Chapter 10 The Churuata Night
Nora
The churuata is lit the way it was the first night, with lanterns strung along the open beams, candles guttering low on every table, except nothing about tonight feels like the first night at all.
We knew less then. We were still people who came here only for hammocks, rope swings, and a wellness retreat with a slightly aggressive itinerary.
Mateo sits at the head of the table like he never left it, like the last forty-eight hours happened to someone else's guide instead of him, holding court with the same energy he had a few days ago, only with a half-healed split lip and a bandage down one arm.
"He has been living near the lodge for three years," he's saying to Andrew about Copérnico, who has decided to join us tonight and is chewing on some fruit while perched on a low-hanging branch. "He knows every trail out of a mile radius better than I do.
"He pointed northwest," Santi says. "Repeatedly. Toward the restricted zone. The exact direction we needed."
"He pointed northwest toward the good fruit that's in season this time of year," Mateo says, with total, immovable conviction. "Anything useful that came of it was an accident of timing, not intelligence."
"I refuse to accept that," Andrew says. "I've decided he's a hero monkey and nothing you say will change that."
"He is not a hero. He is a howler monkey with excellent timing." Mateo lifts his glass, the first real smile cracking through the offense. "But I will allow that the timing, this once, served us well."
The whole table laughs, loose and warm and a little too loudly. We are all people who survived an ordeal and have been given full permission to be ridiculous about it now that the danger's over.
Ryan and Erica are three drinks in at the far end, deep in an argument about whether the last four days constitute a Survivor season or merely a strong Survivor-adjacent experience.
"I'm telling you, you have enough material for a twelve-episode podcast," Erica says. "Working title: Cumbre Verde: Anatomy of a Cover-Up. Or possibly I Told You So: A Retrospective."
"Nobody's listening to either of those." Ryan snorts.
"You'll have listeners if I join you. I am very well-known in my field, don't you know!"
"Your demographic is everyone sitting at this table."
"That's seven loyal listeners. It's a start."
Riley and Derrick sit at the far end, muttering playfully and not hearing a word anyone else is saying to them tonight. They only have eyes for each other. His arm rests along the back of her chair, and she leans into it without seeming to notice she's doing it.
Santi's hand finds mine under the table sometime around the second round of Mateo's monkey grievances, and neither of us moves to make it look like anything other than exactly what it is.
No one comments. Only Erica seems to acknowledge it with a wry twist of her lips and a suggestive wriggle of her eyebrows when I catch her eye.
We stay after everyone else drifts off toward the caba?as, the candles burning down to stubs, the churuata open on all sides to the night beyond it.
The lagoon's a sheet of black glass below us, the tepuyes rising dark and ancient against a sky so clear it looks lit from somewhere behind the stars themselves.
"Last night here," I say, mostly to fill the quiet, watching the lanterns gutter.
"Last night here." Santi's looking at me instead of the view, which feels like it should bother me, but it doesn't. "I need to tell you this, and I'd like you to hear me out before you decide what to do with it."
"That's an ominous opener."
"It isn't. Let me finish."
I settle back and give him the room.
"I don't want to ask you what this is," he says, watching me carefully with those midnight eyes of his.
"I'm not interested in that. I know what I want.
I want you—you, Nora Valdez, with the spreadsheet brain and the secret manuscript and the way you say my name when I fuck you like it's a dirty little secret.
I want to know what your mornings look like when there isn't a crisis attached.
I want to read whatever you write next, even the parts you're not sure are any good.
I want all of that, starting whenever you're ready for it to start. "
I gape at him. This man, who I'm still certain must have fallen out of a romance novel straight into my life, for how perfect and sexy and romantic he is.
"Okay," I say with a breath. "Okay, my turn.
Going back to the office is going to be different.
People will know, or they'll guess, or they'll construct an elaborate theory based on absolutely nothing, and I'm fine with that.
I need you to actually hear that I'm fine with it, not assume you need to manage how I feel about it, run interference with HR, soften how it lands for me.
