Page 7 of Rook's Vow
"Harder," I said. Because I was done being careful and done being patient and done telling myself I didn't need anything from anyone. I needed this. I needed him, his body, his hands, the way he felt inside me, and I was going to take every second of it.
He gave it to me harder. His hips snapping against mine, the desk scraping across the floor, his hand fisting in my hair, tilting my head back so he could put his mouth on my throat. Iwas close again, the pressure building fast, my body tightening around him, and when he reached between us and pressed his thumb against my clit I shattered.
I came hard with my nails scraping down his shoulders and my body clenching around him in waves that pulled him over the edge with me. He buried himself deep and came hard, his forehead against my shoulder, his hips grinding, a ragged sound torn out of him that vibrated through my body.
We stayed like that. Connected, and breathing hard. The desk was a mess, my legs still wrapped around him, and his arms still holding me. The only sound in the room was the two of us trying to remember how air worked.
He lifted his head. Looked at me. And the thing in his eyes wasn't the heat from before, though that was still there. It was something quieter. Something that said he'd been waiting for this without knowing he was waiting, and now that it had happened he was recalculating every plan he'd ever made.
I touched his face. His jaw, rough, and warm under my fingertips.
"Stay tonight," I said. Soft, certain. A woman who had spent four years sleeping alone in a building she loved and a life she'd built, asking someone to be in it with her for the first time.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said.
He meant it. I could hear it in his voice, the weight of it, the vow underneath the words. This was a man who knew what a promise cost and made them anyway.
We got dressed. Slowly, in the stillness, handing each other clothes. He picked up the papers that had scattered off the desk, stacked them without looking at them, and I laughed, a real laugh, surprising and warm. He looked up at the sound of it with an expression that undid me all over again.
I turned off the lights, and locked up because for the first time in a long time, I was taking the night off. Tonight his bike was still in the lot, because he wasn’t leaving this time.
FOUR
ROOK
She slept with her back against my chest, one arm folded under her pillow, the other resting on top of mine where it lay across her waist. I'd been awake for twenty minutes. Hadn't moved and I hadn't wanted to.
Her apartment was above the truck stop, a set of stairs behind the kitchen that led up to a few small rooms her grandparents had built when Lane's was new. Low ceiling, timber walls, a bed that took up most of the bedroom. The sheets smelled like her, warm skin and something faintly sweet I couldn't place, and the early light was coming through the curtains and falling across her shoulders and the curve of her spine and I lay there memorizing every detail because some part of me still didn't believe this was real.
Five months of sitting at her counter. Five months of watching her from the far end, wanting her in a way that rewired every rational circuit I had, and now she was asleep in my arms and the warmth of her body against mine was so good it bordered on pain.
I let my hand move. Slowly, barely a touch, my palm tracing the shape of her. The dip of her waist, the flare of her hip, the soft skin of her stomach where my hand settled and stayed. She waswarm, generous, her body all curves, and softness. Everywhere I touched felt like something I'd been imagining for months and finding the reality of it better than anything I'd built in the dark.
She stirred. Shifted back against me, her hips pressing into mine, and the sound she made, low, half asleep, lit up every nerve I had. I pressed my mouth to the back of her neck. Breathed her in. Felt her wake up slowly, her body coming alive against mine, her hand finding my hand on her stomach and lacing her fingers through mine.
"Morning," she said. Her voice was rough with sleep.
"Morning."
"How long have you been awake?"
"A while."
"Doing what?"
"Lying here. Trying to figure out how I got this lucky."
She laughed. Soft, warm, vibrating through her back into my chest. She rolled over to face me and her eyes were clear, sleep-warm, looking at me in a way I hadn't earned and couldn't look away from. Her hair was everywhere, tangled across the pillow, and her face was bare of anything except the morning light. I looked at her and thought, very clearly, I am so into her that this is somehow going to be trouble.
I kissed her. Because I could, because she was here, because five months of wanting had turned into someone I was allowed to touch and I wasn't wasting another single second of it. Her mouth opened under mine, easy, unhurried, the kiss of two people who'd made it through the first time and found each other on the other side. Her hand came up to my jaw, her fingers tracing the edge of it, and I pulled her closer, my arm around her waist, her body pressed warm against mine under the sheets.
We could have stayed there. I wanted to stay there, in that bed, in that light, with her hand on my face, her mouth on mine,and nothing else in the world. But the world was still there, and it was coming for her whether we stayed in bed or not.
I went downstairsto open the stop for her while she showered. I made coffee, turned on the lights, unlocked the front door. The lot was empty, just my bike and the early morning highway. I stood behind her counter and poured two mugs and the ordinariness of it, the domestic quiet of making coffee while she got ready upstairs, put a fissure in something I'd kept locked for a long time.
I'd been alone since the discharge. Eight years. Occasional women, nothing that lasted, nothing that got close enough to matter. I'd built my life around the club, around the work, around being the man who saw everything and felt nothing. I'd been good at it because feeling nothing was easier than feeling the thing I'd felt when the institution I'd given everything to ruined my good name and showed me the door.
Now I was making coffee in a truck stop kitchen and waiting for a woman to come downstairs, and the feeling wasn't nothing anymore. It was everything, concentrated into a point so sharp I could cut myself on it, and I was standing behind a counter holding it in both hands like a man who'd found something explosive and couldn't put it down.
