Page 73 of Faceless

His hands tightened on her shoulders. She heard the beginning of something, twice, three times, each time stopped before it became a sentence that could be said aloud.

“I have sworn my life to you,” he said at last, the whisper breaking on it. “I want you to understand that. Whatever else is true, whatever I cannot tell you, that is true.”

“Then stop leaving. I cannot live on nothing. I have been on nothing for almost three months, and I cannot — do you hear me — I cannot go on with nothing!”

He groaned against her hair — not a word, barely a breath — and then the last of his resistance gave way. His arms came around her with a force that was almost desperate, and he kissed her again, and this time there was nothing deliberate in it at all, nothing of the man who had spent months portioning himself out to her in disciplined fragments. It was want, entire and undisguised. It was the answer to every evening he had left her wanting more.

He lifted her.

The breath tore out of her. Her hands went to his shoulders and gripped hard, not from fear but from the sheer shock of being taken up so easily, so certainly, and for one wild instant, the darkness itself tipped with her. Then he had her against him entirely, both arms around her, and he crossed the room as if he had rehearsed the path a hundred times in his body, and laid her on the bed. Perhaps he had.

He came over her. She had never seen any part of him, not one line of face or shoulder or hand, and the strangeness of that should have frightened her. What rose in her instead was the fierce, humiliating relief of having him near enough to touch without pretence. Her hands went to the lapels of his coat and held on as though she meant to keep him there by force if she must.

His mouth found her throat.

The sigh she made was small and helpless and entirely unlike her, and the effect of it on him was immediate. His hand went down rather than up — to her side, her hip, the muslin gathering under his palm — and then he was finding the hem of her gown and dragging it upward, as if he could not have done anything else.

She let him. She helped him.

The cool air of the room found her stockinged calf, and then her knee, and then the bare skin above her stocking, and his hand was there too, warm and not certain in its movement. The gown caught somewhere under her hip, and he pulled at it, and a sharp rip of a seam giving seemed to tear through the room with disproportionate force.

He stopped at once. “I am—”

“Do not apologise.”

“I have torn—”

“I do not care.” She reached up, found his hands, and put one back where it had been. “Do not stop.”

His breath came almost as a wheeze. “Are you certain?”

Not a question, quite. A plea for absolution before the fall.

“Yes.”

His hand moved against her bare skin in the dark, and she heard him make a sound that was not a word. She turned her face into his shoulder. The wool of his coat against her cheek. The smell of him — wine on his breath and cold air and something underneath that she had never been near enough to know.

His fingers found her where she had not known a hand could find her, and the gasp that came out of her was nothing she had chosen.

“I have you,” he said against her ear. The whisper was wrecked. He did not seem to know he was speaking. “I have you. I have you.”

She was holding the back of his neck. She did not remember reaching for it. His coat was rough under her fingers, and his hair at the nape was soft, and she could not arrange her thoughts because her thoughts had stopped arranging themselves. He moved his hand, and she made a sound she had not known she could make, and his mouth was making love to her ear, her neck, her brow, and there was nothing controlled or patient about either of them now.

Then he was over her properly, and his weight came down, and he was asking her something with his body before he asked it with words, and she answered him by taking his hand from where it was and putting both her hands on his back and pulling.

He came into her in the dark.

What she had been told to expect, by the women she had been told it by, was not what happened. There was a moment of his being still inside her body that should have hurt and did not — there was no time for it to hurt, because what came up in her in the same instant was a recognition so absolute it crowded out everything else — him.

This.

This was him.

The man she had been listening to across a supper table for months was here under her hands and inside her and breathing into her hair, and she had never been so close to a person in her life and would never be again unless it was him.

Then he moved.

The first time he did it, she heard her own breath go out of her and not come back for an alarming stretch.