Page 13 of Fifth
“Tell me about the lake,” he urged.
“Cold,” she said, and the word hollowed without her permission. “So cold it burned the bottom of my feet when I ran the first ten steps. Then perfect. Dragonflies. Such glorious colors and movement. And there was a pier that creaked when the boards swelled. Iliked the creak. It sounded like the place was talking back to me.”
He listened as though the details were weapons he could use to fight the dark that surrounded them. “And your grandmother?”
Hannah buried her face against him. “She laughed like a bell. Sharp and bright. She smelled like soap that came in paper, not plastic. She taught me to sew. Iwas terrible.” The ache rose again and she choked it back. “She taught me to repair things anyway. You don’t throw away what can be made good.”
“Your grandmother is correct,” he said. “I will do what she taught you. Iwill repair.”
She stared at him. “What do you think you’re repairing?”
“Anything and everything we will need repaired. Iso vow.”
Her eyes burned. “Don’t say things like that.”
He tucked her closer. “Come. Warm yourself against me. Take my heat.”
She didn’t object. Not when that heat rolled off him and into her until the night became smaller and less cruel and more like a space their bodies could define by proximity. His forearm still lay across her middle, and each breath made his skin slide in the smallest increments. The loincloth did a poor job of pretending to be clothing. The knot sat low. She could’ve slipped one finger under it if she wanted to make herself crazy.
“Stop thinking,” she muttered.
“I prefer when you think,” he said. “I prefer it more when you speak.”
“I don’t prefer it. Not right now.”
“Then feel,” he said. “Tell me each sensation. Break it apart the way Third dissects data—observe it, catalogue it, and give it to me.”
“You’re relentless,” she complained.
“Affirmative.”
She let her eyes close. She let herself separate sensation from panic and map it the way she would have mapped a new codebase. Truth escaped. Clear, unvarnished truth. “My lips are hot. Pulled. Like the skin wants to be touched again because it remembers you. My chest is too tight for air, my skin too thin where the halter rubs. Ican sense every thread.”
“And under the threads.” His voice had dropped, roughernow.
“Under the threads,” she said, the word vibrating where his forearm lay, “it’s like I’m aching for something I’ve never experienced before.”
His hand moved just enough to let his thumb settle in the small valley at the base of her ribs. “What else?”
“My legs,” she said, and heard the rasp in her own voice, “it’s like they’re not mine. They want to wrap around you, and if I let them, Idon’t know what I’ll do next.”
He went still. The kind of still that hunters learn when the air changes. The muscle under her hand flexed once. “You may wrap them,” he said. “I will not take what you do not give.”
The confession fell through her like a stone into deep water. It made a clean sound. It rang. The wanting that had waited in the doorways of her body stepped into the room and took a chair.
She lifted one leg and let it drift until her knee rested over his thigh. He didn’t hiss. He didn’t shudder. He turned his head and swept his mouth over her hair as if to keep himself from doing both. The heat of him soaked into the inside of her leg until she flushed all the way to the arch of herfoot.
“More,” he said, awhisper this time, as if the night would break if he raised his voice.
She settled the other knee over his other thigh, the scratchy fabric of the loincloth dragging over her skin. He was heavy. He was hard. He wasn’t human hard. He was a substance designed by something that didn’t care how small she was. She should have been afraid and on a certain level, was. She was also a fuse waiting for a match.
“Tell me your rules,” she said suddenly. “Tell them to me again.”
He took one breath, then another. “My rules are simple. You do not bleed if I can stop it. You do not fear if I can carry it. You do not starve. You do not bow to any man. You sleep when I tell you to. You wake when I tell you to. You do not touch me because you think I require it.”
“And if I want to?”
“Then you touch me,” he said. “Because you want to.”
