"Where's your bag?"
"My bag?"
"The one you had with you on the road that night. Where is it?"
“It’s…it’s in the closet." She started to ask why and I cut her off.
"Just get it for me, Melissa. Please, this is important.”
She found it and brought it to me. The canvas duffel she'd told me that she’d packed for a weekend away two months ago. Iturned it over, running my fingers along the seams, the stitching, the lining. I wasn't sure what I was looking for until I found it. A ridge in the bottom panel. Something small and hard sewn into the fabric with stitches that didn't match the rest.
I ripped the lining open. She started to protest and stopped in her tracks when I held up what I’d found.
A tracker. Small, black, professional. Sewn into the lining with neat, careful stitches that said this wasn't improvised. Tagged. She'd been tagged for insurance. The way you'd label inventory so you could find it if it walked off the shelf.
She stared at it. I watched her face and saw the moment it landed. Every step she'd run in the dark. Every night in this room thinking she was safe. Every morning waking up and believing the distance meant something. She'd been a dot on someone's screen the whole time. She'd brought them here.
I dropped the tracker on the floor and stamped on it. My boot came down hard, the plastic cracking, the circuit board splintering under my heel. I did it again, grinding it into the floorboards, twisting, destroying every fragment. It was pointless now. They had the coordinates. They'd already been in the bar. But these men had tagged her like cargo and the rage in my blood needed somewhere to go so I crushed it until there was nothing left but dust and wiring pressed into the wood.
I was breathing hard. My hands were shaking.
I looked up. She was looking at me.
The rage was still there. Humming in my blood, running through my hands, filling the room with a voltage that had nowhere left to go. The tracker was shattered plastic under my boot. The men were gone for now at least. And this woman was standing three feet from me with her jaw set, her eyes locked on mine. Want. Raw, certain, and aimed directly at me.
She stepped forward and put her hands on my chest.
Her palms flat against my shirt, her fingers spread over the fabric. She was shaking, but the gesture was certain. A woman who'd had every choice stripped from her, and she was making this one.
"Melissa."
“Don’t worry, I know exactly what I'm doing."
"Tell me you're sure."
Her eyes didn't waver. "I'm sure."
I looked at her hands on my chest. Looked at her face. Dark eyes, dark hair, her jaw set in the way I was learning meant she'd decided and the rest of the world could catch up or get out of the way. She wasn't fragile. She wasn't doing this because she was afraid. She was angry and alive and choosing me in this moment with the broken tracker on the floor between us, and the choosing was everything.
I kissed her. My hand on the back of her neck, her mouth opening under mine. She grabbed the front of my shirt with both fists and pulled me down, pulled me in, her body pressing up against mine, the heat of her through the layers of fabric, and the four days of holding back, careful distance, palm-up hands on tables, came apart.
Her hands went under my shirt, palms flat against my stomach, sliding up over my ribs, dragging the cotton up my chest. I pulled it over my head and her fingers were on my skin immediately, tracing the lines of ink across my chest, my shoulders, down my arms. Her touch was fast, greedy, exploring, and I stood there and let her take whatever she wanted because she'd spent two months having everything taken and this was hers.
She grabbed my belt. Undid the buckle, pulled the leather through the loops, dropped it on the floor. Unzipped my jeans and pushed them down my hips, and I kicked them off. She looked at me and I could see the want in her face, raw and real,and I put my hands on the hem of her shirt and looked at her and waited until she nodded.
I pulled her shirt off. She reached behind her back and unhooked her bra and dropped it. She was watching my face while she did it, watching what her body did to me, and there was power in the watching. She was reclaiming something. She was sayingthis is mine and I'm choosing what happens to it.
I put my hands on her waist. Her skin was warm and smooth and I could feel the muscles in her stomach tighten under my palms. I slid my hands up her sides, over her ribs, and cupped her breasts. She inhaled sharply, her back arching, pressing herself into my hands. I ran my thumbs over her nipples and she made a sound that went through me like a current, low, rough, wanting.
I put my mouth on her neck. Her collarbone. She was pulling at me, her hands in my hair, on my shoulders, urgent and demanding. I unzipped her jeans and she shoved them down and kicked them off. I pulled her underwear down and she stepped out of them and then she was naked in front of me, dark hair across her shoulders, her chest rising and falling, and I wanted to slow down and I couldn't because she was already reaching for me, pulling my boxers down, wrapping her hand around me. She stroked once, firm and sure, her eyes on mine.
"Don't be gentle," she said.
I pushed into her slowly and the world narrowed to the feel of her. Warm, slick, tight around me, her body opening to let me in and then gripping as I sank deeper. Her breath caught and her hands flew to my arms and she held on, her nails pressing into my biceps, her hips tilting up to take more of me. I bottomed out and held there, my arms braced on either side of her, my whole body shaking with the effort of not moving.
She looked up at me. Her lips were parted, her eyes dark, her chest rising fast.
“More. I need more.”
