gravel, because even now I need to hear it.
Her answer is to pull me down, legs wrapping around my waist, guiding me where we both need to be.
The first slow push into her heat wrenches a groan from deep in my chest. She is tight, slick, perfect, and the way she clenches around me steals my breath.
I hold still, forehead pressed to hers, letting her adjust, letting myself feel every inch of this surrender.
Then we move.
It is not frantic at first. Eleven weeks of restraint won't let it be. I rock into her with long, deliberate strokes, savoring the drag and pull, the way her nails score my shoulders.
She meets me, hips rising, body speaking the language we've both been holding back. I kiss her through it, swallowing her moans, whispering against her lips how long I've wanted this, how I'd lay down my life for her and still count it worth it just to have this one night.
The heat builds, steady and relentless, like a slow-burning fuse. I shift, hooking one of her legs higher, changing the angle until she cries out, eyes fluttering shut.
"Right there," she breathes, and I give it to her, again and again, losing myself in the slick heat of her, the scent of her skin, the way she says my name like a prayer.
When she comes apart beneath me, pulsing around me, back bowed and lips parted on a silent cry.
I follow right after, thrusting deep one last time as pleasure crashes through me hard enough to white out the world.
I bury my face in her neck, hips jerking with aftershocks, holding her like she might vanish if I let go.
We stay locked together, breathing hard, hearts hammering against each other. I press soft kisses to her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, gentling us both down from the edge.
Nolan, Undone
After, in the dark, I'm as undone as I've ever let myself be in front of another living soul, and I don't reach for one thing to cover it.
This is the other side of the wall, the side nobody gets to see.
Not the wound. This. The part of a man that comes apart when it's finally let all the way loose, the part I've held shut as hard as I've held the worst day shut, because I never trusted a soul enough to let it out where they could watch.
She got it out of me. From the inside, with her hands, the same as this morning. And not one piece of the breaking was a hurt this time, which is the thing I'll sit with a long while. The wall came down, and what was under it tonight was good. I'd half forgotten there was still good under there.
She's got her head on my chest now, over the same spot her palm found before, and her hand is moving slow on me like she's gentling something that finally quit fighting.
Every little while she says a small thing into the dark, my name once, low, just to set it down between us.
I answer with my hand in her hair, and that's all the talking either of us needs.
She gets all of it. The steady gone. The watch gone slack for the first time in longer than I can name. The easy set in the shoulders gone, every last thing I hold in place each hour I'm awake set down for once, where she can see it. I've hidden this my whole life.
She gets it because she's seen the worst of me and stayed, and a woman who's done that has earned the rest.
We've both fallen, the whole way, and there's no wall left on either of us. Nothing in this cabin goes back to the hour before. I lie in the dark with her and don't reach for cover, and the not-reaching is the most exposed I've been all night.
More than the wanting. More than the wound.
Nolan, Eyes Open
The dark after has a weight I don't hate. She's warm along my side, her breathing gone long and even, and the hour Eli's man bought us is burning down somewhere past the window, and neither of us reaches for a clock.
We did a fireable thing. Bent would be the kind word for it.
Broken's the right one. Eli didn't say keep it careful.
He said strictly professional or replaced, and we drove straight through the middle of professional in the dark, on purpose, eyes open, and there's no reading of last night that lives through the sentence he laid down.
She's awake beside me, watching the same dark hold the same hard fact. So we say it plain, the way we say everything now.
"When they see it," I tell her, "and they'll see it sure as sunrise, I'm off your detail."
"I know."
"You get handed to a man who doesn't know your mirror. Or your shake. Or which hand to take the bag in."
"I know that too." She holds my eyes in the dark, steady, the way she held them when the line gave. "I still wouldn't undo it."
"No," I tell her. "Neither would I."
And that's the truth, and it's the most dangerous truth I own, because it means I've got something now I can't stand to lose, on the exact night they're coming to carry the two of us into a place built to take it away.
Nolan, The Kit Goes Hot
The truck's due inside twenty minutes when the night changes its mind.
All evening the kit's thrown its slow green pulse at the floor, patient as a heartbeat, and I've kept half an eye on it past her hair the way I keep half an eye on everything. Between one pulse and the next, the screen goes hot.
South ridge. Multiple returns, spread wide, walking. No engine sound out in front of them. Men who come in dark and on foot like that were moving before Eli's man ever bought us the hour, which means the hour was never ours to spend.
I'm up with the rifle coming level before I've decided to be, my free hand moving her off the window line, and her eyes are already open before my feet finish finding the floor.
"Down, Voss. Wall."
She's moving before the second word lands. So am I.