Chapter 12
NORA
Two weeks I've shared this bed with him.
The border that made sense in the first days broke once and neither of us said so, and since then we've kept to our sides out of habit, not because the line still holds.
We come back from the wedding to the same bed.
Tonight everything is different and I can't stop looking at his side of it.
Tonight I'm married to him, and the bed is the loudest thing in the penthouse.
I'm out of the dress. It took three people and twenty minutes to get me into it, one zipper to get me out.
Now I'm in a slip the color of the inside of a shell, sitting on the edge of the bed we've been treating like a demilitarized zone, looking at the bathroom door he went through ten minutes ago and hasn't come back out of.
The file's on the nightstand. The ring's on my hand.
He's giving me the room. He's good at that, giving me room, leaving the choice mine. I'm twenty-seven years old, I've been lying to a great many people today, including a priest, and I'm done lying to the one of them that's me.
I want him. I have wanted him since a round pen in September, since before I had a single good reason and straight through every reason I built to stop.
Tonight there's no contract on a table making it a transaction, no debt making it a trade.
He cleared all that and handed me the lighter.
Whatever I do now, I do free, which is the most dangerous condition he could have set me loose under, and I think he knew that too.
He comes out of the bathroom. He's awake the way he's always awake, no shirt, the city through the floor-to-ceiling glass throwing enough light across his bare back to show every line of it.
The long muscles shifting as he moves, the old scar low on his ribs, the cut of his shoulders, too much for a man who spends his days in meetings.
He stops when he sees where I'm sitting, his half of the bed instead of mine. He doesn't come closer. He lets me look. I let him look the same way in the dress shop, the two of us trading the same favor for weeks, finally out of reasons to pretend it's anything else.
"You're on my side of the bed," he says.
"I'm aware. I crawled here on purpose."
"Every morning you're back on your side of it.
Whatever the night is, morning comes and there you are, on your half of the map, like it holds.
" Now he steps in, close. The front of him is worse, what I've been keeping my eyes off across a kitchen island and a war over the thermostat.
"Your move, wife. It has to be. I told you I don't touch a woman who doesn't ask me twice. You're at one."
"I crossed the line. That's your answer."
"That's halfway to it." His voice has dropped into the register that does things to the backs of my knees. "Say the rest. I've waited longer than I've ever waited for anything, and I'm not going to be the one who decided for you. Not tonight. Not ever again."
What crosses the last of the distance is the same thing that broke me against a bedroom door two weeks ago.
Not the body in the low light, though God knows.
It's that he won't move until I do. A man who could take anything in this city by reaching for it, handing me the one thing he won't take for himself, the choice, every single time.
"That's two," I tell him, and close the rest of the distance myself.
He meets me halfway. He always does, once I've asked. That's the last clear thought I get to keep for a while, that for all the size, the menace, the three counties' worth of fear, he leaves the last step mine.
His mouth crashes into mine with none of the restraint we've lived on for weeks.
His hands are in my hair, fisting, then sliding under the slip to grip my ass and haul me closer.
I back us onto the bed, dragging him with me until we're moving together toward the center, past the connecting door threshold and into the middle that used to be forbidden ground.
The mattress shifts and dips under our weight as we claim it.
"No more lines," I tell him, breathless.
He laughs low, the sound rough and relieved against my throat. "Hated every fucking inch of that border."
I laugh with him until his fingers find my nipple through the thin fabric and pinch, turning the sound into a gasp.
The slip comes off in a handful of seconds, both of us pulling, and then he's shoving his pants down.
I watch the scar on his ribs catch the light, the muscle flexing across his stomach, the dark line of hair leading down to his cock, thick and heavy, flushed dark, the head already slick and leaking for me.
It twitches when I reach for it, wrapping my fingers around the hot length and stroking slow from base to tip.
He hisses, hips pushing forward into my grip.
"Christ," he breathes.
"Inside me," I say, voice raw with how badly I want it. "Now."
