Chapter 6 #2
We get there. We get her down on the quilt — my grandmother made the quilt, which I do not tell her now, but which I will tell her later because she will want to know — and we undress in the slow rhythm we have agreed on.
I take the rest of her shirt. She takes mine.
The light from the window is gold across her shoulders.
The freckles on her shoulders are new to me.
The scar along her left collarbone is new to me.
I ask her about it. She says, "Knife. Twenty-five years old.
A drunk in a parking lot in Cleveland. I had not yet learned that walking quickly is more useful than fighting. "
"Tell me about the others."
"The others?"
"The other scars. I want to know all of them."
She looks at me. Then she lies back. She puts her arms over her head. She closes her eyes.
"All right. Find them. I will tell you the stories."
I find them.
The one on her collarbone, from Cleveland.
The one on her left ribs, where a wolf bit her in 2018 — a feral she sedated but who got a chunk of her on his way down.
The one at the inside of her right wrist, surgical, where she had a tendon repair last year after over-using her suturing hand for a decade.
The pale stretch-marks at her hips, which she tells me are from puberty and she put on twenty pounds in a year.
The faint mark at her left knee, from being twelve and falling off a fence.
I map her with my mouth.
I take each scar in order. I name it. I tell her the year.
I have remembered, somehow, every year she has told me.
I tell her the story back. She corrects me twice on details — I have the bite at her ribs in 2018 and it was actually 2019, I have the Cleveland knife as a switchblade and it was a steak knife — and she does not open her eyes the whole time and her breathing is going slow and deep and she is, I realize, undone by being known.
This is the thing she is afraid of.
Not the sex. The sex she has had. The sex she has had with men on the circuit who did not bother to know her, who took her function and her body and her competence and reflected it back to her as a thing they were entitled to, and she has gone home from those men exactly as alone as she was before she went to them.
This is the thing she is afraid of.
Being held.
Being known.
Staying.
I hold her.
I know her.
She is going to stay.
I work my way up from her hip and her ribs to her sternum and to the soft place at the base of her throat, and her hand comes up and into my hair, and she says my name — Damon — and the name does the same thing in my chest that it did the first time, which is to mean me, only me, not Vice, not the coordinator, not the champion who isn't anymore. Damon. The man under all of it.
"Damon," she says again.
"Yes."
"I need —"
"I know."
I get her jeans off. I get her underwear off.
I take my time with both. The waistband at her hips.
The lift of her ass for me to slide them down.
The dense muscle of her thighs. The dark hair between them, and the wet shine I find when I bring my hand up between her legs.
She makes a sound — low, half a breath, half a word — and her hips come up into my hand, and she says, Damon, and the way she says it is the same way she said it in the medical suite three days ago, only slower, and with more room in it for what comes after.
I touch her slowly. I find what she likes.
She tells me — not in words but in the rise of her hips, the catch of her breath, the way her hand finds my forearm and grips.
I learn her. The exact place that makes her breath stutter.
The pressure she wants. The rhythm that brings her up to the edge and the rhythm that holds her there.
I bring her right up. I hold her there. I let her say my name twice, three times — Damon, Damon, Damon — and on the third I let her over, my fingers inside her and my thumb where she has told me, and she comes against my hand with my mouth at her ribs and her hand fisted in my hair and her whole body bowing up off the quilt in a long, slow arc that I will remember as long as I have a memory.
She is laughing when she comes down.
"That was not slow," she says.
"That was the warm-up."
"Damon."
"Mm."
"Take your jeans off. Now."
I take my jeans off. I take my underwear off.
She has her hands on me before I am all the way out of them — finding me, hard, already aching — and she wraps her hand around me with the same unhurried precision she used to find what she wanted under her own.
She strokes me slowly. Twice. Three times.
The sound I make is a sound I do not recognize as my own.
"You're shaking," she says.
"Yes."
"This is hard for you."
"Yes."
"How long since the medical suite."
"There hasn't been anyone since the medical suite."
She is still. Her hand is still on me.
"Damon."
"What."
"Come here. Let me take you the rest of the way apart."
I settle over her.
I keep my weight on my arms. I keep my head still — I have a way of holding my head, now, that I have refined over three years, and Petra has noticed it and incorporated it into how she touches me and how I touch her, and there is no awkwardness anymore in the geometry.
There is just us. Two bodies that have figured out how to fit each other.
She reaches between us. She guides me to her.
The head of me meets the slick heat of her and the contact alone is enough to make my arms tremble, and I slide into her slowly, an inch at a time, watching her face — the way her eyes go half-lidded, the way the freckle at her lip moves when her mouth opens, the small caught breath she lets out when I am fully inside her.
She is wet and she is hot and she is, around me, exactly the right kind of tight, and the way her body opens for mine is the kind of thing I have not had words for in any of my previous lives.
I do not move yet.
I let her feel me. I let her adjust. I let her hand come up to the back of my neck — careful at the scar, the medic in her still doing her job — and her other hand come down to the small of my back and pull me a fraction deeper.
I take her mouth. I take her slowly. I take her the way I would take a long fight — measured, deliberate, finding the rhythm and holding it, building it, letting her tell me with her body when to change tempo and when to stay.
I move. Slow. All the way out, almost. All the way back in.
The drag of her around me on the upstroke.
The way her breath catches every time I bottom out.
The way her hand at the back of my neck shifts into a grip when I move and softens when I am still.
She tells me with her hands. With her thighs.
