Page 74 of Faceless

The second time she got the breath back, but it was not the breath she had begun with.

By the third time she had given up trying to keep track of any of it because her body was finding a rhythm she had not ordered it to find, and his hand was at her hip pulling himself deeper into her with each motion, and her hands were in his hair and the small of his back and clutching the fabric of his shirt and she was making sounds that on any other night would have shocked her.

The dark stripped everything down to touch and warmth and breath until each small thing became enormous — his hip at the inside of her thigh; the roughness of his breathing against her ear; the smell of sweat and cold air and man; his name, when she said it, breaking out of her without permission.

“Elizabeth.” The ruin of it — broken down to half syllables as though they cost him everything — and his forehead came down to hers. His breath was unsteady against her mouth. The tremor running through his arms reached her where her own hands gripped him, and she knew, with a clarity that went through her like heat, that he was not merely taking. He was falling.

She tightened her arms around him.

He moved harder. The rhythm of him changed, less deliberate, more urgent, and she answered him without deciding to, her hips rising to meet his with a will of their own. She heard her own voice making a sound that was not quite his name and not quite a word, and his arms came up under her shoulders and gathered her against him entirely, and there was nothing left between them that was not warmth and breath and the dark.

Something she did not have a name for built and built. Her hands were gripping the back of his shirt. Her face was against his neck. Whatever was happening in her body had got past her ability to attend to it; it was running ahead of her, taking her with it, and she was not afraid. She was not afraid of any of it.

Then it broke.

She cried out with an exquisite sort of agony she had never felt in her life, and he held her through the whole of it, his face in her hair, his hand at the back of her head, his body still moving inside hers as though he could not have stopped if he had wanted to. Her body kept arching for some time after the sound was done, after the tremors had ceased racking her. He was murmuring something against her temple, broken pieces of it, her name, and yes, and what might have been thank God — she did not know, she could not separate one word from another, she was not trying.

He went over the edge after her. She held him as he did. The sound he made was not a word; it was lower and rougher than anything she had heard from him before, and he buried it against her shoulder, and his whole body went rigid and then heavy, and his breath went out of him in a long shudder, and he was still.

His weight came down on her. She did not mind it. Her hand found the back of his head in the dark, her fingers in his hair. He did not move for some time. He was breathing into her shoulder, and his hand was at her waist, and she was holding him, and the dark was not the same dark it had been an hour ago.

She shifted one palm on his chest and felt his heart slow beneath it. It was rapid at first, then thick. Under her hand, there was a man’s heart and warmth and the heavy astonishment of having crossed some invisible boundary from which there was no return, and she lay still and was not sorry.

His breathing changed again. She heard it before he moved — the painful effort of gathering his conscience back around himself. Then he stirred. His hand came to her face in the dark, his fingers moving into her hair, finding the strands at her temple and drawing them back with a tenderness that was almost unbearable. His lips came to her forehead. Soft. Not the kiss of their earlier hours. Something else entirely. Something that felt far more dangerous.

She heard him draw a breath.

She heard him try to release it evenly.

He did not succeed. The breath came out broken, caught somewhere in the middle, and then there was silence, and she could hear him fighting for the next one.

“Are you—” The words thinned almost to nothing, the whisper worn through. “Did I — are you hurt?”

“No.”

He made a sound. Not a word. Something beneath words, and the something had a ragged edge to it that she had not heard from him before.

Then, carefully, he sat up.

The mattress shifted. He sat at the edge of the bed in the dark, and she lay still and listened to the cost of it — the long silence before he could speak, the breath he had to find first.

“I am sorry.” The whisper was barely there. He pressed on through it. “I am so sorry.”

“You did not hurt me.”

“That is not—” She heard his breath go unsteady again. “That is not what I am sorry for.”

“Then what?”

He did not answer immediately. She heard the long working of it — not choosing words but trying to hold the ones he had.

“You did not know,” he said at last. “You could not have chosen freely. I have… there are things I cannot give you yet, things you would have needed, and I told myself I would not — that it was yours to decide when I could offer you more — that this was not mine to take before then.” The whisper broke on itself. “I despise myself for what I have done to you.”

“You have not—”

“I have.” The force of it surprised her — the whisper pushed to its limit, as close to raised as she had ever heard it. “You had every right. You had every right to know what you were accepting before you accepted it. And I took that from you. I have been taking it since July, and I took more of it tonight, and I—” He stopped. She heard him press both hands over his face. She heard the sob he was trying not to make behind them.

She sat up in the dark and reached for him.