20. Sacha #2
I put her back into the pillows and worked down the length of her, and she went quiet in a way she almost never does, and I laid my forearm across her hips to hold her where I wanted her and put my mouth on her properly.
She had one fist in the blanket and the other in my hair and she swore at the ceiling in two languages, one of which she had picked up from me and was pronouncing badly.
I know exactly what my hands are. They are tools, built and then trained for a specific and ugly kind of work, and for fifteen years that is all I have ever asked of them.
That night they learned the line of her ribs and the crease of her hip and a place behind her knee that made her arch clean off the mattress.
That is the part I cannot explain, and I am not going to try.
Somewhere in the middle of it I returned to my own body.
I had been renting it out since the doorway, using it to split wood and clean weapons and walk a fence line, and it had been a serviceable arrangement.
Then her nails went into my shoulders and I was in there with her, all the way, present in my own skin for the first time since a night I did not want to think about and was going to think about anyway.
"You're favoring that shoulder," she said.
"Lily, that is enough."
"I'm only saying we could adjust the angle and spare you a week of stiffness."
"There is a woman in my bed conducting an assessment."
"There's an old injury in my bed and nobody has looked at it properly."
"Make your appointment for the morning."
"I'm putting you down for eight."
She stopped talking after that, mostly. What she did instead was put her mouth on the worst of the old scars, the one under the ribs on the left, and hold it there. I have taken a knife into that exact spot and been less undone by it.
Then she pulled me up over her, and for a while neither of us did anything else.
I braced on my forearms and laid the whole weight and length of me down against her, skin to skin from her mouth to her ankles, and she got both arms around my back and pressed her palms hard and simply breathed.
There is no name for what that was. Nothing had held on to me in three years except a coat and a rifle.
"Sacha."
"I know."
"I need you to stop being polite about it."
"I am not being polite. I am memorizing."
"Memorize faster."
She got a hand between us and took hold of me, and the small certain grip of it went through me like a live wire.
She guided me down to where she wanted me and left her hand there to keep me honest, and I held myself off her on locked arms and let her set the place.
Then I pressed forward into the heat of her and felt her body give around the first of me, and I had to shut my eyes.
I went slowly, and not only out of restraint.
She was tight and she was ready and she was going to take all of me, and I intended her to have every second of it.
I gave her an inch and stopped, and her breath went out through her teeth.
I gave her another and felt her stretch to hold it, and she said something under her breath in a voice I had never heard her use, low and ragged and with no jokes anywhere in it.
Her heels rode up over the backs of my thighs and pulled. I did not let her hurry me.
She drew a breath in then and did not let it out for a long moment, so I stopped where I was and waited and watched her face. I have hurt people on purpose. I was not going to do it here by accident.
"Don't stop."
"You are not breathing."
"I'm busy."
"Breathe, and then you may have the rest."
She swore at me. Then she breathed. And I gave her the rest of it in one long deliberate press until I was seated all the way inside her and there was nothing left of me anywhere else in the world.
She was hot and impossibly close around me and shaking very slightly, and I held still there with my forehead against hers and let her get used to the size of what she had asked for, and I could feel every one of her heartbeats in the place where we were joined.
Then her hand came up around my neck and pulled, and after that there was nothing careful left anywhere in the room.
She met me stroke for stroke and told me what she wanted in short flat sentences with no shame anywhere in them, and I gave her every one of them.
Harder. Slower. There. Do not stop doing that.
I have taken orders from men who commanded armies and never obeyed with more attention.
Halfway through I got an arm under her and turned her, and she went where I put her and said something into the pillow that was not a complaint.
I took her from behind with one hand spread flat between her shoulder blades and the other at her hip, holding her exactly where I needed her, and it was the closest I have come in my life to saying a thing out loud without using a word.
She was mine, and I do not mean that as ownership.
I mean it as a post I intended to stand at.
She reached back and got hold of my wrist and held on to it the entire time, and I understood that she was answering me in the same language.
Then I could not do it any longer without her face.
I turned her over and got her legs up around me and went back to work with her looking straight at me, and that is how it finished.
She got there first, arching up hard and clenching around me and dragging my name out of the air in pieces, and I worked her all the way through it and only then let go of the last of myself.
It went through me like something breaking clean instead of breaking wrong.
This was not a first reach across a gap.
That first night, we had been two people setting their weapons down.
This was two people picking something up and agreeing to carry it, and I felt her decide it in the same moment I did, and I put my face into her hair and held on to a woman I had no right to and no intention of letting go.
Afterward she lay along my side with her head on my chest and her hand over the scar she had claimed. The fire went down to coals. Then I did the strangest thing I have done in three years.
I started talking.
It began as nothing at all. I told her the shoulder came off a loading dock in Hamburg and the ribs came off a man with a better plan than mine.
Then I told her about the flat above a bakery where I lived at twenty-two, and the fact that I have not been able to smell bread since without checking the exits.
She hummed in the right places and asked me almost nothing, which is exactly how she got the rest of it out of me.
I was some way into a story about a train before I heard myself and stopped dead.
"You," I said, "are some kind of interrogation specialist."
"I'm a nurse."
"I have sat in rooms with men whose entire profession was making other men talk. They got less out of me than you have got out of me in ten minutes, lying down, with your eyes shut."
"That's because they were after something." She did not open her eyes. "I only wanted the one about the bread."
"You should be licensed."
"I promise to use my powers exclusively for good," she said. Then, with no pause whatsoever, "What was his last name?"
The room went very still.
"You will have to be more specific."