Page 33 of The Beast
For a long time afterward, neither of us moved.
His weight settled over me. I lay under it and looked at the ceiling of the studio, at the bad overhead light he'd had the sense to turn off so only the city glow came through the windows. I thought about the word nobody.
Nobody else.
He'd said it like a claim. Like something he was planting a flag in. And I had said it back like I meant it, which I had, which I still did, lying here in the aftermath of the best and most consequential Saturday of my life.
He lifted his head and looked at me. The dark eyes, the jaw, all of it—undone now, softer at the edges, the careful containment of him temporarily, completely dismantled.
"You okay?" he said.
"Yes," I said. Meaning it the way I'd been meaning things all day—with my whole self.
He searched my face for a moment. Found whatever he was looking for.
Then, he pulled me into his side. I went.
14
BROCK
She was mine.
There wasn't a discussion to be had about it, not in my head, not anymore.
Somewhere between the alley and this sofa, I'd crossed a line I hadn't known was in me. On the far side of it was a simple fact, plain as a sight picture: this woman was mine and I was hers and that was the shape of the world now.
I don't say things like that. I'd have laughed at any man who did. But I'd saidnobody elseinto her throat and meant it down to the marrow. She'd said it back. A thing like that doesn't unsay itself.
And the sex. God help me. I'd had my share over the years—quick, functional, a need handled and forgotten.
This was a different animal entirely.
This had taken me apart and left the pieces somewhere I couldn't find them.
Fuck.
I didn't have the words for it and I wasn't going to go looking. Some things you just let be true.
We didn't talk after. There was nothing that needed saying that the last hour hadn't already said better.
I pulled her back against my chest and got an arm over her. She fit there, tucked down into me, small against all the parts of me that had only ever been built for harm.
I lay in the dark of that studio with the city glowing soft through the windows and her breath going slow under my arm, and I felt her drop—just drop, like a stone into deep water, down into a sleep so sudden and so total it told its own story. The sleep of somebody who'd been holding the whole world up by themselves for a long time and had finally, for one night, set it down.
I dozed. Old habit. A man in my line doesn't sleep the way regular people do; he sets a watch in the back of his skull and rests under it. So, I floated, half down, the door in my sightline, even with my eyes shut.
An hour, maybe. Then I came up out of it to the slow, deliberate press of her backing into me.
She was awake. Moving against me in the dark, that perfect curve of her grinding slow into where I was already hard again—because, of course, I was, I'd been half hard in my sleep with her against me. She made a small sound, low and wanting, and rolled her hips back into me like a question that already knew the answer.
I didn't need asking twice.
I got a hand on her hip and lifted her thigh and slid into her from behind, slow, into all that wet heat, and she gasped and arched and pushed back to take more of me.
We found a rhythm without trying for one—unhurried, deep, the kind of slow that isn't going anywhere because it doesn't have to. My mouth at the back of her neck. My arm wrapped under and around her, holding her whole against me. Her little moans breaking soft in the dark, each one going through me likea current. I moved in her, easy and certain. She let me, melted back into it, her hand reaching back to grip my hip and pull me deeper.
And lying there in the dark of a paint-smelling room over a frame shop, buried in a woman I'd known for one single day, with the city asleep below us—I could not believe this was my life.
