Page 90 of Final Drive

I stand and move her back toward the bed with a hand at her hip, slowly, since I want to watch it happen. This is the part I can’t explain to people who feel it the ordinary manner. It isn’t wanting that runs me. It’s attention. I want to know what her breath does when the shirt comes off her shoulders, which side of her neck she tips toward and which she doesn’t. I want the data firsthand. I’ve never wanted it off anybody before her, and I’ve quit trying to make that mean anything except what it means.

Bo’s shirt goes over her head. All five marks are there. Jackson’s at her shoulder, Eli’s opposite, Beckett’s high, Zane’s on the inside of her thigh, Bo’s fresh and dark at her nape.

“You can look,” she says. “Everyone else pretends they aren’t.”

“I’m not everyone else.”

“No. You’re not.”

I get her onto the bed and I take an hour.

Her jeans go next, and what I learn in the first twenty minutes reorganizes several things I thought I understood.

I learn that she goes quiet before she comes and loud afterward. My prediction had it backward. I learn it with two fingers inside her and my thumb on her clit, watching her mouth stop making any sound at all right before her thighs lock around my wrist.

I learn that pressure at the base of her skull opens her hands. That one I find by accident, cupping the back of her head to angle her up, and every finger she had fisted in the sheet lets go at once. I do it again to confirm. Same result.

I learn that if I stop and ask her a direct question in the middle, she’ll answer it, and that answering costs her more than the question does. So I ask three more times. What do you want. Where. Say that again.

I put my mouth on her and stay there past the point where she’s begging, since her hips are still moving, her hands are still in my hair, and none of it reads as finished. She comes a second time against my mouth with my fingers curled hard inside her, loud enough that Zane will hear it through the floor.

When she finally shoves my shoulder and tells me she’ll die if I don’t, I believe her. By then I have the data to know she isn’t exaggerating.

“Now.”

“I know.”

I push into her slowly. She says my name in a register I’ve never gotten out of her before, and everything I’ve built my life on goes offline at once.

She hooks a leg behind mine. I get an arm under her shoulders, hold her against me, and move. There’s no strategy anywhere in it. For the first time I understand why the rest of them are the wreck that they are.

“Tyler.” Her hand closes on my wrist. “Are you going to knot me?”

“Yes.”

“Say the other part.”

“I’m going to bite you.” I put my forehead against hers. “I’ve picked the spot. I picked it in March.”

“Of course you did.”

The knot builds. She gets there ahead of me, clenching around it, spine lifting off the mattress. I take her left hand off my shoulder, turn it over, and put my mouth to the inside of her wrist, over the radial artery, where her pulse hits my lips at a hundred and forty.

I bite down there.

Her bond doesn’t arrive. It resolves.

Everything I’ve kept in separate columns since I met her comes into one frame at once, sorted, indexed, and true. The pack in the boat and the pack in this house are the same object. What I’ve been calling data collection is what everybody else has been calling wanting her. I’m not adjacent to any of it. I’ve been in it the whole time, and I appear to be the last person in this building to run the numbers on myself.

She’s saying something. I come back into the room far enough to hear it.

“I’ve got you. Tyler. I’ve got you.”

I lift my mouth off her wrist. The mark sits over the pulse in a clean arc, darkening already, and positioned where she can see it any time she turns her hand over. That’s why I picked it. She’ll look at it forty times a day and nobody else will see it once.

She studies it. Then she studies me.

“You’re crying,” she says.