Page 116 of Safe Hands

Carly stopped walking.

“Don’t,” she said.

Lauren blinked. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t be good at it.” Carly put her hand flat on Lauren’s sternum and felt her heart going hard under her palm. “You don’t have to be good at it. You don’t have to be anything. Just be here.”

For a second, Lauren looked as though she might laugh it off. Then the grin went, and what was underneath was so frightened that Carly’s breath caught.

“Okay,” Lauren whispered.

In the bedroom, Lauren didn’t turn the lamp off. She let Carly undress her slowly: the hoodie, the T-shirt underneath, the sports bra that took two attempts and made them both laugh under their breath. Then she just stood there in the lamplight and let herself be looked at, goosebumps rising along her arms.

“You’re shaking,” Carly said.

“So are you.”

She was. She hadn’t noticed.

She did this like she did everything: with a plan. She caught herself at it, halfway onto the bed, one hand on Lauren’s hip, already three moves ahead. Here, then this, then that. Control was the only way she’d ever known how to be safe with anyone.

Lauren caught her wrist.

Not hard. She brought Carly’s hand to her mouth and kissed the palm, then rolled them both until Carly was on her back, Lauren’s weight warm above her, Lauren’s forearms bracketing her head.

“Let me,” Lauren said. “You don’t have to run this one.”

Carly didn’t move.

Every instinct told her to take the lead back. To know what was going to happen before it happened, so nothing could catch her out. That was how she’d survived dressing rooms and the army and a frozen ditch in Estonia and two years of watching her father disappear by inches.

She let go of it.

It wasn’t graceful. Her leggings were still damp from training and clung all the way down, one leg snagging on her heel, and Lauren muttered something filthy at it until Carly laughed out loud. Then it occurred to her, far too late, that she’d spent an hour running round a floodlit cage and hadn’t been anywhere near a shower.

“I’m disgusting,” she said. “I haven’t even—”

“Neither have I.” Lauren turned her onto her front and kissed the scar low on her back, the place her hands had worked loose on the massage table, and this time there was nothing professional about it. By the time Lauren turned her over again, Carly had forgotten what she’d been worried about.

Lauren took her time. She kissed the inside of Carly’s wrist, her collarbone, the soft place under her jaw, as though she was learning a route. When her mouth closed over Carly’s nipple, warm and unhurried, Carly arched off the mattress before she could stop it, and Lauren made a low, pleased sound against her skin and did it again, then moved to the other one until Carly’s hands were fisted in the sheet.

Carly had always known what came next. Now she didn’t. Lauren’s hand slid down over her stomach and between her thighs and found her soaked, and they both heard the sound Carly made at the first touch, low and startled, nothing she’d have chosen.

“Okay?” Lauren murmured.

“Yes.”

Lauren didn’t hurry. She traced slow circles around Carly’s clit, never quite where Carly wanted her, close and then not, until Carly’s hips were chasing her hand without permission and the sheet underneath her was damp with sweat. When Lauren finally gave her what she wanted, Carly’s whole body jolted, and Lauren swore softly into her neck.

Then Lauren settled her weight over her, forehead against Carly’s, and found a rhythm: tight, steady circles, slow and then faster, never letting up. The bed creaked. Down the hall, Berkeley’s tags jingled as he resettled. Carly’s heel slipped on the sheet and her knee knocked Lauren’s hip, and neither of them cared. She stopped deciding anything. She let herself be moved instead of moving, let herself make sounds she couldn’t have planned and wouldn’t have allowed: rough, broken, nowhere near quiet.

When she came, it wasn’t neat or controlled. It went on longer than she was ready for, her thighs clamped round Lauren’s wrist and her nails in Lauren’s shoulder, the tension lifting her off the mattress and dropping her back down, shaking. Lauren kept her fingers where they were and held on all the way through it, until Carly had to grab her wrist because it was too much.

Afterwards, Carly kissed her, slow and thorough, and rolled them over before Lauren could say anything clever. This time she didn’t plan. She watched Lauren’s face in the lamplight as she slid a hand between her thighs and found her slick and swollen, and learned what made her gasp, and what made her laugh, and what made her stop laughing altogether. Lauren rocked against her fingers, one hand gripping the headboard. When she came, she did it with her eyes open, holding Carly’s gaze, and didn’t look away once.

Later, they lay tangled in the half-dark, the lamp still on, the duvet kicked half onto the floor and the bottom sheet a lost cause.

Carly couldn’t remember the last time her head had been this quiet. No lists. No contingencies. No numbers running in the background like a generator. Just Lauren’s shoulder under her cheek, and Lauren’s fingers drawing slow circles on her lower back, right over the old fracture.