21. Closing In #2
Nolan, Come to My Voice
"Come here," I tell her, low, the register I keep only for her, the exact words from the drill. "Come to my voice."
And she does. She comes off the strip and into me, and my arms close around her, and hers around me. The pen is a hard small shape against my chest where it has ridden in her pocket the whole way, still transmitting, still saying find me even now that I have.
My arms hold her the way a man holds the thing he was sure the world would not let him keep, too hard, not hard enough, both at once.
Her hands fist in the back of my jacket and hold on hard.
The strength of it tells me exactly how cold the cold she chose in that car really was, how much it cost her to sit quiet and findable and trust a promise she could not verify.
"You came," she says into my chest. It is not surprise, because she never doubted it, but it is something, the sound of a bet paid out. "Like a man with a team," she adds. "You kept the wording."
"I kept the wordin'," I tell her, my mouth buried deep in her hair and my hand spread wide across her back, learnin' all over again that she's whole, that she's right here.
The shape of her under my hands is the livin' shape, not the one them nightmares kept tryin' to hand me.
"I told you I'd come for you, yeah. I'll always come.
That's the one thing you ain't never got to run the odds on ever again. "
For eleven weeks I called it the job. I stood on her wall and told myself the wanting was a thing I had set aside for good, because a man in my position does not get to want the person he guards.
She proved that wrong without trying. And now, in the cold desert dark with her heart going hard against my chest, there is no setting it aside, no version of me that pretends this is anything but what it is.
She is the thing I would burn the whole order down to keep, and tonight, in my own quiet way, I nearly did.
She pulls back just enough to look at me.
The analyst is right there in her eyes alongside everything else, because she is never only one thing.
"The pen worked," she says, and there is wonder in it under the steadiness.
"I armed it in the car and I couldn't see the light and I had to trust it was doing what you built it to do.
It did. You built a thing that brought you to me in the dark. "
"You went and trusted it. That's the part that matters, yeah.
" I press my forehead to hers, and for one held breath the strip and the plane and the whole long night fall away.
There is only this, the thing we spent eleven weeks and a lifetime reaching, her breath and mine in the same cold air, nothing between us now but the one truth we already said out loud.
Open strip. A pilot forty yards out who doesn't know yet what Harlan did to his airplane. My own people on the ground and the site not released. Twenty years of standing walls doesn't switch off because a man finally got what he came for.
I do not decide to kiss her. No decision in it. Only the eleven weeks and the forty feet and the two decades of arriving too late, all breaking at once, and my mouth finds hers and hers is already there, already open, already pulling me down.
She kisses me like a woman who spent the last hour sure she would die findable and quiet in a stranger's car. Hands fisted in my jacket, hauling me into her as if the space between us is one more thing the night tried to take and she will not allow it.
I kiss her back the same way, both hands in her hair, the cold desert gone, the plane gone. The whole world narrows to the living warmth of her against me, proving over and over that she is here, she is whole, I reached her in time.
It is not tender. Tender is for later, for a room with a door. This is the other thing, the desperate thing, two people who nearly lost each other in the dark needing their hands to say what the words cannot. That we are alive. That we are here. That the distance closed.
Her breath is ragged against my mouth and mine is worse.
And then the thing in me that has never once quit counting comes back up out of the dark and counts.
Open strip. A pilot forty yards out who doesn’t know yet what Harlan did to his airplane.
My own people on the ground and the site not released.
Twenty years of standing walls doesn’t switch off because a man finally got what he came for.
So I move her. One arm around her waist and her feet hardly finding the ground, back down the strip to the truck still sitting across its mouth with the lights dead and the engine ticking as it cools.
Aidan sees us coming and turns for the perimeter without a word, and I will owe him for that a long while. I get the door open and get her up into the cab and pull it shut behind us, and the desert goes quiet on the far side of the glass.
She presses into me without hesitation, her body fitting against mine as if the night had never tried to tear us apart.