He doesn't make me ask twice. He settles between my thighs, one hand braced beside my head, the other guiding the blunt head of his cock through my slick folds.
Once, twice, coating himself in how wet I am.
Then he pushes in. Slow, relentless, letting me feel every thick inch stretch me open until his hips meet mine and there's no space left between us.
The fullness knocks the air from my lungs.
He starts to move. Deep, steady thrusts that rock the bed and drag over every sensitive spot inside me.
The wet sound of him sliding in and out mixes with our breathing.
I hook my legs higher around his waist, heels digging into his back, pulling him harder into me with every stroke.
His hand slips between us, thumb finding my clit, circling in time with the way he's fucking me.
"That's it," he growls against my ear. "Take it. Take all of me."
I get my mouth to his ear. "Come inside me," I say. "Don't pull out."
The rhythm turns harder, faster, the headboard tapping the wall, sheets twisting under us as we stay locked in the center.
My orgasm hits sudden and sharp. I clench around him, pulsing tight, crying out as it crashes through me.
He follows right after, hips driving deep one last time, cock throbbing as he comes hot and thick inside me, filling me with every pulse. He doesn't stop. Not for a second.
We stay joined through the aftershocks, his weight pressing me down, my legs still locked around him. When he finally eases out and rolls, he takes me with him, rearranging until we're tangled in the middle of it, the sheets wound between us. Limbs locked, skin cooling, no borders left between us.
After, the room is dark, warm, the bed a wreck. We've made chaos of it, sheets wound and legs crossed, a bed that this morning neither of us had set foot in. Not his side, not mine. A no-man's-land we finally took together, which I'd call symbolic if I had a single brain cell left to spend on it.
I'm draped half over him, the big slow thud of his pulse against my cheek, his hand moving up my spine, pressing now and then, like he's making sure I'm really there.
I let him. I've stopped fighting the letting.
Tomorrow I'll pick the war back up. Tonight I'm a married woman in her husband's arms, and the war can wait till the coffee's on.
Neither of us says anything for a long time. The only things worth saying would crack this open, what I'm starting to feel next to what I still suspect, so I keep them behind my teeth tonight.
I drift. I'm most of the way under when I realize the room isn't fully dark.
There's a lamp on across the room, low, the one on his side, and when I crack an eye he hasn't moved to kill it.
I think he forgot. Then I watch him for a minute and understand he didn't forget anything in his life.
He's awake. Flat on his back, one arm around me, eyes open on the ceiling in the low light, breathing slow on purpose, holding still, watching the room like he's guarding it from inside his own bed.
"You can sleep," I murmur. "Nobody's getting past three hundred men, a wall, and two dogs who'd die happy doing it."
"I know." His hand keeps moving on my back, easy, a lie his arm is telling while the rest of him stands guard. "Go to sleep, Nora."
But he doesn't turn off the lamp. He doesn't close his eyes. I lie there pretending to drift while my brand-new husband keeps a light burning at one in the morning over a sleeping woman in a guarded house, watching a door nobody's coming through.
I store it with the rest of what I've collected on him, the things I can't yet make fit together.
He doesn't keep a light on against an empty room unless he's spent a long time in rooms that were never empty, or never safe, or both.
Nobody taught him he was allowed to close his eyes.
Somebody should have. That tells me something, even if I'm too far gone tonight to decide whether it's evidence for the case against him or proof I've been building the wrong case all along.
I fall asleep before I work it out. He's still awake when I go under. I'd bet the ranch he stays that way, guarding a life he doesn't trust he gets to keep.
There's a warmth low in me, the heat of a big body, a long night, a border I finally crossed. I tell myself that's all it is. The good things in this house tend to come with a string I find later, so I enjoy them with one eye on the door.
Tonight I just sleep, warm, on the wrong side of a bed that doesn't have sides anymore, married to the man I came here to convict, and for once I don't dream about my father at all.