Chapter 4 #3
It is not the sound I expected. It is lower.
It is the sound of a woman who has not been touched in this way in a long time and who has just remembered what it does.
She bends lower. Her mouth is at the hollow of my throat.
The cervical region is right there and she does not touch it — she is careful, the way she promised — and the carefulness is not a slowing of the heat; it is a different kind of heat.
It is the heat of someone tending to the most fragile part of you while doing the most reckless thing she has ever done.
I get my hands under the hem of her sports bra.
She lifts her arms.
I take it off her, slow, one-handed because the other hand is at her hip — and the way she watches me do this, the way she does not break eye contact, the way she lets the bra come off and her hands come back down to my chest without any flinch or attempt to cover herself — is something I will remember as long as I have a memory.
She has the body of a combat medic. Dense, strong, the right kind of soft in the right places, scars of her own at her shoulder and her ribs from cases I do not yet know the stories of.
Her breasts are small and high and her skin is flushed and her sternum is rising fast under the breath she is keeping deliberate.
I bring her down to me.
I get her mouth.
I keep my head flat.
She is the one who moves. She undoes her own belt one-handed and the button of her tactical pants and slides her hand into the waistband of my jeans without ever taking her mouth off mine, and her fingers find me — already hard, already aching from the last twenty minutes of her in my lap and her mouth on my throat — and she wraps her hand around me with the unhurried precision of a woman who knows exactly what she is doing.
The first long stroke is followed by a sound that I make, a low one, dragged out of the back of my throat, that I have not made for any partner in my life.
The wolf in me hears it and comes up to the surface of my skin and stays there, watching, present, awake.
Her thumb passes over the head of me and I have to set my jaw against the urge to lift my hips, against the urge to do anything that would compromise the stillness she has demanded of my neck.
She strokes me again. Slower. Twice. Three times.
Long, deliberate, her grip exactly the pressure I would have asked for if I could have found the words.
"Petra."
"I know."
"Petra. If you keep doing that —"
"I know. Not yet."
She lifts off me. She gets my jeans down — efficient, both hands now, no theater — past my hips, far enough.
She gets her own pants and her underwear off, kicks them clear of the table, and she is bare from the waist down and so am I and she is, when she settles back over me with a knee on either side of my hips, exactly the woman I have been watching for three nights: dense muscle in her thighs, the dark hair between them, the heat of her radiating through the inch of air still between her body and mine.
I can smell her now. Salt and antiseptic and something deeper, something specifically her, and the wolf in me makes the low sound again, the one I cannot control, and her eyes go to my mouth and stay there.
She braces one hand flat on my chest. Eye to eye.
"Damon. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Tell me if anything in your neck feels wrong. Anything. A twinge. A pinch. A buzz down your arm. I will stop. I will not be heroic about it."
"I will tell you."
"Promise."
"I promise."
She reaches between us. She takes me in her hand.
She guides me to her, and the head of me meets the slick heat of her, and she is wet — so wet that the slide of me against her draws a sound out of her that she does not try to hide — and she lowers herself onto me, slow, an inch at a time, and the slow is not for her, the slow is for me, for the angle of my head, for the absolute discipline of keeping my body anchored to the table.
The slow is its own kind of unbearable. She is tight and she is hot and the stretch of her around me, inch by inch, is the deliberate, breath-by-breath patience of a woman who is making sure her body opens for mine without forcing it, and the discipline of her doing this — the brutal, careful, medic-precise patience of it — undoes me before she has even fully seated.
When she has fully settled onto me she is still, completely still, with her forehead against mine and her breath ragged and her hands on either side of my head on the paper-roll of the examination table.
I can feel her pulse at the place where her thigh meets mine.
I can feel my own pulse at the place where I am inside her.
"Tell me," she says.
"Nothing's wrong."
"Tell me you'll tell me."
"I'll tell you."
She moves.
She sets the pace. She does not let me set it.
I keep my head flat. I keep one hand on her hip — fingers splayed across the dense muscle there, gripping enough to anchor, not enough to bruise — and the other splayed across the small of her back, holding the curve of her spine, feeling the way her body rolls forward into mine on every downward stroke.
She does the work. What she does is the slow, deliberate, building thing of a woman who has decided that the only way this is going to happen is if she controls every variable.
Slow. Deeper. Slow. Deeper. The slide of her down onto me, the long pull back, the slide down.
Her breath against my throat, her teeth at the unscarred side of my collarbone, her hair falling around our faces.
The lights are dim. The air smells like antiseptic and bourbon and sweat and us.
