Page 62 of Night of Shadows
Neither of us moves.
He is so far inside me I can feel my own pulse around him. The room is black and silent, and all I hear is the wet of our slapping skin, the ragged catch of his breathing, and the blood slamming in my ears.
Then I roll my hips.
The drag of him pulling almost out and the slow, thick push of him sliding back in light up every nerve I have. I ride him slowly. I lift until just the head of him holds me open and sink back to the root, again, again, and on every downstroke the base of him grinds my clit and the head of him drags that high, deep place, and I come apart in increments, my walls fluttering around him, the slick of me coating us both, the sound of it filling the dark.
His good hand spans my hip — guiding, lifting, bringing me down a little harder than slow — and I let him. I brace my hands on his chest, and I take him and give him back, and we find the rhythm of two people who have decided.
I lean toward his ear.
"I would do this again. Every time. Knowing what's coming."
His hand stops. His whole body goes still beneath me, inside me. He is looking at me, and the gold is not the gold of a man receiving a compliment. It is the gold of a man receiving a vow.
Then his good arm bands around my back and pulls me flush to his chest, and the angle changes, and now he is driving up into me from below, deep and slow and relentless, hitting that place on every stroke while the base of him works my clit, and the coil in me winds tighter and tighter and tighter.
"Maeve."
"I know."
"Come here."
I am already gone. It breaks over me in waves, my body clamping down around the thick of him in hard rolling pulses, the orgasm wringing me out from the inside, and I feel him swell thicker, and then he goes over with me, holding me down to the root, spilling hot and deep while he says my name into my hair like it is the last word he has.
I say his.
It comes out broken. The world reduces. The safe house, the brownstone, the city, the man out there who wants me dead, all of it reduces to the place where he is still throbbing inside me, and his heart is going under my cheek, and I have chosen him. In three sentences. Only one of which I have said out loud.
"Lex."
Chapter 20
Lex
Mine
She is collapsed against my chest, her breath still ragged, and I am still inside her, and the world has been reduced to the size of this bed in a blacked-out room three floors above a Charlestown street.
She has just told me, into my shoulder, that she would do this again. Every time. Knowing what is coming. The sentence is in my chest, and it is rearranging the architecture I have carried for fifteen years: the architecture of a man who decided at twenty that he would never be allowed to be loved by a woman who had seen what he was.
The architecture is rearranging in real time.
I have, in my chest, a word.
It arrived in the second between her saying ‘every time’ and the moment her body went over mine. It came up from a place I have not opened since I was twenty years old, a place under the place where I file the things I do not let myself want, and it is in my chest now, and it is not coming out of my mouth tonight.
The word is ‘mine.’
Not in the way the family means it. Not in the way Nico claimed Siobhan three years ago in front of the assembled families with the fierce ceremony of Greek possession.
Mine the way a man owns the wound that almost killed him and the scar that proves he survived. Mine the way a man owns what he was given three years ago and did not know he had been given, and is being given again tonight, with full knowledge.
She is on me everywhere. Anyone who tries to take her, I will put in the ground.
I know what I feel, but the word is not ready to leave my mouth. When she gets it, she gets the full version, not a thing I gasped out in a safe house with my arm still bleeding under the tape.
Then I say, low, into her hair, the three syllables I said into her hair at the lake house, the three syllables I have said exactly once before in this lifetime, the three syllables that mean what ‘mine’means in the language I will not yet say to her in English.
