Page 69 of Coyote

"Why don't you ask me, little one?"

He was quiet. My thumb moved behind his ear, and he leaned into it.

"If I ask it, you'll answer it," he said.

"That's the general idea."

"That's the problem." He pressed his cheek harder into my palm. "Right now the question still has both answers in it. I spend it, and it only has one."

I took my hand out of his hair and rolled him over to face me. He looked up at me in the moonlight with his hair loose over his shoulders, and that was it. I was done holding out.

"Then don't ask," I said. "You don't have to ask. I'm done walking." I ran my thumb once across the inside of his wrist. "You get tomorrow, and every day after that. As many as I've got left, and I want them spent right here."

His pulse sped up under my thumb.

"And you should have the rest of it," I said. "I love you. I'm fifty-two years old, little one. I'm not rationing that out by the day like it's plasma."

He took my hand off his wrist, both of his around it, and pressed it flat to his own chest, over the shirt, over the scars I'd learned by dim light and never asked about. His heart hammered under my palm.

"I don't have it," he said. "The word."

"I know."

His hands tightened over mine, hard enough to feel the bones. "Mine is the word I've got. It'll have to hold."

"It holds," I said. "It's held since the river."

Then he let go of my hand, reached back into his blanket roll, and set a bottle of lube upright on the boards between us.

I arched an eyebrow. "How long has that been in there?"

"Since this afternoon. I stole it from Ransom."

He lifted Nimue out of his lap and set her back into her crate. She slid down into the rags and stilled. He unclipped the knife from his belt, sheath and all, and laid it up past the head of the bedrolls, well out of his reach. Then he dragged his bedroll flush against mine and pulled his shirt over his head.

"Your way," he said. "Tonight."

He started to lie back.

"Not yet." I took his jaw in one hand, all of it, and kissed him first.

Every kiss between us so far, he'd taken. This one arrived instead, and I felt the moment it confused him: his mouth opened to take over, teeth first, the old way, and I tilted his head back with my thumb under his chin and wouldn't let him rush it. He growled into my mouth. Then he groaned, and that wasn't protest. His hands came up and took two fists of my beard, holding on, and by the time I let him breathe, he was panting.

I kissed the corner of his jaw. The hinge of it. The place at his throat where Nimue rode, and his pulse hit my lips going twice what mine was. He tipped his head back and gave me the whole throat, and I stayed there until he started swearing. "Fuck," he said to the ceiling. "Fuck. John."

Then his hands came back to me. His knuckles traveled down the tape on my ribs, light, checking his own work, then brushed the dressing on my thigh. Only after he'd accounted for everything he'd wrapped did he open my jeans and pull the rest of my clothes off me. Then he sat back on his heels and took his time looking, and his hand went flat against the front of his own jeans and stayed there.

He lay back on the joined blankets, and his hands settled flat at his sides. His eyes went to the door once, then the roofline, then came back to me and stayed.

So I took my time.

I took off his boots first, one and then the other, and set them where he could find them in the dark. He didn't take his eyes off my hands, and something in his shoulders came down a notch. Then the jeans, worked off without any hurry. He lay bare on the blankets in the moonlight, small and scarred, every muscle ready to answer a threat that wasn't coming.

"Relax, little one."

I laid my palms on his collarbones and ran my hands down the scarred ladder of his ribs, over the bitten shoulder, the burn, the old knife scars, taking my time over each one, and everywhere my hands passed, gooseflesh came up behind them. He trembled, and it wasn't because of the cold.

"You've been through a lot," I said.