I've been managing my own comfort in rooms full of men who think they know what I can handle since I was twenty-four. I don't need you to start now."
Santi's quiet for a second, and I watch him actually consider it instead of rushing to reassure me, which is exactly the right response.
Then a smile splits his lips. "I know you're fine.
I've been watching you be fine for eighteen months.
Fine in board meetings when someone talked over you.
Fine, when Bailey's restructuring memo should have made you furious, and instead you rewrote the entire proposal better than the original by Friday.
I'm not interested in managing your comfort, Nora.
I never was. I'm interested in you. The whole rest of it—the office, the gossip, whatever HR makes us sit through—that's background noise. I'm not marrying the background noise."
All the air seems to be sucked out of the room. "...Marrying?"
He looks sheepish. "Well, not yet. Obviously. But... someday. Maybe?"
I purse my lips. "Maybe."
"I haven't scared you away, have I?"
"Shut up and kiss me, Santi."
He does, once, slow and thorough enough that it answers the question better than any more words would. Then he pulls back far enough to look at me, eyes dark in the candlelight.
"Not here," he says, voice rough already. "I want you somewhere I can take my time with you and not worry about Carmen finding us in the morning."
"My caba?a has the better view."
"Your caba?a, then."
He doesn't let go of my hand the entire walk down the lantern-lit path, past the dark, quiet churuata, past the other caba?as with their lights already out, down to the last one on the dock with the unobstructed line on the falls.
My fingers fumble the key, distracted by his mouth finding the side of my neck the second we're out of anyone's sightline, patient and filthy at once, and by the time the door clicks shut behind us, I've half-forgotten my own name.
"Eighteen months," he says against my throat, walking me backward until my shoulders meet the wall beside the door. "Eighteen months of watching you across conference tables and not letting myself do this."
"You're allowed now."
"I'm aware." His hands find the hem of my shirt and drag it up, slow, not stopping until it's gone entirely, dropped somewhere behind him without either of us looking to see where. "I intend to make up for lost time."
There's no rush in him at all tonight—no waterfall roaring privacy into a four-minute window, no rope to hold onto, no thirty-foot margin until someone notices we're gone.
Just his hands learning me slowly, deliberately, like he's correcting eighteen months of restraint one inch of skin at a time.
He gets my bra off without fumbling, drops his mouth to my breast like there's nowhere else on earth he needs to be, and the low sound that pulls out of me when his tongue circles my nipple makes him hum against my skin in open satisfaction.
"Tell me something," he says softly, working his way down my bare skin, tongue tracing the waistband of my shorts before his fingers make quick work of the button. "Anything true. Not the office. Just you."
"I used to write love scenes I didn't believe in," I manage, breath already unsteady. "I'd write the want and not feel it. I feel it now. Constantly. It's very inconvenient for my professional reputation."
His laugh is low and warm, vibrating against my hip as he drags my shorts and underwear down in one slow motion and settles between my knees like he has all night, which, for once, he actually does. "I'll take partial responsibility for that."
"You'll take full responsibility."
"Full responsibility," he agrees, and proves it with his mouth.
He's thorough in a way that should be illegal, lips and tongue working with a patience that has nothing left to prove and everything still to give, drawing slow circles exactly where I need them and then, infuriatingly, backing off the second I get close, dragging his mouth lower to press open-mouthed kisses against my inner thigh instead, listening to me curse his name into the pillow and then going back to finish what he started.
He does this three times until at last he lets me actually come, and when he finally does, it isn't sharp—it rolls through me long and full and almost unbearable, his name breaking on a sound that sounds like an animal, my hips bucking against his mouth until he gentles me down with slow, soothing drags of his tongue.
"You're going to kill me," I tell the ceiling, boneless and floating.
"Not tonight." He kisses a damp line up my midriff, between my breasts, the curve of my throat, then settles over me, propped on his forearms, looking down like he's memorizing every inch of my face. "Tonight I plan to take excellent care of you."