Page 23 of Remmen

I’d laid hands on a lot of people. I knew how a body usually met you: the flinch, the brace, the little apology of a man who didn’t want to be a bother. I didn’t know what to do with how Remmen met me, which was not at all. He held that arm out and let me have it and went so quiet I could feel his pulse going hard and slow against my fingertips.

“You can breathe,” I said. “This is the easy part.”

“I know.”

“You’re not breathing.”

He breathed. It came out rough.

I cleaned the wound with the stuff from Otho’s jar, and the whole time I was aware of him watching my hands like they were doing something extraordinary and not just field aftercare I’d done a thousand times. I told myself it was the light. I told myself he was cold, or in shock, or thinking about the yard.

“This is going to sting,” I said, and pressed the herb pack to the open inch, and he didn’t so much as twitch. He’d been torn open in front of a crowd for money. A sting was nothing.

But his hand turned over while I worked. Slow. Until his fingers weren’t lying flat anymore. They’d curled up loose around the side of my wrist, not gripping, not stopping me, just there. His whole hand could’ve closed around my forearm and then some. It didn’t. It rested against me like it had wandered off on its own and he hadn’t decided yet whether to call it back.

I should have moved. I taped the fresh dressing down instead, slower than it needed, and I did not pull my wrist out of his hand.

The friendship was a nice idea.

Is that what we are? Friends?

I’d like to be.

“Remmen.” My voice came out wrong.

“Anne.” His came out worse.

I looked up from his arm and he was already looking at me, and his eyes had gone fiendishly hot, and there was nothing careful left in his face. Whatever this was, he wasn’t managing it.

“You scared the hell out of me today,” he said. Low. “I watched a man put his fist in your jacket and I don’t — I can’t.”

“Remmen—”

“That’s what all of it is.” His thumb moved on the inside of my wrist. One pass sent gooseflesh up my arm. “It’s been all of it for weeks.”

I could have made it a joke. I was quick; I had three of them lined up. And I looked at this huge, careful, lonely man holding my wrist in his ruined hand like it might bruise, and every one of them died in my mouth, because I didn’t want to be quick.

“We can’t,” I said.

“I know.”

“My whole life is riding on this. It’s the last good place I’ve got, Remmen. I can’t⁠—”

“I know.” He didn’t move. He’d have sat there and bled quietly and driven me home and never said another word, if I’d pulled back.

I grabbed a handful of his coat and hauled myself up over the gap and the kit and his braced knee, and I kissed him.

For one second he held that terrible stillness, like he didn’t trust it. Then it broke. His hand came up and cupped the back of my head, and he kissed me back, hard, all of it at once.

There was no careful in it.

I’d wondered more than once, in the dark, how a male that size handled someone like me, and I’d figured it would be all restraint and hesitation. It wasn’t. He kissed me like he’d been starving and I was the first real meal. One hand splayed so wide it held my whole skull. The other came around my back, gathered me in, and lifted me clean off my seat and into his lap.

In his lap I could kiss him properly, and I did, deep and greedy, and he met me every time and gave me more, licking into my mouth, catching my bottom lip in his teeth, one huge hand spread warm across my back to hold me right where he wanted me. I was dizzy before he’d done anything but kiss me.

I got a knee on either side of him. It was the only way to fit. The truck was built for one of him and had no idea what to do with the two of us, and I did not care about a single physical law in the universe. His hands ran down my sides, huge and hot through my clothes, and every place they landed I felt how careful he was being. He was shaking with the effort of holding back, and he would not stop holding back, not even now. I was straddling a male who could have crushed me without half trying, and I felt safe, and wanted, and nowhere close to sensible.

“You won’t break me,” I said against his mouth.