The generosity is the cruelty. He's giving me everything because he thinks it might be the last time, and the kindness of a man who doesn't do kindness is the most devastating weapon he's ever aimed at me.
The orgasm builds like a tide instead of a wave, rising slow and deep until it crests through me in long, shuddering pulses that lock my thighs around his head. I don't try to control the sound that comes out of me. I'm too busy trying to control the thing behind it, which is grief, which is want, which is the terrifying recognition that I am in love with a man whose family killed my sister.
He stays with me through all of it. His mouth gentles but doesn't leave, drawing the last aftershocks out until my body goes loose and heavy against the sheets.
He rises over me and I pull him down. His body settles onto mine, skin to skin, and the weight of him is the most grounding thing I've felt in weeks. He's hard against my thigh, the heat of him searing against my skin, and when I reach between us and wrap my hand around his cock, the thickness of him in my fist makes my breath catch. He's hot and rigid and the pulse under my fingers is fast, faster than his composure suggests, and the sound he makes against my throat when I stroke him is raw and quiet and honest.
I guide him to my entrance. The blunt head of him presses against me, and I'm so wet the pressure slides through slick heat without resistance. He pushes inside slowly, filling me by inches, and the stretch of him is a deep, consuming fullness, the thick heat of him parting me open and seating itself behind myribs. Each inch is its own event, his hips pressing forward in long, gentle thrusts that open me around him until he's buried to the hilt and I can feel every inch of him inside me, the heavy, intimate pressure of a man who fits like he was designed to take up exactly this much space.
His forehead rests against mine. His breathing is unsteady. His hips are still, his whole body trembling with the restraint of staying deep and not moving, feeling me around him, the wet heat of my body gripping him completely.
"There you are," I say, because the face I'm looking at is the face I've been looking for since the first night. No composure, no calculation, no professional surface. Just a man inside a woman he's terrified of losing, holding still because the stillness is the only way he knows how to say the thing his mouth won't form.
He starts to move. Long, slow strokes, the full length of him withdrawing until I ache with the emptiness and then returning, filling me again, the head of him dragging against my front wall on every pass. His pace is the pace of a man who has decided to make this last, and the decision is command, not request, his body setting the terms the way it always does.
I try to speed him up. My hips roll against his, pulling him deeper, demanding urgency, because urgency would make this feel like something I know how to survive. He catches my hip with one hand and pins it to the mattress.
"Slow."
The word is quiet and absolute.
It carries every ounce of the man who saidSitandLook at meandNot a chance.The alpha commanding tenderness the way he commanded fury.
The command strips me of the last defense I had, which was pretending this was just bodies.
I wrap my legs around his hips and stop fighting the pace. My hands find his back, tracing the scratch marks I left there, andI feel him shudder at the touch, the ridges of torn skin sensitive under my fingertips.
He lifts his head enough to look at me. His eyes are dark and wet and completely unguarded.
"I'm memorizing you," he says, and his voice cracks on the second word, and the crack is the bravest thing I've ever watched a man do because it costs him everything his composure was built to protect.
"I know."
"I don't want to stop."
"Then don't."
His rhythm deepens. His hand slides between us and his thumb finds my clit, the pressure gentle and precise, circling in time with his strokes. The dual sensation builds slower than the first time, deeper, a gathering warmth that starts at the base of my spine and spreads outward until every nerve in my body is humming with it.
The orgasm, when it comes, doesn't break. It opens. A slow, enormous wave that rolls through me from somewhere deep and spills outward, my body clenching around him in long, rhythmic pulses that grip the full length of him and pull, my back arching off the sheets, my thighs shaking where they hold his hips. His name comes out of me raw and wrecked, and I can hear myself saying it and I can hear what it means, and what it means is the thing I haven't said and won't say because the investigation has to come first and the investigation is going to take him from me.
He follows. His hips press deep and hold, and I feel him come inside me in slow, heavy pulses, the heat of him spilling into me while his body locks rigid and his breath stops against my mouth. His hips rock through the last of it in small, involuntary movements, each one pushing the heat deeper, and his hands on my hips are holding, not gripping, and I can feel his fingerstrembling where they press into my skin. The tenderness in the hold is the most terrifying thing he's ever shown me.
I tighten around him deliberately, feeling the last pulses of him inside me, and the sound he makes is quiet and broken and honest in a way that nothing else has ever been.
The silence after is enormous and careful. His weight stays on me. His breathing evens out in stages. My hand rests against his chest, feeling the heartbeat slow.
His face in the aftermath is a face I haven't seen before. Not the composure rebuilt. Not the surface going back on. The face of a man who doesn't have the energy to pretend and has decided not to try, and what's underneath the pretending is younger than I expected, and more tired, and looking at me with the particular focus of someone who has just realized that the thing he's most afraid of losing is the thing he can't protect.
We lie in June's ironed sheets and we don't speak, and the not-speaking holds more than any conversation we've had. The house settles around us. The October cold presses at the windows. Somewhere up on the ridge, the mine holds its dead, and one of them has my father's eyes, and the man lying beside me with his arm across my waist just learned that the family who raised him put her there.
"What happens now?" I ask the ceiling.
"You know what happens." His voice is low, rough from what we just did and what we're about to say. "You take what you have to Naomi. You take it to the county commission. You take it wherever it needs to go."
"And what about us?"
His arm tightens across my waist. The grip is possessive and involuntary and costs him more than anything he said downstairs.
