"One more minute." His voice against my pussy is warm and unhurried. "You can give me that."
I cannot give him that. I am going to die. I tell him this.
And then he seals his mouth over my clit and sucks, and his fingers crook hard inside me, and I come so suddenly and completely that I cry out into the empty cabin and don't care at all that I do it.
He works me through it, gentling, until I pull at his hair. Then he kisses the inside of my thigh and comes up my body, and I'm still shaking when I get my hands on his shirt and shove it up.
"Off," I say. "Now."
He pulls it over his head. His chest is broader than I'd accounted for, because clothes are apparently doing serious structural work there, and the compass tattoo on his right bicep is right there and I trace it once with my finger because I've been wanting to and now seems exactly like the time. He lets me. Then his hands go to his belt and I watch him strip the jeans off and he's bare underneath, and the sight of his cock, so hard and thick and flushed makes my mouth dry.
I reach for him. Wrap my hand around him and feel the weight of it, the heat, the way he goes very still when I stroke him once. His jaw works.
He's bracing over me with his forearms either side of my head and his forehead against mine. He pushes in slow. First inch and he watches my face, and I breathe, and my body stretches around him and my mouth falls open, and he stops and watches me some more, and I tilt my hips and he takes that as the answer it is and pushes the rest of the way home.
Full. Deep. I can feel him everywhere.
He starts to move and I stop being a person and I become only this — his weight on me, the drag and push of him, the specific pressure of him hitting deep and the way he reads every sound I make and adjusts, always adjusting, always paying attention. His thumb finds my clit. His eyes stay on mine.
"Look at me," he says. Low and even. "Stay with me."
I look at him. I stay.
"Good girl."
Those two words in that voice do more damage than everything that came before them. I come on his cock with his thumb working me and my nails in his shoulders and his name in my mouth, and he doesn't stop, just shifts his angle and hooks my knee up over his arm and goes deeper, and I feel that in my back teeth, and he works me up to a third one slow and thorough and merciless until I'm crying a little with how much I feeland he kisses the tears off my face without comment and keeps going.
Only then does he let himself go. He pulls out and finishes on my stomach, his forehead dropping to my collarbone, one long ragged breath out.
"Fuck," he says as his come spurts over my stomach.
We stay on the rug. He pulls the flannel over me and cleans me up and lies down beside me and I put my ear on his chest and listen to his heart rate come back down. Mine is doing the same thing, probably. I've lost the ability to monitor my own vitals.
"I didn't know I could be loud," I say. "That was new information."
His arm tightens around me. "Not going anywhere."
I fall asleep with the fire on my face and his heartbeat under my ear, and sometime later I half-wake to being lifted and carried and set down on the bed, blankets tucked around me. The chair by the window creaks.
At three in the morning I open my eyes. He's still there. Rifle across his lap. Eyes on the road.
I close mine again and sleep soundly for the first time in a long time. Safe.
five
Rafe
Theburnerphonebuzzesat seven AM.
I take the call on the porch. The intermediary. Boilerplate man, paid by the hour, no idea what he is part of. He asks for status. I give him a lie. Subject broke east after Kamloops. I've rolled with her. Peace River tonight. Friday for delivery. He buys it and hangs up.
That buys me thirty-six hours. Voclain will verify inside twelve. I will spend the rest of today getting her statement and the laptop into the right hands. I have a call to make to Beauchamp at noon to arrange the waypoint.
All of that is true. None of it is what today is for.
I come back inside. She is at the table in my flannel, barefoot, her bandaged hand wrapped around a mug. Her hair is sleep-crooked. The light through the east window is doing something to her face that I am going to remember.
"The client called," I say. I sit down across from her. "We have about a day. I'll call Beauchamp at noon. He'll set awaypoint. Tomorrow morning we drive you down. You give your statement. The laptop goes into an evidence hold. You go into protective custody for a while."
