Page 63 of Graceless

I lifted her — she weighs nothing; she weighs more than the world — and her legs came around me and the kitchen went past and the curtain went past, and I ducked my head under the rod with her mouth still on mine and set her down in the lamplight, my control fraying along every seam, both of us listening to it fray.

Her hands were under my shirt, flat on my chest, and she pulled back an inch and said it breathless, against my jaw:

"I still have questions. A lot of them. This is not going to distract me."

"I didn't think it would." Her pulse was against my mouth. "But⁠—"

Whatever I meant to protest died where it stood. She wanted me — I could hear it, feel it through every place we touched, louder than my objection, older than my discipline — and I stopped arguing with the only force in creation I have no argument for.

Cate

Before, I hadn’t known what I was holding.

That was what I understood, standing in the lamplight with my hands going up under his shirt along the furnace-warm impossible make of him. Now I knew. And my hands were steady.

I undressed him. He let me — stood there and let it happen, and I took my time, because taking my time is the one fluency I have.

When the shirt came away I walked around him. The full circuit.

Looking at him in light was not a comfortable thing to do. In the dark my hands had told me beautiful and left out the rest. The lamp left nothing out. He was made the way weapons are made — nothing spare, nothing soft, a symmetry so exact it stopped being handsome and became something my body filed under run.

And he stood absolutely still, stiller than people can stand, watching me circle him with eyes gone from near-black to burning.

Every prey instinct I own lay down flat. Every other instinct I own leaned in.

The terror and the wanting come off the same live wire.

“Cate.” Low. A warning with no enforcement mechanism whatsoever.

“Quiet. I’m working.”

The scars under lamplight were nothing like the scars under my fingertips in the dark. Long, silvered, symmetrical. Terribly clean. The work of somebody thorough.

I stood behind him and looked and let him feel me looking. That was the part costing him. I could see it in the set of his shoulders; in the way the stillness gathered along his spine like the moment before glass either holds or doesn’t.

Being seen, for this man, was the actual undressing. Everything else was buttons.

“Tell me if this⁠—”

“Touch them,” he said.

It came out rough and fast, ahead of whatever usually processes his sentences. And then, quieter, and I felt him pay for it:

“Please.”

Please.

The same coin I’d spent in this room with my heart going like a dropped pot lid — stay, I’m asking — spent back to me by a thing that predates the language it asked in.

So, I did what he did when I asked. I didn’t make it gentle-careful, hedged, revocable.

I put both palms flat on his back, on the ruin, full weight.

The sound he made was not a human sound.

Whatever went through him went through him like a tide, a long shudder down the whole architecture of him, and the room hummed low enough to feel in my sternum, and under my hands the scars stayed exactly what they were, and I did not take my hands off them.

Then he turned around inside my arms.