Page 21 of Faultline

He pulls back and pushes in again, deeper, and a cry tears out of my throat that I couldn't have stopped if I wanted to. He sets a pace that's deep and devastating, each stroke a complete withdrawal and return that makes my body clench around him on every push. My wrists stay pinned. His hips roll with controlled power that I feel in my teeth.

"Give it to me," he says, low in my ear.

The command in his voice undoes something I didn't know I was holding. His free hand slides between us, his thumb finding the swollen center of every nerve I have, and the pressure he applies is precise and relentless.

The orgasm doesn't build. It detonates. My whole body seizes, my spine bowing off the mattress against the weight of him. What comes out of my mouth is something between his name and a plea that goes on longer than I thought my lungs could sustain. He works me through every pulse of it, his thumb never easing, his pace never breaking, drawing it out until I'm gasping and boneless and shaking so hard the bed frame rattles against the wall.

He releases my wrists. Both hands grip my hips, lifting me into the angle he wants, and his pace breaks open. The discipline he's worn like armor every second since I met him falls away. What replaces it is raw and powerful and relentless, driving into me hard enough that the headboard hits the wall and I can hear his breath tearing out of him in ragged bursts.

His fingers dig into my hips hard enough to print themselves into my skin, and I want every mark. His whole body goes rigid above me, the muscles in his arms locked, the tendons in his neck standing out like cables. The sound he makes against my throat when he comes is the first uncontrolled thing I've heard from him since we met. Low and rough and broken open, and it lasts long enough that I feel every pulse of him inside me.

We don't move for a long time. His weight presses me into the mattress. His breath evens out in the curve of my neck. I stare at the ceiling of a room I've never been in and try to reconcile the woman who drove up this mountain this afternoon with the one who just came apart beneath a man she's known for less than a day.

I can't reconcile them. The woman who drove up this mountain was running a tactical calculation about defensible positions and Wi-Fi passwords. This woman is lying in the dark with Liam Stoddard's heartbeat against her sternum and his hand still resting on her hip with a possessiveness that even sleep won't soften.

Neither of us says what this is. No one reaches for an explanation. He pulls me against his chest, his arm banding across my waist with the weight of something that was never casual, and I let him because fighting it would require an honesty I'm not ready for. I close my eyes. The morning can wait.

7

LIAM

The morning comes anyway, the way mornings do when you've asked them not to. Gray light fills the cabin in degrees, seeping through the linen curtains and pooling on the floorboards while the woodstove ticks its way through the last of the overnight coals.

My body registers the time before my eyes open. Years of predawn starts have built an internal clock that doesn't recognize weekends, weather, or a woman pressed against my chest with her hair spread across my pillow and her breathing so steady that moving feels like a violation.

Her weight against me is slight, but the warmth of it has rearranged the geography of the bed. My arm is draped across her waist, the same position it settled into hours ago, and my hand rests where she narrows above the hip, the skin smooth and cool against my palm. Her back curves along my torso. The bones of her spine press into me at intervals, delicate and precise, and I can feel the expansion of her ribs when she breathes in.

The quilt has migrated to her side of the bed, twisted around her legs while I sleep with nothing but the heat of her body between my skin and the cold.

The light moves across the room by the minute. I watch it trace the angle of her shoulder, the ridge of her collarbone, the soft dip at the base of her throat where her pulse beats in a rhythm I can feel against my forearm.

My hand has tightened on her hip in my sleep, fingers pressing into the same places they pressed hours ago, and I let the grip hold longer than I should before I pull away.

I withdraw my hand carefully, pull my arm away from her waist, and slide out of bed without disturbing the mattress more than I have to. The floorboards are cold under my feet.

I find my jeans on the chair where I left them, pull them on, and leave the room without looking back. Looking back would mean acknowledging that what happened in my bed changed the terms of something I thought was settled.

The kitchen is the same kitchen it's always been. The stove needs feeding. The water for coffee needs heating.

The window above the sink faces the tree line, and the tree line needs reading. It's needed reading every morning since my grandfather built this cabin and set the routine that three generations of Stoddards have followed like standing orders.

I feed the woodstove, start the coffeepot, light the burner with a match because the igniter quit working last spring and I keep forgetting to replace it. The routine anchors me. The routine is the thing I've built my solitary life inside, and it holds me upright the way rebar holds concrete.

I take my coffee to the kitchen window and look at the forest.

The tree line sits dark against a sky turning from gray to pale gold along the eastern ridge. White spruce, birch, a stand of cottonwood along the creek drainage that has started dropping leaves. The temperature dropped into the twenties overnight, and the dew froze on the lower branches in a crust that catches the first light.

I scan the same as always. Canopy health and the game trails where elk cross to reach the creek, then the drainage culvert south of the access road where the root systems of the oldest spruce are showing erosion I'll need to address before the ground freezes.

Everything is where it should be. The forest confirms it, the same quiet confirmation it offers when rain is coming or when a winter will be hard. The fact that I'm standing here with an ache between my shoulder blades and the taste of a woman on my tongue doesn't change the spruce or the light or the creek.

It changes me. The forest doesn't care. The forest has watched Stoddards make worse decisions for a hundred years and kept growing.

I'm halfway through my second cup when she walks into the kitchen. She stops in the doorway and takes in the room with the sharp, cataloging attention she turned on the evidence spread across the Ridgeline table yesterday.

She's wearing the thermal she arrived in yesterday, the one I pulled over her head beside the woodstove. It falls to mid-thigh. Her hair is loose and tangled, dark against the cream-colored fabric, and her feet are bare on the same floorboards I crossed ten minutes ago.

When she reaches for her phone, the thermal catches against her hip and rides up. I catch the edge of a bruise beneath the hem. Four fingertip marks, vivid against pale skin, exactly where my hand held her.