"I'm not saying anything."
Her hips roll against my hand and whatever she was going to say dissolves. I work her until her breathing goes uneven and her grip on my arm tightens, and then she pulls me up by the collar before she gets there, stubborn to the bone, refusing to let me have it that cleanly. I respect it, but I pull her closer for it.
She gets my belt undone and wraps her hand around my cock and the sound I make is not dignified. She notices immediately.
"There he is," she says, quietly triumphant.
"There she is," I say back, and she bites the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling and fails.
I take her wrists and lay her down. When I push inside her the smile goes, replaced by something unguarded and undefended, her body going still for one suspended moment, her whole body stilling for one suspended moment before she exhales against my throat. I tilt her chin back with two fingers. She holds my gaze through it — furious at being so completelyseen, and present anyway, which has always been the most defining thing about her.
I move and she meets me. Not yielding, but matching, her hips rising to answer mine with the same stubbornness she has brought to every argument and every crossing and every dark passage between us. There's no softness in it. There is something better than that: the gravity of two people who have chosen this without flinching, the grief underneath it with anger threaded through it, and the need that neither of us had the grace to outrun.
"Stop looking at me like that," she says, breathless.
"No."
She pulls me down harder in answer. I find the pressure and the angle that makes her control slip until strategy is useless — I just stay there, and watch her try to hold herself together, and feel the incremental loss of the battle in every point of contact between us. Her jaw unclenches. Her eyes lose focus and she drags them back to mine. The armor comes off one piece at a time and she lets it go without surrendering it, which is the most remarkable thing I have ever witnessed.
"Don't stop," she says finally, quiet, the sarcasm entirely gone. Just her voice, stripped of everything except the ask. I don't.
When she comes it moves through her whole body — her nails finding my shoulder, a broken sound torn from somewhere below composure, her gaze staying locked on mine all the way through it. That is what undoes me. Not the heat of her or the sound or the way she shudders against me, but the fact that she looks at me and stays. I follow her with my face against her hair and nothing left of the restraint I have spent four weeks maintaining, and for a moment there is nothing in this rotting cabin but the fire and the storm and us two, and it is enough. It's more than enough.
We stay still for a moment. Her breathing slows. Mine takes longer.
"Well," her voice vibrates against my collarbone.
"Yes."
"That was?—"
"Yes."
She laughs once, and it reaches my chest like something I have no name for and I'm not ready to look at directly.
Before the dark shifts toward gray she is asleep with her hand loose against my ribs. I lie still and look at the ceiling of this rotting cabin with the documents folded inside my coat and an enemy still shaping every road ahead, and understand that I am no longer capable of the decision I would have made about her four weeks ago.
I feel myself drift into sleep for a short time. Then, she stirs as the light changes. I open my eyes as the memory reaches her. For one second, she looks almost exposed. Then she smooths it away.
"Theren will come looking," she states.
"Yes."
A beat. Neither of us moves.
"Right," she sits up, and begins the efficient work of putting herself back together. I watch her do it and think how inconvenient this is, I would never have let this happen to me before. I jump up. Check the door. The storm has spent itself in the night, leaving the world outside indifferent to whatever happened inside these four walls. Good. Indifference I know how to work with. Whatever this is, I haven't learned how to work with it yet. I don't know if I can. But I already know I won't be able to leave it alone.
13
CORRINE
The cold finds me first, before the guilt does. We are an hour out from the cabin and the wind off the ridge has teeth, and I am thinking about nothing useful—the give of the half-frozen ground under my boots—when Leoric drops back without a word and puts himself to my left, between me and the open drop where the slope falls away into nothing.
He does it with no announcement. No glance to see if I noticed. Just a body the size of a doorway, sliding into the place a caster's line would come from. This is the old reflex of me that I don't warn people about. Not the wanting—I understood the wanting, even when I refused it. The wanting at least had the decency to feel like betrayal. What I didn't account for is the morning after, when that wanting went quiet and what's left is this: embarrassing attention to the heat coming off him, to the fact that he chose the cold side of the path so I wouldn't have it. I keep waiting for shame to arrive and burn it clean. It comes, but it doesn't burn. It just sits beside the tenderness and lets it be.
I lit a fortress to kill men just like him. I held his chest last night and enjoyed it. I'm confused to how I can be both.
"You're favoring the shoulder again," he says. Not gently. A field note.
