Thelightthroughthetent wall is flat grey and in it I can see his face and he can see mine and there is nowhere to hide and I have stopped wanting to.
He's watching me. “Morning, beautiful.”
I push him onto his back.
He goes. Hands dropping to his sides, watching me climb over him with that same unhurried attention, and something about being looked at like that makes me want to give him something worth seeing.
I start at his throat. Work my way down his chest, his stomach, feeling the shift in his breathing under my mouth. His hands come up and then deliberately drop back. He's letting me do this. Choosing to lie still while I take my time and I feel that choice like a dare.
I get my mouth on his cock and his whole body goes tight.
I take my time. Learn what makes his jaw lock, what makes his hands finally move into my hair. He's quiet but his body. Hiships lift once, just once, and he stops them, and I feel the effort of that restraint and do it again deliberately until he makes a low sound I feel in my sternum.
His hand tightens in my hair.
"Come here," he says. Not a request.
He pulls me up his body and rolls me under him in one movement and I don't have time to think before his hand is between my thighs and he finds out exactly what doing that to him has done to me.
"Fuck, Nyla."
He gets two fingers inside me and works them slow while his thumb presses against my clit and I grip the sleeping bag and stop trying to think. He watches my face the entire time. Reads every response the way he reads terrain — adjusting, returning to what matters, and he's learned enough since last night that he knows exactly when I'm close and exactly how to keep me there without tipping me over.
"Please," I say. I have no pride left about it.
"Please what." His fingers don't stop. "Tell me."
"I need you inside me."
He holds me at that edge for another excruciating moment and then he pulls his hand away and pushes inside me in one long stroke and I gasp at the fullness of it, the sudden completeness, and he stops there with his forehead against my temple and breathes.
Then he starts to move.
Deep and deliberate. His weight on his forearms, his face close to mine, his eyes open and on me the whole time. This is the grey morning light and nowhere to hide and he sees all of it — my face coming apart under him, every sound I make, every time my breath breaks. He finds the angle that undoes me and works it with the patience of a man who does everything at exactly the pace it requires and not a second faster.
"You feel, fuck!" he starts.
"Don't stop," I say. "Whatever you were going to say, don't stop."
He drops his head and keeps going. Gets his hand between us again and presses his thumb against my clit and the combination of that and the depth of him and the grey light and his breath in my hair is too much and I come with my whole body, shaking, gripping him, his name in my mouth.
He follows me. Pushes deep and holds there and goes still and heavy, his face pressed into my hair, his hand flat on my hip, and I feel him let go, coming inside of me.
We lie there in the quiet afterward. His weight on me, the cold air on my face, his heat everywhere else. Outside the meadow sits grey and silent. The light through the tent wall shifts from grey to white-gold, the sun clearing the ridge, and I watch it and know what it means.
The morning is real. The walk out is real.
His hand spreads flat on my stomach. Warm and certain.
I put my hand over his.
We'll go. In a minute. Just not yet.
We break camp in the early light, working around each other in the small space with the ease of people who've been doing this for days. I carry more than my share without being asked and he notices without saying so. The meadow is silver-grey and wet with dew, the peaks catching the first proper light in shades I still don't have names for. I stand and look at it for a long moment before I shoulder my pack.
We hit the main trail at the junction and turn right, toward the trailhead, and I feel the direction of it immediately — the descent in both senses. Every step takes us closer to the world that has been waiting, patient and unimpressed by my absence. My shoulders come up half an inch without my permission.
Dawson doesn't say anything. He just shortens his stride until we're walking level, side by side where the trail allows. It doesn't fix anything. It helps anyway.
