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“Yes,” she breathed as he entered her. “Yes.” She wasn’t wet, but she didn’t care. It wasn’t about pleasure. It was about much more than that. It was about survival, a form she hadn’t even known existed. She was trying to save her soul, and she looked in his eyes and knew he was too.
He began moving, plunging into her. He wasn’t gentle, but she didn’t want gentle. She wanted hard and pounding. She wanted it scored into her flesh. She wanted it to smash and beat out the smells and the sounds and the feelings she’d experienced against her will. “Harder,” she breathed. He complied. He didn’t have to tell her he needed this too. They couldn’t have explained it to anyone else in all the world so that it sounded right or good, or even sane. But they had been there, and they were here now, and they knew.
They knew.
She wrapped her legs around his hips, and then she did fall back, landing on the pillow. He followed her down, still thrusting, and she chanted in his ear, “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” The word was healing. It was medicine. It was the beginning of knitting some terrible gash closed, tiny stitch by tiny stitch.
It wouldn’t close the wound, but in that moment, it felt like a start. One so desperately needed.
When he came, he came with a growl and a sob mixed up into one. She tightened her legs around him, and she held him there, breathing inthe scent of his skin. She realized she was crying, hot tears that leaked from her eyes and dripped into her ears.
Their breath evened, muscles loosening as she lowered her legs to the bed and he pulled himself away from her. There were no words, no eye contact as they sat up. Evan brought the discarded towel around his waist, and Noelle covered herself with the one she’d slept in.
“Three hours,” he murmured, looking at the bedside clock. “We slept three hours.”
“I feel like I could sleep for eternity,” she said as he stood.
He glanced back at her, a small sad smile playing on his lips. He didn’t say anything, but she knew what he was thinking.We avoided that. You will sleep for eternity someday, but not yet.
Not yet.
She stood, too, smoothing her hair.
Evan held up his bandaged hand. “Do you think you might ...” He nodded to the bathroom, and it took her a moment to understand, but then she did.
“Of course,” she said.
Evan turned on the shower, and they both dropped their towels. She supposed it was odd that they weren’t embarrassed by their nudity, but in some ways, she felt that she’d spent the last however long with him, completely stripped bare. What was naked flesh when a person had seen your soul?
They’d had sex, and yet it almost hadn’t been sexual, in a way she was too cloudy headed and close up to make sense of. Maybe later she’d be able to articulate the meaning of it, but now she neither wanted nor needed to.
They stepped beneath the hot spray, and Noelle used the bar of soap to wash his body. She poured a generous amount of shampoo into her hands and scrubbed his hair and the beard that had grown on his face, and then she repeated the process.
When she was done, she washed herself again, including her hair this time. A few hours ago, she’d wanted a shower more than anythingin the world, but she had been too exhausted to do more than the minimum. Now she was thorough about it, leisurely.
She turned, and wordlessly Evan used his good hand to lather the entirety of her back. “I’m sorry,” he murmured as he rubbed the soap in circles on her skin. “I’m so damn sorry.”
She hung her head and closed her eyes. She knew what he was apologizing for, and she supposed she felt the same, or she should. Their sex had been necessary, but in some way, they’d used each other. They’d used each other’s bodies to relieve their pain. She wouldn’t take it back, and she didn’t think he would, either, but still. Surely the regret would come later, and she’d be glad she’d said the words. “No, I’m sorry,” she told him.
He put his forehead on her shoulder, and she felt his breath on her skin. “I’m sorrier,” he said. “Seriously, Noelle—”
“I’m the sorriest,” she said. She turned, taking him in her arms.
He released a breath, mixed with the smallest of laughs. “Stop. I’m—” He lifted his head, his eyes widening, and that’s when she heard it too. The approach of vehicles.
Evan turned off the water, jumping from the shower and grabbing a towel as he raced for the window. “It’s my dad,” he called, panic and elation and a hundred other emotions in his voice.
Noelle grabbed a towel and dried herself hastily and then reached for the only clothes she had—items that were now all but oily, bloody, disintegrating rags—and began to put them on as what sounded like a fleet of vehicles arrived outside their room.
Evan had pulled on his clothing and was now moving the items of furniture he’d piled in front of the door. How he’d done that with one hand and half dead from exhaustion, she wasn’t sure, but he had. She ran to him, beginning to help, when a loud knock came at the door.
“Evan!”
“Dad, hold on, I’m moving things. Hold on!”
“Jesus Christ, hurry, Evan!” There was the sound of heavy commotion outside, as though Evan’s father had brought a hundred men.
She and Evan huffed and puffed and pulled until there was room for the door to be wedged open, and then Evan turned the two locks and a man—his father—came pushing through the door. He let out a sob as he took his son in his arms, shaking as he held him. Then he stood back and took Evan’s face in his hands and searched it as though looking for the injuries he might have imagined. Where his cheek had been ripped open just above his patchy beard, there was the start of a nasty scar. Apart from that, and his terribly broken hand, Evan looked like Evan, though.
