She knows. Course she knows.
She reaches back, fists my hair, drags my mouth to her ear. "Stop cheating," she pants, "andfeelit."
Not fair. Not fair at all.
She does it anyway. And it works.
The odds go.
All of them. The field. The four threads. The cold dead branch with her name on it. Gone. There's only the drag of heraround my cock, tight and slick and mine for exactly as long as she lets me have this, the ache climbing low at the base of my spine, her name breaking out of her one more time, and the undeniable, undefended, alive fact of her under my hands.
I come with my face shoved into her neck. Swearing. Mindless. Every muscle in my back locking up at once, the release tearing through me hard enough that my knees nearly go. For once I am exactly where I am and nowhere else at all.
It's the most honest I've been all year.
After, we slide down the cold wall to the floor because the bed's too far, my back against the stone and her sprawled across my chest, both of us wrecked. The mark still burns low on the back of my hand. I lace my fingers loose over her stomach and she covers them with hers, over the burn, like she did before, and I let myself have it.
The futures are coming back. They always come back. I can already feel the field starting to fan, the branches reaching out from this room toward all the ways tomorrow goes. I keep my eyes shut against them a little longer than I have to.
"You're doing it again," she says, half asleep.
"Doing what?"
"Leaving."
"I'm right here, Grey. Floor and everything. Romantic."
She huffs a laugh against my ribs, and it's worth more than most of the things I've seen.
There's a thing I could say. It's been sitting under my tongue since Kansas and it gets heavier every week. The men say it different ways, or don't, but they've all got it. I won't. I've watched what that word costs in too many branches, watched it turn into the exact lever they use, watched a man undone by it in a quiet hallway because he loved her enough to agree to the small reasonable thing. I'm not handing anyone that lever. Not even her.Especiallynot her.
So I say the other thing.
"Don't say the thing," I tell her hair, light as anything, the grin back in my voice where it's safe.
"Wasn't going to."
"You were absolutely going to. I saw it. Branch with the talking."
"There's no branch with the talking."
"There's always a branch with the talking." I press my mouth to the top of her head. "I outran it. You're welcome."
She doesn't push. She just settles deeper, her breathing going long and even, sliding down toward sleep with my arms around her, and I hold the one branch where she does that—where she falls asleep believing, all the way down, that we all make it out of this building alive.
I don't tell her about the other odd. The one I never say out loud, the one that isn't about her at all. The swallowed stone behind my ribs, the number with my own name on it, the branch I've stopped checking because it never moves no matter how I deal it.
Tonight she gets to think we all make it.
That one I'll carry by myself.
23
EVERLY
You can't ask a building where the missing went.
Brittany worked that out before any of us did. Three nights ago, cross-legged on her bed with Herbert walking the back of her hand and the doom metal turned down to a heartbeat so the house couldn't hear her think.