With the soft sounds she makes at the back of her throat that she did not make in the medical suite because the medical suite was fast and this is not.
This is a long thing. This is a thing we are doing because we have time and we are going to take the time.
Her hands are on my back. Her hands are in my hair. Her mouth is at my collarbone and at my jaw and on my mouth, and her eyes are open now, watching me, and the gray-brown of her irises has gone almost all black and the freckle at her lip is moving when she breathes.
I am moving slow.
She says, "Damon."
"Yeah."
"Faster."
"In a minute."
"Now."
"In a minute."
She laughs. It is the first time I have ever heard her laugh — really laugh, not almost-laugh — and it is a low sound and it cracks open something in the center of my chest that I have been holding closed for years and the wolf in me makes the sound again, the not-growl, and Petra's eyes go wide and she says, "There it is. That sound. Make it again."
"That's not a request he takes."
"Yes it is. He just took it."
The wolf makes the sound again.
She tightens around me — involuntarily, all at once, a clench I feel from the base of my spine to the back of my throat — and she says, Damon, and the way she says it is not a request anymore.
It is a demand. It is a woman who has held herself separate for eleven years asking, in plain language, to be taken apart.
I take her apart.
The next ten minutes are not slow.
I move faster. Deeper. I keep my head still — I have to, the wolf in me knows I have to — but the rest of me does not have to be careful with her, and I am not careful, and she does not want me to be careful.
She pulls her knees up. She gets her heels at the small of my back.
She tilts her hips up to meet mine and the angle changes and the sound she makes is the long, low, unbroken sound that has been waiting eleven years to come out of her.
Her hand on my back. Her other hand at the back of my neck.
Her mouth at my throat. Her teeth, light, against my pulse.
The slap of skin against skin. The wet, deep, deliberate sound of two bodies that have stopped being polite.
The quilt under us. The mountain air through the open window.
Her sweat on my chest and mine on hers and the smell of the cabin — pine and antiseptic and salt and the particular smell of us, of her wetness on me, on the quilt, on the whole of the room.
She is close.
I feel her close. The clench of her around me starts to come in waves — irregular at first, then regular, then faster. Her breath shortens. Her hand on my neck stays light, even now, the medic in her still doing her job, even now.
"Damon."
"I'm here."
"With me."
"With you."
"Look at me."
I look at her.
She holds my eyes. Her pupils are blown all the way black.
Her mouth is open. Her hand at the back of my neck is feather-light, and the lightness of it is the most erotic thing I have ever felt because I know what she is doing and I know that she is doing it on the same body that is currently inside her, and the doubling of those two truths in one woman — the care and the want, the discipline and the abandon — is the thing that pushes me over.
She goes first.
She goes around me — a long, slow, breaking wave of clench-and-release that pulls me as deep into her as my body will go, and she says my name, only my name, Damon Damon Damon, and her hand stays light at my neck even as everything else in her body comes apart.
I follow her by five seconds, six, and I come inside her with my forehead against hers and her hand at my throat and the wolf in me finally silent, finally still, watching from the threshold of her, satisfied at last that the woman under me is staying.
I stay inside her after.
I do not move.
She does not let me.
Her arms come up around my back and she holds me there, my forehead against hers, breathing.
After.
She is curled against me. My arm is under her head and her hand is on my chest over my heart.
I am counting her pulse with my thumb against her wrist. She is counting mine with her palm against my sternum.
We are doing the medic-pulse-count thing without either of us deciding to do it because we are both who we are, and that is part of this, and we are not going to stop being who we are.
She says, "Tell me what you are afraid of."
"Now?"
"Now."
"This."
"This how."
"Of holding you. Of staying held. Of being known.
Of —" I look at the ceiling. The ceiling is unpainted pine and I have not looked at it in three years and tonight I am looking at it.
"I have spent three years afraid of losing the man who fights.
I have not realized, until this moment, that I am also afraid of being a man who is loved.
Because if I am loved, and I lose it, I lose more than the pit.
I lose the thing that replaced the pit. I have built my life around losing the pit.
I have not built it around being able to survive losing you. "
She is very still.
She lifts her head. She looks at me.
"Damon Serrano. Listen to me carefully. I have spent eleven years not letting myself be loved.
I have spent eleven years moving so that I would not have to know what it would feel like if I stayed long enough to lose somebody.
And I am here. In your bed. In your cabin.
With my hand on your heart. And I am terrified, and I am here.
I do not know how to promise you that you will not lose me.
I cannot promise that. Nobody can. But I can tell you that I have stopped running.
I have made the choice to stop running. And I am making it tonight, with you, in your grandmother's quilt, in this cabin.
The fight, if it comes, we will fight it. Together."
I look at her.
I close my eyes.
I hold her.
I hold her like the fight of my life depends on it.
And maybe it does.
The mountain wind moves through the window.
The light through the window goes from gold to amber to copper to the soft blue of mountain dusk.
Somewhere down the slope, a dog is barking.
Somewhere in the lodge, music is playing.
Somewhere in the chamber below, the cleaning crew is finishing the post-tournament reset.
The compound continues.
The pit continues.
I am not in the pit.
I am here.
It is, I am beginning to understand, where I have always been supposed to be.
Petra is asleep on my chest. Her hand is still on my heart. She is counting my pulse in her sleep. I am counting hers. The wolf in me is not pacing. The wolf in me is at the threshold of her, watching her breathe, and his head is on his paws, and he is at rest.
I sleep.
I do not dream.
I do not need to.