The door opens behind me.
She walks out into it. Doesn't stop in the dry under the lintel. Walks straight out into the rain I made, brown skin gone slick with it in a second, her hair flattening dark to her skull, and she comes to where I'm standing in the worst of it and she doesn't ask if I'm okay. There's no version of okay. She knows that. She's the only one who's ever known that.
She just stands there in my storm and lets it hit her too.
"I'm going to take it apart," I tell her. The rain's in my mouth. "All of it. The sessions, the notebook, Wheeler, the whole rotten fucking thing—" The thunder eats the end of it.
"I know," she says.
"I mean it."
"I know you do."
And then I'm kissing her, or she's kissing me. Doesn't matter which. The rain doesn't leave room for the difference. Her mouth is warm in all that cold. My hand goes into her wet hair. The other finds the small of her back and pulls her in against me, hard, hard enough that she gasps into my mouth. She comes up on her toes, fingers fisting in the soaked front of my shirt, kissing me like she's furious too. Like she gets to be furious about my mom.
Somewhere in my chest the thread between us pulls tight and bright. I feel her wanting through it, hot, direct, arriving from outside me, same as her warmth always does.
God, I want her. It's a physical ache sitting right next to the grief. Close enough I can't always tell which one's driving.
A strike comes down close enough to whiten the whole green. She doesn't startle. She fits her body harder against mine.
"Inside," I say against her mouth. "There's a—come inside."
There's a room in the back of Fulmen Hall I've all but lived in this year. A bed, not a cot. A real one, because at some point I stopped pretending I went anywhere else. I get her through the door and the storm keeps going without me. It doesn't need me to stand in it now, it'll run itself for an hour, which is the whole point. I don't want to think. I want the storm doing my thinking for me, out there where I can't reach it, while I do something else entirely in here.
The window over the bed throbs blue with every strike. I don't ground the charge. I could. I know how. I let it ride my skin instead, let it crawl my arms and snap off my knuckles, becausetonight I don't give a damn about being the careful one. I've been careful my whole life over a lie.
I get the soaked shirt off her. My hands aren't steady and I don't try to make them. Her clothes come off wet and difficult, peeled down her legs and dropped to the floor, and we both half-laugh at how impossible it is, the one warm thing in all of this. Then she's bare under me on the bed and the laugh's gone out of both of us.
She's warm everywhere the rain made her cold. That's the first thing my hands tell me, ahead of my eyes, the heat of her under all that wet. I put my mouth to her throat. Her collarbone. The soft underside of one breast. I close my lips around her nipple and she arches up into it, a sound going straight down my spine and into the charge.
"Look at me," she says, fingers twisting into my hair, dragging my head up. Her eyes are steady. Rain still runs off the ends of my hair onto her skin. "I'm here. I'm choosing this. Say you hear me."
"I hear you."
"Then stop being gentle with me."
I move down her body. Hook her thighs up over my shoulders and put my mouth on her. She's already wet—not from the rain, this is hers—and the taste of her undoes something I've kept shut since Oklahoma. For a few seconds there's nothing in my head at all. No mom. No registry. No number in a notebook. Just her, and how good she tastes, and the sound she makes when I get it right.
I work my tongue against her clit. Slow, then not slow. Her hips buck up and I pin them with one forearm and keep going.
The bond opens before I'm ready for it. Her pleasure lands behind my sternum a half-beat before her body shows it, heat arriving from the wrong direction, from outside me. I feel herclimbing in my own chest the same moment her thighs start to shake against my ears.
"There," she gasps. "Right there—don't stop, don't you dare?—"
I don't stop. I push two fingers into her while my mouth stays on her clit. Curl them up to the place that breaks her voice. She comes apart on my hand and my tongue at once. The window cracks across with a strike that lands right on the hall, blue light flooding the room, thunder in the same breath. I drink the sound of her down. I don't lift my head until she's pushing at my shoulders, too sensitive, swearing at me and laughing while she does it.
Then I'm up over her. I take myself in hand and line the head of my cock against her, right where she's wet and open for me. Outside—or maybe it's not outside anymore, maybe it's in the walls now—thunder rolls under everything, steady enough that it's stopped feeling separate from my own pulse. She reaches down and wraps her fingers around the base of my shaft and guides me in herself, her hips tilting up to meet it.
I feel every inch go in. The give of her. Tight enough that she has to work to take the thickest part of me. Her body opens around my cock a fraction at a time, until there's nothing left to give. The heat of her closing around me runs through me top to bottom, the same current finding a different ground.
It's the best I've felt in ten years that didn't come with a price tag on the other side of it. I want to stay right here and never go back to being the guy from an hour ago.
She's tight. Slick. I hold there a second just to feel it, buried in her to the hilt. Her breath is ragged against my jaw. Her heartbeat doubles in my chest where the bond keeps it—two hearts going too fast, and for a second I can't tell whose is whose.
"Don't be careful," she says, reading me like she always does. Her legs come up and lock around my waist. "Not tonight. I don't want careful. I want you."
So she gets me.
