We sat on the bed. The pretense was gone.
"What's your real name?" she asked.
"Ethan."
She smiled. Small, surprised. "Ethan. That’s very normal."
"Sorry to disappoint."
"No, I just..." She laughed, quiet, almost involuntary. "I've been having this conversation in my head for three weeks and I didn't even know your name."
"What else do you want to know?"
"Everything."
She pulled her legs up on the bed and turned to face me. We talked. Not fragments and silences this time. Real conversation, the kind that happens when two people have run out of reasons to hold anything back.
She told me about her father. The love that was also ownership. She told me about her mother leaving when she was nine, about looking at her father's face and deciding she would never give him another reason to lose someone. She told me about growing up in the Jackals' world, loving it completely because it was the only world she knew, and understanding clearly, with the precision of a woman who paid attention, exactly what it cost and exactly who paid.
I told her about the military. Not the whole of it, but enough. The discharge. The line I'd held that destroyed my career. Themen I'd refused to betray and the brass that punished me for the refusal. How Angel had found me in a bar in Missoula when I was heading nowhere good and offered me a purpose before he offered me a patch.
"Why are you so quiet?" she asked.
"Habit. You learn to be invisible when being visible gets people hurt."
"That's not what I asked. Habit is how. I asked why."
I looked at her. She was sitting close, her knee touching mine, her shoulders down, the wariness gone. She was asking the question nobody asked because nobody got close enough to think of it.
"Because I'm afraid of what happens if I'm not."
She held my gaze. Then she leaned in and kissed me. Slowly. Her hand on my jaw, the way she'd held me in the corridor, firm, deliberate, an act of claiming. No force. Pure choice.
I kissed her back. Careful. Measured. This was nothing like the corridor. The urgency was gone. In its place was something slower, deeper, a want that wasn't racing because it was planning to last.
I laid her back on my bed. Took her jacket off first, then her shirt, lifting it over her head while she raised her arms for me. Her bra was dark against her skin. I unhooked it slowly, watching the straps slide down her shoulders, watching the fabric fall away. She was beautiful. I'd known that in the corridor but I hadn't had the time to look properly, hadn't had the luxury of seeing her without urgency clouding everything. Now I looked. The full curve of her breasts, the dip of her waist, the soft swell of her stomach where our child was growing. Fourteen years between us. Her skin smooth where mine was scarred. Her body soft where mine was hard. The weight of her trust, and the care it demanded.
I traced my thumb along her collarbone. Down between her breasts. Across her ribs, feeling them expand with each breath. She shivered, not from cold.
"You're staring," she said.
"Yeah."
"It's intense."
"I know." I bent my head and pressed my mouth to her throat. "Tell me to stop and I'll stop."
"Don't you dare."
I kissed down her body. Slowly, deliberately, taking my time with every inch. Her throat, her collarbone, the space between her breasts. I cupped one, my thumb circling her nipple, feeling it harden under my touch while I kissed the other, my tongue tracing the curve, drawing a sound from her that was low, involuntary. I spent time there. Learning what pressure made her gasp, what rhythm made her hips shift against the sheets. She arched into my mouth, her fingers threading through my hair, holding me against her.
Below her navel I pressed my mouth to her skin, my hands framing her hips, and I stayed there. Breathing. Feeling the heat of her against my lips, the slight firmness beneath the skin that was almost imperceptible. What we'd made in a dim corridor seven weeks ago.
I unfastened her jeans. Drew them down her legs along with her underwear, kissing the inside of her thigh as I went, the soft skin behind her knee. She lay bare on my bed, her hair spread across my pillow, breathing hard.
Then I kissed lower. She gasped when my mouth found her, her fingers threading into my hair, her thighs falling open. I took my time. Slow circles with my tongue, then firmer, then slow again, building her up and easing off until her thighs were shaking and her hand was fisted in the pillow and she was saying please against the ceiling. I worked her with my lips, my tongue,my fingers inside her, curling, searching, finding the spot that made her back arch off the bed. This wasn’t technique. It was devotion. A man on his knees in front of the only person who'd made him feel human in twenty years.
She came with a long, shuddering cry that filled the small room, her hand fisting the sheets, her back arching, her body pulsing against my mouth. I stayed with her through it, gentling, easing her down.