My wolf is right at the surface and his gold is in my eyes — I can feel it in the heat of my pupils — and I see it reflected back in her, not gold, just the pupil-blown black of arousal in a human woman, and the two of us pace each other through it.
She finds her rhythm. Loses it. Finds it tighter, harder, the angle changing as she leans forward and braces both hands on either side of my head and rides me from above with the focused, gathering motion of a woman who has stopped negotiating with what she wants.
Her hips against mine. The wet, deliberate sound of her body taking mine.
The drag of her around me on the upstroke and the clutch of her on the down.
I am holding her hip hard enough that I will see the marks of my fingers there tomorrow and she will, I think, like seeing them.
She is close. I can feel her close — the tremor that starts in her thighs and works up her stomach, the irregular catch in her breath, the way her body grips around me in a rhythm that has stopped being voluntary.
I dig my fingers into the muscle of her hip and she makes a sound I have not heard from her — a tight, breathless almost-laugh — and she says, "Damon. Stay. Stay with me."
"I'm here."
"Stay."
"I'm here. Petra. I'm here."
She comes.
She comes around me in long, slow, breaking waves that I feel everywhere — at my hips, at the base of my spine, in the back of my throat — and her body bows down to mine and her forehead presses to my forehead and her mouth opens against my mouth in a sound that is not a word, just breath, just my name half-formed and broken, Damon, and her body clenches around me in the unmistakable involuntary rhythm of a woman undone, and I let go.
I let go because I have been holding on for three years and there is nothing left to hold and she is here and I am here and the wolf in me is howling silently against the inside of my chest. I come inside her in a long, dragged-out release that whites out my vision for one second, two seconds, three, and when I can see again she is still curled over me, breathing my breath, her hand at the side of my throat just below the jaw because she will not — even now, even like this — stop being the medic who is checking my pulse.
It is slow and it is long and the after of it is sound-tracked by her breath in my ear and my pulse in my throat and the wolf in me finally quiet, settled, the gold receding from behind my eyes.
Her forehead is against my forehead. Her hair is damp at the temples.
Her hand is flat over the place where my heart is hammering, counting it, the medic in her unwilling to stop being the medic even now, and the count is fast but it is not catastrophic, and she nods slowly, and I feel her smile against my mouth.
"You're fine," she says.
"I am very fine."
"Don't make jokes. I almost — Damon, I almost —"
"I know."
She rolls off me carefully and lies beside me on the narrow examination table. The table is not built for two people. She is half on me, one leg over mine, her head on my unscarred shoulder. She is listening to my pulse through the bone. Her hand is on my chest. She is breathing slow.
After a long time she says, "Your C4 cannot take another impact like that."
"I know."
"So no more pit."
I turn my face — slowly, carefully — and look at the ceiling tile above the examination table. There is a water stain in the corner of one of the tiles that looks like Idaho.
"There was never going to be any more pit," I say. "That's not what I'm afraid of losing."
She is still on my shoulder.
"What are you afraid of losing."
"The man who fights. The man who acts. The man who steps between danger and the people behind him. If I lose that — Petra. If I lose that I'm nothing."
She lifts her head.
She looks at me.
"You just shifted for the first time in eight months to protect a room full of strangers.
You took down a feral alpha at the risk of your own life.
You came back, you let me work, you are lying on this table because you decided that being the man who stepped between danger and the people behind him was worth the risk of being a quadriplegic.
You haven't lost it, Damon. You haven't lost any of it. "
I let that land.
I let it land all the way.
She is right.
I have spent three years grieving the wrong loss.
The pit is gone, but the fight is not.
The fighter is not.
I close my eyes. I feel her settle back onto my shoulder. I feel her breath slow. I feel the wolf in my chest, calmer than he has been in three years, fold himself down at the threshold of her, watchful, awake, but no longer pacing.
Somewhere outside the suite, the compound is winding down. Conrad is handling the wrap. Reaper is handling Crawford. The crowd is dispersing. The Sinners are running the cleanup. I should be up. I should be in the booth. I should be doing the work that I built this life around.
I am not.
I am on an examination table in a four-hundred-square-foot stone suite at the bottom of a mine shaft, with a human woman who has just rearranged my entire understanding of what I am still allowed to be, and I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
I tell her so.
She does not answer.
She is asleep.
I lie there. I listen to her breathe. I count her pulse with my hand on her wrist because turnabout is fair play. I look at the ceiling tile that looks like Idaho. I do not move my head.
I do not need to.
The fight is here.
It has always been here.
I just couldn't see it from the booth.