My fingers trace the line of her spine through her shirt, feeling the steady beat of her heart, the rise and fall of her chest. She is solid.
Real. Not a ghost I chased through the dark.
Voss makes a soft sound into my mouth, half relief and half need, and I answer it with everything I have held back for eleven long weeks. My hand cups the nape of her neck, tilting her head so I can deepen the kiss. Her lips part under mine, warm and urgent.
I taste the salt of her skin, the faint metallic trace of fear that still clings to her, and I want to erase every second she spent in their hands.
She slides her palms up my chest, fingers curling into my shirt as if she needs to anchor herself. I feel the tremor in her touch, the same adrenaline that still races through my veins.
My free hand finds the hem of her shirt and slips beneath it, palm flat against the smooth skin of her lower back. She shivers at the contact, but she does not pull away. Instead she arches into me, her hips meeting mine in a silent demand that sends heat rushing through every part of me.
We are alive. The knowledge pulses between us like a second heartbeat. I map her with my hands, learning the familiar shape of her shoulders, the dip of her waist, the strength in her arms as she holds me just as fiercely.
She explores me in return, fingers pressing into the muscles of my back, tracing the line of my jaw when we break for air. Our foreheads rest together, breaths mingling in the cold.
For one stretch there is nothing but her, and the cold, and the proof of her under my hands. I could stay in it until the sun comes up. I want to stay in it until the sun comes up.
I pull her across the seat and into me, taking her weight, my hands framing her ribs. My mouth finds hers again in a kiss born of raw relief and weeks of fear. She tastes like survival and salt and everything I almost lost tonight.
My hands roam with urgent reverence, sliding up her sides and cupping the soft weight of her breasts through the thin fabric.
She gasps into my mouth as my thumbs brush over her peaks, the sound shooting straight through me.
I want to worship every inch of her, to replace the terror of the last hours with the certainty that she is here, warm and real and mine.
She tugs my shirt higher, her palms spreading across my bare chest, nails grazing lightly. The touch sends sparks across my skin. I get her back against the door, my body between her and the window and the whole black desert past it, and the cab is small and warm and ours.
My thigh slips between hers, and she rocks against it instinctively, seeking friction.
The heat between us builds fast and desperate, fueled by the nearness of loss.
I kiss down her neck, sucking gently at the pulse point that flutters wildly beneath my lips.
She whispers my name like a prayer, her fingers threading through my hair and holding me there.
I slip one hand lower, beneath the waistband of her pants, finding her already slick and ready. My fingers stroke her with slow, deliberate care, circling the sensitive bundle of nerves until her breaths turn into soft moans.
She clenches around my fingers when I slide two inside her, curling them just right.
Her hips move with me, chasing the pleasure I give her.
I watch her face in the dim light, memorizing every flutter of her lashes and parting of her lips.
She is beautiful in her surrender, strong even as she comes apart for me.
The tension coils tighter in her body. I keep the rhythm steady, thumb pressing firm circles while my fingers move deeper. When she breaks, her release washes over her in powerful waves. She trembles against me, clinging tight as pleasure ripples through her.
I hold her through it, murmuring soft words of reassurance against her skin. The sight and feel of her coming undone nearly undoes me as well, my hardness aching and wet. But I focus on her, on giving her this moment of pure relief. She looks at me inquiring. I whisper, "This is for you."
She rests her cheek against my chest, her fingers still twisted in my shirt. We stay like that, breathing together, letting the proof of our survival settle deep in our bones. Her heart beats steady against mine, a rhythm I would follow anywhere.
Slowly the world begins to return. The low hum of an engine somewhere out on the strip.
Boots on sand, muffled through glass, a long way off and getting no closer.
My pulse starts to settle, though the heat between us lingers like an afterglow, warm and promising.
I keep one hand on her back, reluctant to let even an inch of space come between us.
Eli's voice crackles over the net, sharp and urgent, cutting through the quiet. I tense, but I do not release her right away. I press one last kiss to the top of her head, my hand smoothing down her spine in a final caress.