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He shouted her name as they climaxed, bodies jumping, shuddering, knocking against one another then flying free in an edgeless, borderless sky.
Drum dropped to her side and curled around her, his chest heaving, his face tucked into the back of her neck. His fingers played over the tattoo on her side. “Unbelievable.”
His voice was barely there, but she’d echo the sentiment if she could make her own mouth work. Between them they hadn’t managed to get her bra off, and the heat was leaking out of their bodies fast.
She rolled away to pull the quilt out from under them and he quirked a brow, shifting to let her, eyes greedy. “Go leave a message, make your excuses for work. I’m not letting you sleep yet, and when I do you’re going to need a week for it.”
28: Small Talk
The blood brain barrier protects the central nervous system from common bacterial infections in the blood that might cause damage. It was an ingenious system until it broke down. Drum’s blood brain barrier was shattered the moment he entered Foley.
That moment she gave all of herself to him, he was irrevocably changed. Bones, blood, breathing, biology—all altered beyond expectation by the union with her.
He had no illusions, he knew he wasn’t normal, no longer competent in the usual ways and certainly not in the way he’d worked and lived before the cave. He’d always known he had an obsessive personality. That’d been part of his extraordinary success; his spectacular failure, his ability to focus intently from a young age, to stay on course and not get sidetracked.
He’d struggled not to turn Foley into an obsession, made himself passive and let her take the lead, but now she was all he could see, think, feel. She was his heroine, his morphine, his anaesthetic. His immunity against his own inconsolable state.
He watched her wrap herself in the cashmere robe and retrieve her work bag from the stairs. She left a message for the brown-eyed Gabriella, another for Adro. She lied to both of them, telling them she felt unwell and would take a few days’ sick leave. Then she turned the phone off and threw it aside.
“Are you tired?” he said.
She’d been distressed and wrung out when she came downstairs from his office with the truth in her grasp, and yet she’d come into his arms and she’d wanted him. He didn’t understand how that was possible, but there was time to question it later, when the disease of her had stopped raging through his body like no sensation ever had.
Her hands were at the tie of the robe. “I think I died and went to heaven.”
So maybe that was it. It wasn’t his blood brain barrier, it was all of him and all of her and they’d mucked with some dimensional reality that allowed them to be this way with no repercussions.
“I just lied my face off and I don’t feel bad about it.” She laughed. “God is going to get me.”
Maybe there was a God. Foley could almost make him believe there was a divine plan, a cosmic arrangement that allowed for her to exist to make up for all the wrong he’d done.
“He’ll have to come through me first.”
“We need to talk.” She tied a bow. She’d need a double knot; she’d need a steel cage to keep his hands off her.
Or she’d need one word, one syllable, and he’d honour that too.
He’d talk, but there were things he wanted more. Her scent, her voice, her skin, her limbs shifting from soft to rigid to replete as he held them.
“Drum, when you look at me like that, I know talking isn’t what’s on your mind.”
He laughed. “We’ve tried words. We know each other well enough through words. I want to know you through your skin.”
A hand went to her hip. “What we just did, that was—”
“Small talk.” He flipped the covers back. “Come here and I’ll tell you what I want to talk about.”
She took two steps towards the bed. “We need to really talk.”
“We need to sleep and shower and at least one of us has a job they’re meant to be at.”
She undid the bow. “See your point.”
He saw shoulder, bra strap, silk-covered breast as she shrugged the robe off. Ribs, waist, that flush of colour tattooed on her side, the puzzle piece that was shaped like an F, then hips, a stud in her belly button, lean, muscular legs. She put her hand behind her back and unhooked her bra and he saw another piercing, a simple ring through her nipple and that did a whole lot of unexplained, unexpected things to his blood flow again; thinned it out, made it hum, race, put his mouth in gear without a filter again.
“If I’d have known you had that. Fuck, I want you.”
“If you’d have ever bothered to check me out properly you might’ve worked it out. You were so busy being cautious you nearly missed the fun.”
